Thought this was an appropriate post on the anniversary of the Birmingham bombing that assassinated those four young girls...I still love many of the films these clips came from, as I do all the old Westerns that bent over backward to salve the South's poor loser complex (and often contained this phrase)...but damn it was so obvious to me even as a kid how wrong this so common expression then was...
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3 comments:
Insidious.
I must confess to having never seen any of the scenes in these movies. And to never having heard the phrase "free, white and 21" before.
It's possible I may have seen one as a child. There were a lot of old movies on television in the 1950's, but most of the dialogue went right over my head.
It's peculiar they'd use the phrase in a movie with Harry Belafonte. His indignation in the film would have to have mirrored his own personal rage then.
Perhaps even weirder is that the co-star in the film in question--The World, the Flesh and the Devil [1959]--was Inger Stevens, a Scandinavian beauty who would later secretly marry African American actor and director Ike Jones (in 1961).
Ironic.
you must be younger curtis, not only was it in the movies when i was a kid constantly but also in real life people would say it quite a bit...and as for Inger, ironic indeed...
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