When Ishmael Reed announced this week that Dr. Ruth Elizabeth Burks had died, he reminded us that she was among the contributors to “Black Hollywood Unchained—Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood,” a collection of essays he edited in response to the film “Django Unchained” and published by Third World Press (2015).
With this notice in mind, I secured my copy of the book from a growing pile and read again Burks’ piece, which she titled “Hollywood Recreates History, Again.” For the most part, her critique compared Quentin Tarantino’s film with D.W. Griffin’s “The Birth of a Nation,” released in 1915. In Burks’ view, 100 years separated the films, but in so many ways very little had changed in the way Hollywood has depicted the Black experience.
Here’s how she closed her scathing indictment: “In a less self-aggrandizing, self-censoring, self-referential, self-rewarding and self-serving peculiar institution like Hollywood, a film about slavery’s unspeakable horrors might center on the slaves themselves. In a less peculiar institution, Hollywood might ‘have the courage enough to shake off its fears and taboos and to depict the Negro in films as a normal human being and an integral part of the life in America and the world,’ as Walter White urged its moguls to do in 1942.”
Burks continued, “And, in a less peculiar institution. Black actors who wish to practice their craft might demand more than the two options Hattie McDaniel claimed open to her when she protested White’s intrusion and declared, ‘I’d rather play a maid than be a maid.’ There must be a third choice.”
This passage is but a small slice of the intelligence and insight Burks possessed in understanding Hollywood, and Reed elaborated on her keen analysis, recalling what a remarkable student she was and the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in English from UCLA.
Burks’ academic ascendance flowered early, and by the age of 3 she was already reading voraciously. Born in New York City April 9, 1949, Burks was the product of ambitious parents. Her father was a biochemist and her mother a housewife and school teacher. Almost immediately on her educational journey she was rewarded, receiving honors and double promoted.
During her high school years, she excelled in the classroom and served as class vice president. But it wasn’t all academic achievements. She was a member of the school’s cheerleading squad, and when her head wasn’t buried in textbooks, she worked as a sales representative at Macy’s Department Store and at Camp Minisink in upstate New York during the summers.
On graduation from George Washington High School, Burks was voted the most likely to succeed, and that recognition was further developed when she enrolled at Boston University as a pre-med student. But it wasn’t long before the literary aspirations took command and she changed her major to English. Another change occurred when she married fellow student Gregory Joel Abbott.
She and Abbott moved to Berkeley, Calif., in 1968 and Burks continued her journey in higher education at the University of California at Berkeley. In rapid succession she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned her master’s degree in creative writing. In 1973, she gave birth to a son, Gyasi Omari Burks-Abbott. Four years later, she moved to Los Angeles and attended the American Film Institute. And it was perhaps there that she began sharpening her comprehension of Hollywood and its machinations.
Her love and pursuit of English now had to share time with her devotion to film, although she enrolled at UCLA with an aim toward getting her Ph.D. in English. Meanwhile, there was the importance of raising her son, which she had to do alone after divorcing her husband.
With her son in tow, Burks earned her doctorate in 1992, and then began a teaching career that spanned the globe. On a PBS interview in the 1990s during her tenure teaching at Macalester College, Burks expounded on the conclusions of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. When asked if she agreed with Wright’s appraisal of Black writing that up to that time “went-a-begging White America?”
“Ah, no,” Burks replied with laughter. “But at the same time, I can understand where Richard Wright is coming from. And, one of the people that he’s writing against is Zora Neale Hurston. And it becomes quite interesting because I’ve studied both of them. And I wound up doing a seminar, in which we did Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. And it was absolutely fascinating, because you finally see that they’re not really coming from [different places], although their approach is quite different. And in a way, one could say that Zora Neale Hurston writes in what has become the African-American women’s literary tradition. And Richard Wright is very much writing out of the African-American male tradition.” She later completed her Ph.D. dissertation on the film adaptation of Wright’s novel, “Native Son.”
Thus, in effect, Burks demonstrated the same comprehension in Black literature she had in Black films. Even so, there were other educational goals on the agenda, and in 2003 she received her master’s in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It should be noted that she began writing a profile of her autistic son, using a qualitative method she acquired at Harvard.
“I spoke to her last week,” Reed said in an email, “but she was very much sedated. She devoted her life to the care of her autistic son. I spoke to him this morning and he said that his mom had set up a support system to keep him going.”
Burks also set up a support system for the rest of us who are interested in knowing more about the inherent racism in Hollywood and the intricacies of African-American literature.
She was 68 when she died on Sept. 13, 2017, at the Walden Rehab and Nursing Center in Concord, Mass.
