BURNETT WAS BORN IN VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, on April 13, 1947, but when he was age three, as part of a diaspora of blacks from the Deep South who were seeking employment in West Coast industries, he and his family moved to Watts in South Central Los Angeles. The area takes its name from a farmer who bought a small amount of acreage in 1886 and sold it when it was about to become an important railroad hub (the Watts train station is a historic landmark). The earliest population was made up of Hispanic rail workers and black Pullman porters, but in the 1940s a huge number of southern blacks moved to Watts to raise families in specially built housing projects. Los Angeles was blatantly racist, and many black people in Watts were confined to their neighborhood. Yet there was work to be had in the community until the early 1960s; in the summer, for example, the young Burnett could get jobs with carpenters or construction crews.
By the mid-1960s the railroad was rusting away, the heavy industry was gone, and much of the black population had become grimly poor. In 1965 the Watts riots broke out: a chaotic explosion of violence prompted by the arrest of a single youth by the California Highway Patrol after years of systematic police brutality against residents. (The young man’s name was Marquette Frye, and he and Charles Burnett had been in junior high school together.) In the mid-1970s, at the time when Burnett made Killer of Sheep, Hispanic gang culture was on the rise, stimulated by the growing drug trade, but it was not until the late 1980s that the notorious battles between the Bloods and the Crips made Watts a war zone. The warring factions signed a peace treaty in 1992, the same year as the Rodney King riots. By that time many poor blacks were moving back to the South, and Chicanos were becoming a larger presence in a community of mostly single-parent families who lived in rented housing.
Burnett was raised chiefly by his mother and grandmother. His father joined the military and was seldom seen. “He didn’t have any impact at all,” Burnett told Manona Wali in 1988 (Kapsis 2011, 15). His mother, who worked as a nurse’s aide, left home at four in the morning and usually didn’t return until evening; therefore, his grandmother quit her job and watched over Burnett, requiring him to go to church before she would let him go to the movies. He never became truly religious, but his grandmother’s sense of right and wrong was a lasting influence. Her love of spirituals, together with his mother’s love of blues, eventually shaped his taste in music. As a child he learned to play the trumpet and became interested in photography and films. The “race” pictures of Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams predated this period and were no longer available, but he saw old adventure serials, Universal horror films, and Tarzan movies. He remembers that he and his friends cheered when Tarzan wiped out a whole village of black warriors (Kapsis 2011, 16).
Like most boys in Watts, Burnett had to learn boxing as a survival skill, but at least he didn’t have to worry about armed killers or dangerous drug addicts (Kapsis 2011, 14). He managed to stay relatively clear of gang activity and unlike some other kids never became an alcoholic or a pill popper. In high school he grew increasingly aware of institutionalized racism because of the way teachers tacitly assumed their students were never going to amount to anything and tried to shove boys into shop class. (They resembled Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who in 2015 argued that affirmative action should be overturned; the poor black students, he said, should go to schools where grading was less strict.) After graduation, partly because he wanted to avoid being drafted into the military, Burnett earned a practical degree in electronics from Los Angeles Community College (LACC). He soon realized, however, that he was never going to be happy in a technical job. Fortunately, while at LACC he took a writing class taught by Isabelle Ziegler, who became the next major influence in his life. Her students were working class, experienced, and aspirational; Ziegler had them read widely in European and American literature and write short stories, novels, and plays. Burnett has recalled that she asked him, “‘What is your ax to grind?’” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 74).
Although Burnett had become interested in photography while in high school, the only motion picture lens he could look through was attached to an old 8mm movie camera owned by a friend. He remembers using it once to photograph an airplane in the sky as it approached Los Angeles International Airport. For a while he considered becoming a photojournalist. “I spent time at the library looking at old black and white photos of people and events,” he told me. “I wanted to capture what was going on in my community. I bought an old 35mm still camera and went out immediately to start documenting things. . . . The first thing I came upon was a lady who had died of an overdose lying in the doorway of an apartment. Police were standing around keeping people away, but they didn’t bother me when I started taking pictures of the lady. When I had to stop to change film I stood under a tree on the sidewalk reloading. A young, attractive teen-age girl who had cerebral palsy slowly made her way up to me. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She stopped in front of me and very politely asked me why I was taking pictures. I didn’t know what to say. I said something stupid, like, ‘Oh, for fun.’ She said to me, you take pictures of tragedies for fun. I put my camera away, and that was the end of my attempt at photo journalism.”
He was much happier in Ziegler’s class. Intellectually curious and possessed of an artistic temperament, he got a night job at the main branch of the LA public library and began going to movies in his spare time. As he grew older, the first film he saw with which he could identify in a strong personal sense was Robert M. Young and Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man (1963), a love story about a railroad section hand and a preacher’s daughter, which deals intelligently with conflicts of both class and race and features an exceptional music score by Motown artists. In 1980 Burnett told a French interviewer that he especially admired this film because it was about “a young man and his wife working hard to survive in a racist environment. The movie is full of anger but without hate” (Kapsis 2011, 3–4). Other films he liked when he was young (all of them re-releases) were Delmer Daves’s The Red House (1947), a rural melodrama about class tensions; Rudolph Mate’s D.O.A. (1950), a noir thriller with documentary footage of San Francisco streets; and especially Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945), a harsh but lyrical film about the lives of dirt-poor southern tenant farmers. At least one critic has compared Burnett to Renoir, because both men are skilled directors of ensembles who tend to give all the characters their reasons (Kim 2003, 8–9). What Burnett especially admired about The Southerner was its tendency to treat all the poor with equal dignity: “They were all sharecroppers, white and black, and sharecropping was hard for everyone. The rich landowners were the ones who benefited. Not the poor whites who were fighting for the same scraps from the master’s table. Renoir showed it” (Kim 2003, 9).
The 1960s were at least in some ways good years for the arts in the black community of Los Angeles. “The Watts Writers Workshop [inspired by Malcom X] was booming,” Burnett told an interviewer. “Until—it was rumored—an FBI informant burned it down” (Kapsis 2011, 16). Burnett wasn’t involved in the workshop, but he had a growing awareness of the political determinants of life in Watts and was preparing to examine that life through writing and filmmaking. It was against this background that he gained admission and financial support to study film at UCLA, an inexpensive school at the time, with $15 per quarter tuition for in-state residents. Burnett enrolled in 1967, earning a BA in theater arts and creative writing in 1971 and an MFA in 1977. One reason for his long stay there was that he could make excellent use of UCLA’s free cameras and equipment, and he became important as a student instructor. He had arrived at the right moment. While at the university he was a leader and facilitator of what was arguably the most important black cultural formation in the United States since the Harlem Renaissance.
THE L.A. REBELLION
In those days Los Angeles was, and to a considerable degree still is, an unofficially segregated city, but Burnett found the atmosphere in Westwood strikingly different from the world he had known in Watts, which resembled a semirural extension of the black South, or what he described as a “displaced” community. One of his strongest memories as a schoolchild was when his teacher wrote “poor,” “middle class,” and “rich” on a blackboard and asked the students in which category they belonged. Burnett assumed he was middle class, but the teacher told him he was poor; he had never seen life outside his neighborhood and didn’t know his own condition.
It would have been difficult for him to acquire that knowledge,