The Blaxploitation Reader

In the pantheon of lexical construction, "blaxploitation" is one bad mutha. Few linguistic mashups have been as simultaneously pithy and evocative as this infamous term, coined in the early 1970s by Los Angeles NAACP head (and ex-film publicist) Junius Griffin. A union of the words "black" and "exploitation" was not accidental: "We must insist that our children are not exposed to a diet of so-called black movies that glorify black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters, and super males with vast physical prowess but no cognitive skills," Griffin told Newsweek in 1972. His protest came after the release of Super Fly, the massively popular tale of larger-than-life coke dealer Youngblood Priest as he plots one last score. (The film was so successful that it bested no less than The Godfather in a short run as America’s highest-earning movie.) Try as he might, Griffin, along with his partners in the NAACP, CORE, and PUSH, simply could not halt the advance of blaxploitation.