Review by Marvin X: Last Black Man in San Francisco

Last weekend, writer Cecil Brown stopped by my Academy of da Corner, Lakeshore Ave., Oakland, and asked if I'd seen Last Black Man in San Francisco? I replied that I hadn't and he said he hadn't either, but from what he'd heard, it was the gentrification of gentrification, referring to the white director,Joe Talbot, although co-written by Rob Reichert and Jimmy Fails, also the co-star. Cecil Brown was saying the process of the  production itself was gentrified, and it certainly was, e.g., European music dominated the soundtrack of a film essentially about hip hop characters, although the film was definitely inter-generational, including a mythic ancestor grandfather, who supposedly built a Victorian house in the 1940s when the wave of North American Africans migrated West to work in the war industry and replaced Japanese in the Fillmore when they were put in concentration camps.

Jonathan Majors and Jimmie Fails are the main characters, Mont and Jimmy respectively. Like many North American Africans disconnected from their history, we often construct mythology to placate our psychological trauma that transcends amnesia which assumes we forgot, but Dr. Nathan Hare says we simply never knew, as any victim of physical trauma is unable to recall what happened to them. Jimmy comes to believes, or rather constructs the myth that his grandfather built the house but eventually deed history reveals it was constructed a hundred years before, as a tour guide attempted to tell his group.

During probate by the white owners, Mont and Jimmy occupy the house but are forced to move when a "friendly" real estate agent puts it up for sale. Before they depart, Mont produces a play in the house that reveals the myth Jimmy has been living by at which point Jimmy declares he must be the last black man in San Francisco because all his relatives are living precariously or have departed.

This film about brotherly and family love has value as North American Africans are being gentrified coast to coast. But as Tina Turner said, "What's love got to do with it?"

We don't expect film writers to be sociologists and city planners, so although we appreciate the film, it presents the problem but no solution, and perhaps there is none when the median cost of a home in San Francisco is 1.4 million dollars. Will any amount of creative financing solve problem of affordability? Most certainly, a livable wage won't!

And most especially, a communal problem will not be solved with an individual solution. We know films must be focused, and although we can deduct from the specific to the general, we need to see that the severity of the problem is communal.



We recently celebrated the memorial of Wade "Speedy" Woods, and I titled my story on him as "The Last Fillmore Revolutionary Negro". Ironically, as per this film, Speedy headed WAPAC, the Fillmore or Western Addition
Project Area Committee, a redevelopment agency that tried to save, and did save, many of the Victorians like the one depicted in Last Black Man in San Francisco. If I were to write a film on Speedy, it would reveal his efforts to save community as opposed to a narrative of him as an individual. He did have a team! And WAPAC save some elements of the Fillmore, but we must note that years later as the Fillmore, aka, Harlem of the West, suffered gentrification, former Mayor Joe Alioto publically apologized for "destroying the cultural and economic vitality of the Fillmore."

Left to write, SFSU BSU co-founders Mar'yam, Danny Glover and Marvin X.
Danny portrayed Jimmy's grandfather in Last Black Man in SF.

As was noted in the Rolling Stone review, Last Black Man floated between fantasy and documentary, or mythology and reality, and this is okay, except our condition is so critical, do we have time for fantasy? We are being moved on and thus we are on the move. The film revealed our desperate straits, from family members to the hopeless Greek chorus on the corner in the hills of Hunters Point, to the sick white people in downtown San Francisco who want nudity as a normality. They have even opened a cafe where they can enjoy rats as they eat and drink!


As we came off the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, we noted the skyscrapers under construction, then wondered how city planners can approve these constructions without giving equity to the displaced with affordable housing and living wages? Nevertheless, our beloved Mayor London Breed spoke at the Fillmore Juneteenth and assured the crowd of North American African we would not suffer the fate of the Last Black Man in San Francisco! We shall survive, the Mayor assured  the crowd!
--Marvin X
6/23/19