#i always think about how beautiful it was for ryan coogler to cast buddy guy as older sammie #i often think about how people like to espouse the idea that we are "so far removed" from jim crow and segregation when creatives like buddy are still alive #a lot of the activists and figures are still alive! #idk the fact that he's living proof of the continued effects of chattel slavery on black americans is so bittersweet because he remembers such atrocities but he's also able to bestow wisdom and history for art pieces like sinners
Ryan Coogler said in an interview, btw, that part of why he thought of Buddy Guy was because his uncle loved seeing him – he'd get dressed up and go see him play live when he got the chance.
My grandfather's grandfather was born a slave. I believe he lived to see freedom, but still.
Which means my grandfather's father was a sharecropper, which is within my family's oral history for why the [surname] family property and farm is the way it is and has been in the family for so long.
My grandfather died at 96 years old at the turn of the century.
Sharecropping as we know it today ended sometime in the 1930s-1950s depending on the state. Not only was my grandfather a sharecropper's son- my grandfather was a sharecropper himself during his early adulthood before he left home to join the military and later became a preacher.
My grandfather marched with Martin Luther Kin Jr and educated my father on black politics and activism. My father just turned 71, the same age as Ruby Bridges, the little girl who sparked the mass desegregation of education. She was born in 1954. There exists a photo somewhere of a little boy on a man's shoulders in the crowd at one of MLK's public events. That's my dad.
That's how close this is to the current era.
I said that once as a teenager on a forum. I was mocked and told that I am either way older than I claimed to be or that I am way off in my estimations because slavery was long ago. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Civil Rights movement itself, that is in recent enough memory to be evident in the lives of those who are alive today. My grandfather's grandfather- I'm just 5 generations removed from slavery.
Buddy Guy is 89 years old. My grandfather would be 122 if he was still alive today. That's how close this is.
