Nothing But A Man

It makes you very conscious, as a white man, of how ignorant you are of the realities of the world, when you see a white police officer stamping his knees on the neck of a black man. I sit here in my sheltered home, and struggle to think of a time when I’ve ever even interacted with the police, positively or negatively. I’ve walked past them a few times at protest marches, and I think one of them gave a talk at school. Otherwise I’ve never been stopped by them, even when I’ve been drunk and shouting in the streets. Never. They are completely divorced from my world but for black people they’re a matter of life and death. It’s impossible to understand that, and part of me doesn’t want to understand. Why would anyone want to know terror in their lives?

The fact is we have to know that terror. To ignore it is to end up where we are. With a thousand George Floyds and Tamir Rices and Trayvon Martins and Breonna Taylors. To fail at this basic act of empathy is to continue the gross violence we do to the world, both physically and within our own heads. Racism is as much a violence on the mind as it is the body, within all of us, and until it is purged from our thoughts, we will never know peace. Not to be nihilistic about all this but the protests, and even the election in November, will not stop this violence. The protests are a wonderful, powerful call to action against injustice, that force us all to respond and consider our own prejudices, but they are only the beginning. The momentum cannot stop. Not while we have a chance to make a difference.

Writing this is a small start for me. A recognition that I don’t do enough to speak out and a form of communication that I hope will expose people to the richness of our shared culture. So many films, especially films about black people, are forgotten. Nothing But A Man was successful at the Venice Film Festival in 1964, but it only screened to a few independent cinemas upon its original release. It was never even shown in the UK. It’s now considered a classic of American black neorealist cinema, but those words don’t mean much to most people. Hence why I’m talking about it here, because I remember the profound effect it once had on me which I now want to record.

I remember seeing this film at the BFI centre in London, with a school group. I can’t remember why we saw it, because outside of studying American literature we hadn’t really covered American film nor politics regarding race. At least not in English class. The BFI did a re-release of the film in 2013 so I suppose that was the reason why our school took the advantage. One of my teachers must have thought it was a good idea. I’m glad they thought that.

I remember being told that this was Malcolm X’s favourite film. I’m not sure what this meant to me then. I knew that Malcolm was a black rights figure in the 1960s, and that he was the “violent foil” to Martin Luther King Jr’s ” peaceful good guy”. I knew that he was the basis for Magneto in the X-Men comics and films. A villain with a noble cause.

Even then however, I felt a strange sense of respect for this film that apparently won over a man I only knew then as an enigma. There was something powerful about someone like him liking this particular film, that it was a film of supreme importance.

I’m in the process of educating myself now. I know now that Malcolm advocated self-defence, not violence. That he was a deeply thoughtful and courageous man whose grievances against the world were justified, and despite everything the world threw at him, he stood tall and fought back. He was charismatic, passionate, angry, but also funny and warm. It’s easy to understand why he’s so beloved by the black community, and so hated by the white.

He would walk through the streets of Harlem, and speak to everyone there. I can imagine him approaching one of the actors, Julius Harris, and saying, “You’re Julius Harris. I saw Nothing But a Man, I really liked it.” In 1964, when the film released, Malcolm would have just recently left the Nation of Islam, which prohibited against going to the cinema. There’s something that makes me smile about Malcolm sneaking into one to watch a movie, maybe for the first time in years. I imagine him enjoying the quiet act of rebellion and freedom during that tempestuous and hazardous period of his life.

Leaving the cinema, I felt very emotional in a way I hadn’t really felt before. Not after seeing a film anyway. I felt angry, but also inspired. I’d experienced something totally different to my own experiences, and gained something new. An understanding. I couldn’t articulate it then, but I felt I had finally seen the African American experience depicted in a way that I understood, a depiction that wasn’t drenched in the racism of earlier films or the irritating schmaltz of later white-washed nonsense. It felt real, and that reality gave it power.

Film is film of course. It can never escape its artifice, and this is never more apparent than in neorealist films, of which this film may have been my first exposure. Neorealism was all about capturing the working class, or under-class experience. A way to give voice to the dispossessed, or tell stories divorced from Hollywood fantasy. Sometimes they would border between fiction and documentary, casting normal people in the lead roles, or capturing day to day life regardless of relevance to the plot.

Nothing But A Man is one of the rare works of neorealism made in America, depicting the lives of African Americans in Alabama. It stars Ivan Dixon, actor president of the Negro Actors For Action, and Abbey Lincoln, singer, songwriter, actress and civil rights campaigner, as well as an almost entirely black cast, a number of whom had never acted before. The writer Robert M. Young and director Michael Roemer made a point of visiting Alabama, with funding from the NAACP, to speak with black communities there to help develop the story and gain an understanding of the world they wished to present.

