The dizzying career of Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles, whose low-budget 1971 phenomenon, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” — an X-rated film about a Black revolutionary’s survival on the run — proved a milestone of independent and African American cinema, died Sept. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

Over a six-decade career, Mr. Van Peebles continually reinvented himself: as an Air Force officer, a San Francisco cable-car gripman (operator), a self-taught film auteur, a novelist in English and French, a Tony Award-nominated playwright and composer, an Emmy Award-winning TV writer, a spoken-word artist and, for a spell in the 1980s, the only Black floor trader on the American Stock Exchange.

Melvin Van Peebles, fiercely independent filmmaker, dies at 89, by Adam Bernstein, Washington Post, September 22, 2021. Image is the poster for Peebles' 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Image credit: Employee(s) of Cinemation Industries, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.