His commitment to showing the realities of what it feels like to be constantly haunted by thoughts of mortality and the trauma of life surrounded by conflict - for me, that’s what made “Boyz n the Hood” stick. It usually came during some form of “the talk” - not the one about the birds and the bees, but the one black boys have heard for decades about the threats that await their bodies. I imagine Singleton heard those words early in his life. There’s an adage that was drilled into me, always by an elder black man in my family or community, “The day you were born, there was a pine box and a prison cell built with your name on it.”
I can easily remember running full speed from the bullets indiscriminately spraying out of a red IROC-Z Camaro and the face of the man who put a gun to my temple in high school is forever seared into my brain. Before I could do long division, I mastered which neighborhoods and housing projects to never step foot in. I’d seen boys get jumped into a gang set and fight to survive. It was Singleton’s exploration of manhood, friendship, optimism and responsibility that made the film hit home for this young black boy. Without “Boyz n the Hood” there would be no “Juice,” “Menace II Society,” “Above the Rim,” “Fresh,” “South Central” or “Friday.”Īnd yet it was Singleton’s exploration of manhood, friendship, optimism and responsibility that made the film hit home for this young black boy growing up in a lower-middle-class community in Cincinnati.īy then, I knew far too well the implications of making the wrong choice or the wrong move growing up in a neighborhood where dealers and bangers became surrogate fathers and big brothers.
Rappers had already been providing eyewitness dispatches from the ’hoods they came up in (the film’s title is lifted directly from an Eazy-E hit that appeared on an N.W.A album ), but the box-office success of Singleton’s debut spawned an entire subgenre of black-led “hip-hop” films as movie studios cashed in on a youthful market for street realism that humanized communities barely shown outside of news coverage. On the surface, “Boyz n the Hood” is a cautionary tale about the horrors that confront black youth in neighborhoods devastated by gangs, drugs and violence. He died following complications from a massive stroke he suffered on April 17. With his 1991 drama “Boyz N the Hood,” director John Singleton became the first African American filmmaker nominated for a directing Oscar.
He was pushed by the brutality of a statistic that threatened young black men like him in this country, the realities of which were barely depicted outside of rap music before Singleton - then fresh out of USC’s film program - brought the coming-of-age ’hood drama about a group of black South Central teenagers to screen. Singleton, who died on Monday at the age of 51, following a stroke, was just 23 when he wrote and directed “Boyz n the Hood,” the 1991 film that made him the youngest and the first black director to be nominated for an Oscar, and minted his status as a visionary in black cinema. Most will die at the hands of another black male.” It comes at the film’s opening, in the form of a message flashing across the screen before the action begins: “One out of 21 black American males will be murdered in their lifetime. I spent much of my childhood in fear of the grim statistic that opened the film. “Boyz n the Hood” wasn’t the first John Singleton film I saw in theaters - that distinction goes to his 1993 romance “Poetic Justice” - but it’s the one that’s stayed with me the longest.