I should mention some issues of artificiality. The film was not actually made in Alabama. Shooting there would have been too dangerous, so most of the city scenes were filmed in New Jersey. The writer Robert M. Young was a white New Yorker, and the director Michael Roemer was a white German Jewish man. I don’t mention these things to denigrate the film at all, but just to suggest that people shouldn’t watch the film as documentary. The film has a very deliberate and important socio-political message that it wishes to convey, with a story informed by reality but otherwise fictional. Roemer argued that, “the most powerful, useful statement would be a human one.” They understood how essential it was to cross melodrama with social commentary to get their point across.

(As a little aside, there’s something blackly comic about a contemporary Time Magazine review praising the film’s depiction of “the ghastly reality of the Birmingham slums” when those shots were filmed in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It shows how blind people were (and are) to poverty in their own backyards).

Nothing But A Man follows the life of a black itinerant worker, Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) who works with a section gang on the railroads. He enjoys an independent life that affords him the ability to speak out against white people. “They can’t get to you if you keep moving.” His drifter lifestyle ends however, when he falls in love with a black school teacher, Josie Dawson (Abbey Lincoln), and realises that he needs to settle down if he wants to support her. Josie is attached to the town despite its virulent racism, because her family lives there and because she’s the only black teacher the segregated school has. We see how Duff and Josie’s relationship blossoms, and the struggles they have both with their families, and the racism they have to deal with throughout.

The film opens with the workers on the railroad, men at their labour with diegetic sounds of drilling and clanking steel tracks being hauled up by cranes. It’s a quiet scene, easing you into a false sense of security. Seeing the men working, their bodies silhouetted in the setting sun, you’d think this was a tranquil world, with progress being made. In the mythology of America, and in the Western especially, the railroads always signal the coming of civilisation, the end of the chaotic wild west and a future promising peace and prosperity. The scene also firmly places the men, and in this case black men, on the outskirts of town. Even when they’re accommodated for the evening, they’re living in a dumpy little hut with uncomfortable-looking metal bunkbeds. Things are deceptively peaceful in these outskirts, so Duff (and the audience) are in for a shock when he makes his way into town.

Duff meets Josie after a church service, having not attended himself but rather watched from outside. He is a lot like a cowboy in the way he carries himself; independent, apart from society, but also charismatic and attractive. Josie is very domestic by comparison; she attends church, has quiet dinners with her father and step-mother, and wears fashionable and attractive outfits and hairstyles. In these ways Nothing But A Man signals itself as a Western: illustrating a wild west man arriving into the cosy homestead and causing excitement. Independence and the outskirts of town are seen as masculine, and domesticity and “civilised society” are feminine, except of course, one defining feature of this film prevents the story from being romanticised. The protagonists are black.

Duff can’t be a romantic homesteader riding across the prairie heroically questioning authority and taking revenge upon men who wrong him, because, as the title suggests, he’s nothing but a black man. Black people didn’t have romances written about them: recreated histories illustrating them as heroes and warriors. Most of the time, they were degraded as monsters, or idiots, where even the most sympathetic stories about them stereotyped and victimised them. By framing Duff and Josie’s love story within the set-dressing of a Western, Nothing But A Man highlights how it is “civilisation”; the wonderful, utopian goal of most Westerns, that is the real threat to black people.

The film shows how racism permeates throughout the society, in the black community as well as the white. Josie’s father, a preacher (Stanley Green), doesn’t want Duff to be with his daughter because he sees Duff as a troublemaker, a danger to both himself and Josie. The Reverend has managed to make a comfortable home for himself and his family, but at a cost. In a family dinner scene, we see Josie, her father and stepmother sitting together quietly, stiffly. The scene is juxtaposed with the lively bar scene that comes after it, making the family look lifeless and stilted by comparison. The Reverend has spent his whole life fighting racism, but in doing so he has always had to accommodate the white peoples’ wishes, resulting in window dressing with little progress. He emulates white people to make them comfortable in his home when they visit, and in doing so has become disconnected from the wider black community. Duff’s failure to fight racism is as much a victory for the Reverend as it is for white people, because Duff’s success would show that the Reverend’s leadership of the community has been wrought with failure, humiliating him.

When Duff takes up a new job at the mill, giving up his section gang work to provide for Josie, he has to interact with white co-workers. We see the camera always split apart from the white men, detailing Duff’s discomfort and disinterest in associating with them. Even when they’re sitting together having lunch, the frame places Duff on the right, with the fellow black men behind him, and the one solitary white man on the left, seated in front of Duff yet still divided from him. After an altercation with the white man making racist comments about him, Duff’s black colleagues tell Duff he needs to put up with it to keep his job. Duff suggests instead that, “maybe it’s time you stop letting them? Maybe we should stick together.”

