Shaft: Power Moves

By Amy Abugo Ongiri

In 1969, Gordon Parks was in Berkeley and Oakland, California, photographing members of the Black
Panther Party on assignment for Life magazine. By 1971, he was depicting a fictional Black militant
army for the MGM film Shaft. “The militants,” as they were called in the script, or “the Lumumbas,”
as they are called in the film, were not cast in a very favorable light, however. Parks, who had also
famously profiled the Nation of Islam’s leaders—including Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X—for
Life, was viewed so approvingly by them and the leadership of the Panthers that Eldridge Cleaver asked
him to join the Panthers as minister of information, Elijah Muhammad attempted to commission him
to make a movie about his organization, and Malcolm X made him the godfather to his infant
daughter. In his 1997 photo-memoir Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective, Parks recounts that although
he both deeply identified with and sympathized with the Black Power revolution, ultimately he
couldn’t endorse it. “I was black and my sentiments lay in the heart of black fury sweeping the
country,” he wrote. “I recognized his [Cleaver’s] scars and acknowledged my own. Yet we met over a
deep chasm of time, the events of which forged different weapons for us . . . I prefer changing things
without violence.”
By 1971, Malcolm X was long dead, the Nation of Islam was in disarray, and the majority of the
leadership of the Black Panther Party was either dead, incarcerated, or living in exile from the United
States. Yet Parks had quietly started a revolution in his own way, using the weapons, “the camera and
the pen,” that he had honed over a lifetime working in image culture to fight—as he wrote in his 1965
autobiography, A Choice of Weapons—“what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance,
poverty” and to capture the deep and raw beauty of the people suffering from those societal ills.
Parks was initially self-taught and quickly became so skilled that he was able to establish his own studio
in Chicago. He would refine his documentary skills in the early 1940s working for the Farm Security
Administration—which also employed such other important American photographers as Dorothea
Lange, John Vachon, and Walker Evans—and went on to photograph the legendary Tuskegee Airmen
on assignment for the Office of War Information before they went off to fight in World War II. He
became the sole African American photojournalist at Vogue and then at Life magazine. Parks was in his
late fifties when he agreed to direct MGM’s Shaft after a lifetime of “firsts.” He had been the first
African American musician to tour with the all-white Larry Duncan Orchestra as a young adult.
Having seen the ways that television challenged print media while at Life, he was quick to realize the
potential of film, and he had become the first African American to write and direct a feature for a
major Hollywood studio with the critically acclaimed The Learning Tree in 1968. Now he would create
a Black action film that would become a blueprint for Black representation in almost all of the popular
culture that has followed it.
Shaft would be a different and more confrontational kind of project than Parks’s earlier work. He had
been hired by MGM to bring Ernest Tidyman’s 1970 detective novel of the same name to the screen.
Tidyman, who was white, himself had been commissioned to write the novel by Ronald Hobbs, one of

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very few African American literary agents working at the time, and the book contains many of the
elements of Parks’s film in its commitment to the urban milieu of New York City and to creating the
character of John Shaft as a strong, independent African American man. The studio had originally
wanted to revise Tidyman’s novel to make the characters white, but Parks insisted on not only casting
the character of Shaft as African American but also emphasizing and enhancing the Black cultural
aspects of the novel.
Parks famously wanted to create a film that would allow audiences “to see the Black guy winning.” As
modest an ambition as this may seem by today’s standards, it was shockingly bold in 1971, when
positive images of African Americans in visual culture were virtually nonexistent. Hollywood had
gently stepped into the terrain of Black representation with stars like Sidney Poitier and Dorothy
Dandridge, but the roles that they were offered were constrained at best and insulting at worst. With
Shaft, Parks would deliver something unlike anything that Hollywood had seen before: a Black
superhero.
John Shaft—a suave New York City detective who battles both the Mafia and Harlem’s own gangsters
in the pursuit of justice—is the rare Black male character whose on-screen persona rotates around the
traditional masculine qualities of power and control. In addition, he embodies the revolutionary “cool”
of a new kind of Black masculinity, as portrayed by Richard Roundtree, a previously unknown actor
who had been a member of New York City’s groundbreaking Black theater the Negro Ensemble
Company. If New York is the most important city in the world, then John Shaft is definitely its king,
adept at negotiating uptown and downtown and moving amid white society as easily as he does
through Harlem. While Poitier had made incredible inroads into helping Hollywood to reimagine the
male lead as a Black man, his characters were often viewed as asexual and offered little beyond tropes of
civility and respectability. Respectability is not Shaft’s main prerogative, power is—whether it be
sexual, through the threat of violence, or otherwise. Shaft has a highly charged sex scene with his Black
girlfriend but also has one with a white woman, not even five years after the Supreme Court’s decision
in Loving v. Virginia overturned the prohibition against miscegenation in the United States. He uses
his muscles as freely as his brain and doesn’t hesitate to respond in kind to racial slurs and violence. In a
scene where Shaft moves through Harlem, Isaac Hayes sings, “Black man, born free / At least that’s the
way it’s supposed to be” while a chorus chants, “Soulsville.”
Shaft was made with a budget of just over a million dollars but managed to bring in an astonishing $13
million domestically. Its financial and critical success guaranteed that more films like it would be made,
and it almost single-handedly created the Black film boom that followed it. Though other Black-cast
action films were released around the same time, Shaft was really the film that established the category
that would become known as “blaxploitation”—Hollywood studios’ attempt to capture the rich and
mostly untapped market of African American consumers but also the interest in Blackness sparked by
the civil rights movement and the recent end of legalized segregation.
The character of Shaft would become one of the longest-running figures in film history, even spawning
a series of graphic novels as recently as 2015. Parks himself later directed and scored Shaft’s Big Score!,
the 1972 sequel to Shaft. In total, Shaft would lead to at least two remakes and two sequels—including
the 1973 film Shaft in Africa, in which Shaft breaks up a human-trafficking ring—and a television
show based on the original film and also starring Roundtree. All of these projects, while offering

