'Percy Green: Man of Action' showcases a true St. Louis civil rights hero
Would you climb 300 feet up an unbuilt Gateway Arch to make a point? Percy did.
If you ever wondered who secured the right for an African American to never be fired from their job due to their race, you can thank Percy Green. The legendary civil rights activist made it his eternal mission in life to challenge the overbearing authority that didn’t produce an adequate (or anything close to fair) route for African Americans to find work. Thanks to acclaimed director Joseph Puleo, the new documentary film titled Percy Green: Man of Action shows the hard work and relentless resilience that went into the fight and still burns hot today.
Most people stop when they are told “no” a certain amount of times, but Green disregarded that stopping point of a word if he felt like people of color weren’t being given a fair shake. There’s a good reason he climbed the still-being-built Gateway Arch along with his friend decades ago. At the time of his daring feat, zero black employees were working on the grounds. After he came down, they found jobs on the construction site. That’s the Percy effect in a nutshell.
The memorable Supreme Court case, Green vs. McDonnell Douglas in 1974, cemented the idea that someone couldn’t lose their job due to the color of their skin. In order to secure equal (or closer to equal) rights, Green went after an area of discrimination that made the U.S. Government’s blood boil: Economics. In other words, jobs for African Americans that were being shuttled without hesitation to white people instead, even if the qualifications weren’t as strong.
It was Green who stared down racism in the eye and refused to blink, a hallmark stance of perseverance that has inspired thousands to follow in his footsteps and keep the movement going. Unfortunately, due to the resistance of our worlds to the most humanizing form of change, people like Green are still necessary to push the limits and hand the baton off to younger generations in the fight for equal rights. You can chop off over 50 years of hard work, and still find our country in the same predicament it was in back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Some things refuse to change. Thankfully, Green refuses to back down.
Puleo is quickly becoming a household name around the Midwest and across the country for showing some willpower of his own right. Following films about the courageous people behind America’s last slice of Little Italy on the Hill and the Bosnian infusion into St. Louis, he sets his sights on Green’s cumulative work over the decades that changed lives and moved barriers. Instead of drowning us in exposition or an endless dumping of fact bombs, Puleo keeps the documentary lean and mean at right over an hour.
Puleo incorporates animation into his storytelling here, showing the rigorous efforts of Green and his associates to hold the line and secure more jobs for African Americans at a time when no one wanted to see them thrive. The esteemed Italian filmmaker is tireless in his attempt to inform multiple generations, young and old, about the real heroes who helped our world find a resemblance of balance.
Thanks to immovable souls like Green and renegade filmmakers like Puleo, moviegoers will receive an entertaining and poignant glimpse of history shaping our collective futures.
Percy Green: Man of Action premieres on PBS tonight. Don’t miss it. Instead of an hour-long network show, turn this movie on and you may learn something along with being the voice to hear at the water cooler on Tuesday morning.
