Magnus McFaulds
Lantern Staff
In the spirit of Black History month, on Friday Feb 8, Netflix released their own commemoration as an hour long comedy special titled, Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History. The hour is filled with focus on various famous African American figures who had a great impact on black history but gain little attention today in schools and news alike.
The special opens with Riley (Saniyya Sidney), who plays Kevin’s daughter watching ’12 Years a Slave’ – a strange movie for a child to be watching alone – with her white friend Jeremy (Eoghan Thomas Murphy). She gives him a purple nurple causing him to hide behind the sofa. Kevin enters the room asking about the commotion being caused to find Riley alone and angry because of the messages given off by what she is watching. Riley is angry because she feels that there are injustices against black America. Hart reassures her by telling her she is right to be angry; however, there are many reasons for her to be proud of her heritage, and that there are many more African Americans who have done great things that go under the radar.
Hart tells the story of many Americans who did things that changed the lives for African Americans all throughout America’s history. From the story of Henry ‘Box’ Brown (Lil Rel Howery), who shipped himself to Philadelphia to be free, Mae Jamison (Tiffany Haddish), the first African American female astronaut all the way to Vivien Thomas (Alphonso McAuley), a heart surgeon who pioneered the cure to ‘Blue Baby Syndrome’. As well as the several other stories told, they all follow some of the most influential people in black history. Each story is portrayed by many different actors and shows how they gathered their importance and also how they are indifferent to other people we learn about that influenced black history. One of these being Josephine Baker, a singer who was a spy in WWII but went to and spoke at the March in Washington D.C., where Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous “I Have a Dream Speech’. One thing that most of these African Americans have in common is that a white man took credit for many of their achievements.
This feature special is intended to have comedic tones; however, with the telling of each person’s story, it quickly losses this overtone. The comedy was extremely stale especially for the Kevin Hart standard. Although the lack of any real comedy and the fact it is being overrun by the storytelling, the show still manages to do a fantastic job of giving an “explain it like I am five” story of why these African Americans played such an important part in black History even if they are overlooked in school History lessons.
