It was the “long hot summer of 1967,” so called because racial unrest had reached full boil. Riots—“the language of the unheard,” in the words of Martin Luther King Jr.—were exploding in city after city, from Atlanta to Boston, Birmingham to Milwaukee, roaring in Newark and Detroit. Malcolm X had been shot dead two years earlier, and Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, in all its incendiary eloquence, was sweeping up the young, both black and white. It was slash-and-burn civil-rights activism, and it terri!ed parents, enraged racists, and unsettled the White House. America the melting pot was a crucible in crisis.
But at the movies, even in the South, the crucible was cool. In 1967 the country’s biggest film star, its most loved actor, was black. He had the self-containment of…
