Still from Moving On Up Still from Moving On Up

Moving On Up is an educational and promotional film produced by James E. Hinton in 1969. The film is aimed at engaging black men in construction and trade careers through a joint apprenticeship program. The beginning of the film emphasises the importance of labor organizing in advancing the struggle for black liberation. As the narrator states, “power comes from organization.” By joining the apprenticeship program, individuals are promised good jobs and raises. Another goal of the apprenticeship program is to correct injustices against black workers in the United States. Through producing training booklets, the program claims to educate black communities which prepares individuals to pass aptitude and skills exams necessary to enter the trade field of their choosing. This aspect of the program accentuates the power of the “black craftsman,” a figure which has built this country and its infrastructure and is finally being recognized in the labor market. One particular scene shows workers learning math functions and operations. The film concludes by asserting the dignity of all work, with particular significance on the work of black craftspeople, who have historically been ignored and disregarded. Through the apprenticeship program, black people are “doing work with dignity of equal partnership in society” for the first time. The promotional film, therefore, asserts that black liberation is rooted is participation in capitalism. Freedom will come through black people entering the capitalist labor market, according to Moving On Up.

The film recognizes the violence and injustice that have been inflicted against black communities through capitalist markets and hopes to change this through black people claiming space in these social structures, doing work with dignity and fair pay for the first time in history. The themes of liberation highlighted in Moving On Up are related to the ideas discussed by black radical thinker Richard Wright in White Man, Listen! written during the decolonization movements of the 1950s. Through its social critiques, White Man, Listen! identify elite men as the vanguard of the revolution. According to this text, the revolution will be carried out by and on the terms of a class of educated male elites. In Moving On Up, this is reflected in the men entering the construction trades. The film asserts that these men, with their power and education, will be able to liberate black people in the United States. However, this isn’t true liberation. The text, similar to the film, do not imagine a place in the struggle for liberation for black women.

These ideas clash with work done by black radical feminists of the time period, such as bell hooks. hooks, in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, posits that liberation for these men does little to nothing for the rest of society. What does the freedom of these elites, who are positioned to ascend economic and social hierarchies, do for poor women and those at the very bottom of society? hooks argues that equality in the current unjust, racist, and sexist system of capitalism is it impossible to achieve equality in such a system and should not be a goal. Therefore, Moving On Up works to liberate those at the top of society and leaves behind all others who are at the bottom. The tools of oppression can never be tools of liberation.