In the era when the Black Panther Party was its most powerful and off-the-pig-threatening and separatist, there was little interest in even conversing with whitey, unless whitey was from somewhere other than the ultra-racist USA. Swedish news teams assigned to America were allowed surprising access to the Panther doings, and The Black Power Mixtape is a collage of privileged documentary moments from 1967 to 1975, assembled and edited by Göran Hugo Olsson. Some of the material is priceless: Stokely Carmichael in conversation with his mother about racism, Angela Davis, in an intimate interview from her jail cell, holding forth about her violence-soaked childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. An interesting, articulate voice-over is provided by current African-American writers, rappers, and academics commenting on the still-incendiary footage, as well as Davis, still militant.
