Melvin Van Peebles, godfather of Black cinema, dies at 89
CBSN
Melvin Van Peebles, the groundbreaking filmmaker, playwright and musician whose work helped usher in the "blaxploitation" wave of the 1970s and influenced filmmakers long after, has died. He was 89.
In statement, his family said that Van Peebles, father of the actor-director Mario Van Peebles, died Tuesday evening at his home in Manhattan.
"Dad knew that Black images matter. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what was a movie worth?" Mario Van Peebles said in a statement Wednesday. "We want to be the success we see, thus we need to see ourselves being free. True liberation did not mean imitating the colonizer's mentality. It meant appreciating the power, beauty and interconnectivity of all people."
Ashley White received her earliest combat action badge from the United States Army soon after the first lieutenant arrived in Afghanistan. The silver military award, recognizing soldiers who've been personally engaged by an attacker during conflict, was considered an achievement in and of itself as well as an affirming rite of passage for the newly deployed. White had earned it for using her own body to shield a group of civilian women and children from gunfire that broke out in the midst of her third mission in Kandahar province. All of them survived. She never mentioned the badge to anyone in her battalion.