This year may go down in history as the banner year for Black women’s stories in mainstream commercial film. Last weekend the first hand-painted Disney film in decades starred the company’s first Black princess (and possibly the most Blacks behind-the-scenes employees in Disney’s 87-year history). This was on the heels of what was deemed one of the first Black Oscar contenders in a generation for Best Director, Best Film, and possibly Best Supporting Actress in Precious: Based on the Book “Push” By Sapphire. In our collective rush to deservedly celebrate hard-working black princesses being romanced by shiftless high yella Negroes princes, and illiterate molestation victims who will miraculously survive both HIV and two inbred children in pre-HAART, Bush I America, there’s a more earth-bound story I hope we won’t forget this awards season. 

Early in 2009 a small film, American Violet (now available on DVD), was released to high critical acclaim.  Directed by Tim Disney, written and produced by Bill Haney, and starring Alfre Woodard and rapper Xzibit, the film belonged to its lead, an astonishingly good Nicole Behaire as Dee Roberts. Based on the true-life heroics of Regina Kelly, Roberts is a 24-year old Black mother of four in Harmon County, Texas (real-life Hearne, TX in Robertson County) who despite a valiant grind of working-class servitude can only rise to survivalist poverty. Kelly as played by Behaire made some dooming life choices, poorly selected men based on her environments’ limited offerings, and has a slight anger management problem. After a series of systemically racist events involving illegal drug sweeps of innocent citizens on the word of a single, compromised informant, Roberts is asked to be the lead plaintiff in a civil rights case against a corrupt DA in an eerily oppressive town where Jim Crow-era racial hierarchy is still thrives. Even after she no longer has to fight to save herself, Roberts chooses to stay and fight her people and model something different for her daughters, eventually changing the laws for thousands of poor people, not just in her county, but across the state of Texas.

American Violet doesn’t depict Roberts as anyone’s angel. She’s an ordinary citizen facing extraordinary circumstances. Her every fault and frailty is thrown in her face with enough snide judgment to crush a lesser mortal. The welfare of her children dangled before her with little regard for their lives, her livelihood stripped from her, and still she stood and fought with little more to gain than dignity for herself and her people. Despite the re-election of the Bull Conner D.A. she defeated, the true plaintiff of Regina Kelly vs. John Paschall stayed in Hearn, Texas until this year, in a town whose power structure hated her guts. If I had a daughter, I’d rather she view Kelly’s chutzpah as something worth emulating rather than the fictional ambitions of a singing frog. The example of a flawed Black woman exposing systemic, institutional racism despite her own socially demeaned stature should at least be as celebrated as the personal holocaust survivor of Grand Guignol parents.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed both Precious and The Princess and The Frog. Both films offer vitally important Black women’s stories and images, but they are end spectrum hyperbolic works of art. America Violet is a reality-based road map for walking with dignity for the living. Appropriately, American Violet closes not with some faux-celebratory scene of Regina Kelly’s David vs. Goliath triumph against an ever-present corrupt system; it knows Kelly’s win is but a ripple in a social justice ocean. Instead, it closes with a sobering, challenging statistic for us all to determine whether to act on with the same justifiable outrage and fight of a young mother in Texas: 90% of all U.S. convictions are made through plea bargain.