Later in the locker rooms, a close-up shot of a sinister white man’s face appears from the shadows. He’s the foreman, and he asks Duff what’s, “all this talk about sticking together?” Duff realises that one of his colleagues must have snitched on him, a sad smile appearing on his face as he turns towards the rest of the men, who all look away sheepishly like they don’t know him. The foreman orders Duff to take back what he said about sticking together, but Duff refuses, leading to the foreman saying, “we’re through.” Duff’s life spirals into unemployment all because black men assist whites in their racism.

Nothing But A Man refuses to accommodate white audiences with “sympathetic” white characters. The black characters are happiest when they’re amongst other black people, and on-guard, tense or outright scared when in the presence of whites. The film captures perfectly what James Baldwin said of the feelings between the races. White people hate black people because they’re scared of them, whereas black people hate whites because they just want them to get out of their way. Duff and Josie have enough problems without having to worry about white people.

Nothing encapsulates this more in the film than the character Josie. Josie has lived a sheltered life compared to Duff. She’s the preacher’s daughter so she has some level of protection, and she works at the segregated school so she never has to interact with many white people. Her struggles come with her love for Duff, and if she can commit to a man who may be incapable of providing for her and the family they hope to start.

As Duff struggles with unemployment, it’s Josie who has to bear the brunt of his anger. When she tries to comfort him he snaps back and says she’s ignorant about the world. She offers to help him financially, to find part-time work as a house-maid, but that itself is an affront to Duff’s masculinity, a sign that he can’t take care of his wife. Josie’s experience speaks to the experiences of many black women, who had to bear their husband’s failures and frustrations because they knew their husbands had no one else to turn to. Their own encounters with racism were discounted because the men “had it worse”, leaving their narratives silenced. Nothing But A Man succeeds so well at recreating the Black Alabamian reality precisely because it does not ignore the domestic sphere (something Westerns, and most films, are notoriously guilty of).

It should also be noted that the film doesn’t sully its message by brutalising black bodies. A lot of films feel they have to show extreme violence to make it clear to audiences that, yes, racism is bad and violent. What Nothing But A Man does brilliantly is show how racism can be violent without even lifting a finger. In one particular scene, when Duff is speaking to a white man, the man calls him “boy.” Duff replies, “The name’s Duff” and never once calls the white man “sir.” The white man first looks confused at being told Duff’s name, then increasingly distrustful when he notices that Duff hasn’t said, “sir” at all. The hatred racism fosters is presented in one casual conversation.

It’s understandable why Malcolm X would love this film. Malcolm has been praised for the way he celebrated blackness, arguing that black people shouldn’t conk their hair or lighten their skin, that they should see themselves as beautiful after years of being told that whiteness equaled beauty. Duff and Josie are an attractive couple, their union as much an affirmation of black beauty as it is a consolidation between the working and middle classes (at least, as middle class as black people were allowed to achieve). Where black people like Josie’s father and Duff’s co-workers actively work against their happiness, Duff and Josie’s union is a sign of black unity, and an understanding of their shared experience.

Malcolm is also credited with giving black men back their masculinity, after centuries of being humiliated as violent sexual monsters and emasculated clowns. Duff has that same defiant masculinity people saw in Malcolm, refusing to back down to white oppression and defending his family from threats of violence. When a white man says he’ll kill him, Duff replies cooly, “Dying’s gonna be done two ways.” As previously mentioned, Duff never answers to the word, “boy” and never calls a white man, “sir.” He stands up proud, despite everything the world throws at him, and resolves “to make trouble” in the town, not for the sake of it, but because the town needs it.

It would seem things still need a shake-up. We’re fifty years on and few of the problems presented in Nothing But A Man have changed. Black poverty is still rampant, black people are still discriminated against, not just in America but around the world. Now we even have a pandemic that attacks black people more than most demographics. We cannot allow people to fall back on their old habits of wilful ignorance anymore. For too long people’s prejudices have been allowed to fester because deep down the system hasn’t changed. Even as the civil rights movement raged in the ’60s, “urban renewal” projects were being done to gentrify inner cities and price black people out. This has continued unabated.

We cannot accommodate it anymore. As things go from bad to worse, with mass unemployment on the horizon, I worry that it’s already too late. Since Nothing But A Man, America has become even more of a police state. When given the choice between giving black people equality or reducing their own freedoms, white Americans chose fewer freedoms. Americans, and all of us around the world, need to consider what we want very carefully. Do we want things to continue as they are, with constant bloodshed and sporadic violence, or do we want to finally change things?

I worry I already know the answer to that question, but I have to remain hopeful. To look at this situation pessimistically is to allow the cycle to continue.