Turtle Talk

Here.

An excerpt:

James Earl Jones: Well, the whole thing about black actors in leading roles began to, you know, occurred to me. And before that, I don’t think any. Hollywood sure didn’t worry about it. You know, where was the box office there they’d say, you know. And blacks weren’t in into complaining a lot about the images. I myself would watch John Wayne movies. I woke up to handle feeling like John Wayne. Didn’t matter to me. I didn’t need a black face to identify with, you know. But there was there was something that was missing in the American spectrum when I saw Jeff Turner playing all the Indians and not a real Indian. And I knew I was raised among Chippewa Indians and I knew what they looked like and what they were different culturally. And I kept wondering, well, why can’t I see them playing Cochise and so on and. And Sidney being Sidney and also Harry, both being from the Caribbean, that was somehow much more feasible in a way because they were they weren’t American black men. They were in touch with a different reality than guys like me from Mississippi, you know.

JEJ spent time in his childhood in Manistee, MI where he went to school with Michigan Anishinaabek from Little River.