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something, failed to match the artistic and thematic innovation of the original. With The Learning
Tree, Parks had delivered a coming-of-age story that showed African American life as it had never been
seen by wider audiences before, and it was a quiet revolution of its own kind. But Shaft was different.
Shaft was a pure offering of love to Black audiences, even beyond its extraordinary main character.
With this film, Parks didn’t just tweak the detective genre with an empowered Black hero; instead, he
centered Blackness to reimagine a genre that in the past had associated whiteness with justice, law, and
order but that he turned on its head to expose its racial politics—profoundly disrupting the inherent
white supremacy that had undergirded it.
Behind the scenes, Parks also set out to disrupt. African Americans were included in ways that they had
never been in Hollywood, from the editing to the advertising of the film. One of the most
groundbreaking elements that Parks introduced, influencing all Black film going forward, was the
inclusion of an innovative soundtrack by cutting-edge funk musician Isaac Hayes.
Singer-songwriter Hayes was so original that he had been given the nickname “Black Moses” by Stax
Records executive Dino Woodard for his ability to move people with song alone. Parks’s early interest
in music paid off as the soundtrack of Shaft became one of its defining features. Though earlier
Hollywood films such as Hallelujah, Stormy Weather, and St. Louis Blues had featured African
American music, Shaft cemented the marriage of Black film and Black music as foundational not only
to the performances within a film but to every aspect of its aesthetic. In fact, Shaft would come to be
defined as much by its soundtrack as by its visuals. When Hayes won the Oscar for Best Original Song
(“Theme from Shaft”) for the film, he was only the third African American ever to receive an Academy
Award.
It is a little noted fact that Parks’s storied career as a photojournalist actually began because of cinema.
In A Choice of Weapons, he writes that a viewing of photographer Norman Alley’s 1937 newsreel film
about the sinking of USS Panay changed his life. According to Parks, Alley’s film revealed a kind of
truth through its “grim directness” that transformed him so totally that “even before I left the theater I
had made up my mind I was going to become a photographer.” Parks would mimic the documentary
nature of film in his photography and create a photographic beauty in his films. In Shaft, he made
poetry of the New York streets, especially in the iconic opening sequence where John Shaft jaywalks
and takes on taxicabs with the same power that he shows later while confronting Harlem gangsters and
the Mafia. When the film was in preproduction, MGM tried to change the shooting location from
New York to Los Angeles. Parks was unequivocal about the film’s New York location, and the studio
backed down when he threatened not to participate in the project. His vision paid off as audiences
reveled in seeing the New York they knew so well but had rarely seen represented.
Audiences would delight not only in the location shooting, which captured a New York City—from
Harlem to the Village—that is now largely lost to gentrification, but also in the frequent references to
all the best of Black culture in the seventies. Drew Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali’s flamboyant
cornerman, who purportedly authored Ali’s signature catchphrase “Float like a butterfly, sting like a
bee,” is cast as Harlem gangster Willy. Antonio Fargas, who would become one of the most
recognizable actors in the blaxploitation era on film and television, makes a brief appearance, as does
Parks himself in a cameo role. The Bar-Kays, originally the house band for the Stax label, who virtually
created southern funk and soul and later became the backing band for Otis Redding, provide the beats

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for the soundtrack, along with Hayes. The character of Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) is a thinly
disguised take on mobster Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson, who was Harlem royalty renowned,
along with Stephanie “Madame” St. Clair, for keeping the Italian Mafia out of the neighborhood.
Johnson died in Harlem just a few years before the movie was made and would have been very much
on the minds of African American New Yorkers. The film also showcased African American
vernacular, in everything from style to language, in a manner rife with a rare authenticity.
Shaft provides a complex look at the racial landscape of New York as it was changing in the early
seventies, especially in relationship to Black radicalism. White flight and the recent successes of the civil
rights movement were offering unprecedented opportunities for African American leadership that
would culminate in the election of David Dinkins, the city’s first African American mayor, in 1990.
But white flight also created the conditions for a rise in urban crime, poverty, and despair for large
segments of the African American community, as resources were removed from the city. At one point,
a white police detective in the film warns Shaft: “Looks like war coming, huh? . . . It’s hood against
hood on the inside. But on the outside, it’s Black against white.” The continued threat of Black
radicalism looms large in the film as the same police detective warns of the upcoming “bloodbath up in
Harlem” created by warring crime bosses. This time, he cautions, “it’s not the Panthers or the Young
Lords.”
Though it is the fictional Black militants who enable Shaft’s eventual success, the film has little
sympathy for their struggle or ideology. When Shaft rescues their leader, the man quips, “If you think
I’m going to owe you for this . . .,” to which Shaft responds, “Man, you got nothing that I want.” At
another moment in the film, Shaft points to their ineptitude, telling them: “When you lead that
revolution, whitey better be standing still.” Though he had incredible sympathy for the need for radical
change that these groups were calling for, ultimately Parks’s revolution would be about changing
stories that America told itself about itself.
Shifting narratives and aesthetics may have seemed too small a change to some in those heady days of
revolution. But the impulse and the effect of that change reverberated with an urgency that has only
increased with time. While interviewing the Panthers for Life, Parks was challenged about his lack of
desire to join in armed revolution. He responded: “You’ve got a forty-five automatic on your lap, and
I’ve got a thirty-five millimeter camera on mine. And I still think my weapon is the most powerful.”
The lasting and ever-evolving cultural shift that Parks initiated with Shaft is an ongoing testament to
the truth of that statement.