Blaxploitation Education: The Education of Sonny Carson

A "message" movie that left me with too many questions about what it was actually trying to say.

The Education of Sonny Carson
Written by Fred Hudson
Directed by Michael Campus
1974

For fans of rap music from a certain era, there are some samples of movie dialogue that can be recalled with perfect clarity. The song “Iron Maiden” by Ghostface Killah starts with a sample that features an exchange between a kid and some gang members:

“What you doin’ on our turf, punk?”

“I got a message for Smokey.”

“Give it.”

“You Smokey, man?”

“Give it!”

“If you ain’t Smokey, ain’t your mothafuckin’ message.”

“Mothafucka, I said gimme the message!”

I had heard this bit of dialogue so many times that I could quote it from memory, so I was surprised to accidentally stumble across its origin while watching The Education of Sonny Carson. It turns out the movie has been sampled numerous times; I also recognized the following bit of dialogue from a scene later in the movie in which some gangs are preparing to have a fight:

“We gotta lay cool.”

“We tired of bein’ cool, man. Every time we turn around, you tellin’ us to be cool, shit, man, we tired! Every time we get into an argument with the Lords you say ‘be cool,’ the same thing, ‘be cool.’ We be too cool, we gonna lose!”

“We gonna lose? Who number one?”

Clearly, the movie made an impression on a generation of artists with its depiction of gang life and its attempts to inspire downtrodden people to better their lives rather than falling into meaningless patterns of violence, drug use, and despair. Or at least, one would hope that would be the message. The two clips mentioned above each precede some of the most memorable scenes of violence in the movie, and they could easily be misinterpreted as calls to action, selling young men on the idea that they have to be tough and that any perceived slight must be answered with violence. That’s certainly not what was intended here, but it’s far from the only time in which people have confused depiction with endorsement.

Part of the problem with The Education of Sonny Carson is that its message is kind of muddled. It’s about the life of a young man (played by Thomas Hicks as a child and Rony Clanton as a teenager) who supposedly had a promising future (the opening scene sees him receiving an award for writing an essay, and the white woman praising him says that his words show that “any American, through self-discipline and diligent effort, can taste the fruits of success!”) but who falls in with the wrong crowd. When he gets caught stealing some food from a store, he gets sent to juvenile detention. After he gets out, he delivers a message from a fellow detainee to his gang, then decides that he wants to join. After a violent initiation, the movie jumps forward a few years, showing us that he has become an integral member of the gang, engaging in all manner of delinquency.

Unfortunately, with gang membership comes turf wars, including when members of rival gangs attend school together. It’s kind of odd to see Sonny and his friends openly wearing jackets emblazoned with the name of their gang, the Lords, on the back when they go to school, and they and their rival gang, the Hawks, even march in a local parade. The movie was based on the autobiography of an activist and community leader who fought in the Korean War, so the events that happened to him would have probably taken place sometime in the 1940s. Here, they seem to be happening during the 1960s or early 1970s, but this was still well before the era when street gangs were considered to be the public menace they are seen as today.

Anyway, the rivalry between the Lords and the Hawks periodically escalates into violence, usually over dumb macho posturing about one guy bumping into or insulting another. One memorable scene involves each gang psyching themselves up for a big confrontation, and they all spend so much time talking about how they’re tougher than the other guys and they can’t stand being insulted any longer that it becomes clear that these guys are equally terrified of being hurt or killed and of being perceived as weak. It’s classic toxic masculinity, with young men who have no sense of direction lashing out in completely nonsensical ways in order to protect their fragile egos.

The movie does try to provide some explanations for why these young men are in this predicament, but as I mentioned, the message is kind of muddled. At one point, Sonny gets taken in by the police after being beaten up in a gang fight. The cop questioning him (played by Don Gordon, who also appeared in The Mack, a movie from the same director) gets frustrated when Sonny keeps telling an obvious lie about being jumped by some punks when he was enjoying a banana split with his girl. He snaps and lets his racism show by saying, “You wanna know something? Your kind should be locked up from the day they’re born.” Sonny replies, “You wanna know something? We are.”

While racism and police brutality may be one reason for the plight the characters face, the movie provides a wider perspective during an emotional funeral scene after a gang member named Lil’ Boy gets killed in a fight. The preacher delivers a fiery sermon, discussing the way Black people have spent centuries being oppressed by slavery, but then he asks “Who killed Lil’ Boy?” and implicates himself, the mourners, the fellow gang members, and everyone in the community. Apparently, society itself is to blame, which seems like an abdication of responsibility; if everyone is at fault, then really, nobody is.

I don’t think this movie is ultimately trying to say that this is just the way the world is, and there’s nothing that can be done to prevent violence and despair. But it does strikingly little to outline the underlying social ills that led these events to happen. Why does Sonny decide to choose a life of crime? Are there no other opportunities available? Did he not have any role models or family members who could encourage him to go in a different direction? There are some brief glimpses of his father but little to no mentions of any other family members. We don’t see his home life or school life (aside from one confrontation with rival gang members in a school hallway). The movie makes it seem like the gang was the only option, but that’s only because it didn’t bother to show us anything else about his life.

Ultimately, Sonny ends up getting arrested and going to jail, not because he was involved in any gang violence or murder, but because he decided to rob a telegram messenger in order to buy flowers for his friend’s funeral. He has a powerful scene during a parole hearing in which he gets upset and starts yelling at a man who asks if, upon his release, he’ll make good use of the “privilege of freedom” that they might grant to him. He gets indignant about the idea that these people have any power over him and could take away his god-given freedom, but it’s not like he was unjustly imprisoned, since he clearly committed crimes. As much as I enjoy it when Black characters in movies stand up against The Man, his indignation seems to be kind of misdirected here.

When Sonny does eventually get out, he’s horrified to learn that his former gang buddies have all either died or become junkies. His girlfriend is a junkie too, and she overdoses after making it clear that drugs are the only thing that give her any sense of pleasure or positivity in the horrific nightmare that her life has become. This is enough to make him swear off this life and move on to something better. But like the rest of the movie, there’s no sense of what that might be; he simply takes off the medallion he wears, throws it away, and walks away toward what will hopefully be a better future. Was that an option this entire time? If so, it kind of undercuts the idea that gangs and violence were the only path available to him.

I’m probably being too hard on this movie, since it’s definitely well-intentioned, trying to depict the real-life travails of its subject and the difficulties faced by Black people in the inner city who have few opportunities and dismal futures. It may be pretty white of me to demand answers and explanations rather than accepting what Black people are saying about themselves and their circumstances. However, while the real Sonny Carson was Black, the writer and director of this movie were white, and it seems like the movie is coming from their perspective. They offer a look at the problems faced by the Black community, but they throw up their hands and make it seem like everything that happened was inevitable, and there are no real solutions except for individual Black people to do better. For a “message” movie, that’s a message that’s pretty unhelpful.

However, as mentioned, the movie does have plenty of memorable moments that definitely stick in the mind. Much of the dialogue is naturalistic, seeming to capture the way people in these situations would really talk (to the point of annoyance in some cases, such as one space-case character who seems to follow every other word with “man”). There’s a scene of police brutality that’s horrific after Sonny is arrested for the robbery, with the aforementioned cop beating him mercilessly, causing him to scream and writhe in agony while spitting up lots of blood. There’s a cool shot where police are interrogating another gang member, with him facing the camera in a tight close-up and the cops seeming to melt out of the shadows surrounding as they loom over his shoulders and convince him to give them information about Sonny’s whereabouts. Other scenes are visceral in their intensity, whether they involve gang fights, weeping mourners, or prison inmates screaming about brutality.

It’s understandable that this movie would be something that would linger in the consciousness, with people finding connections to their own lives and being inspired to make their own art. I just wish that all of the creativity had gone toward something that had more to say than “Life sucks, and the only way to make it any better is to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night