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It’s a film so cool, Boyz II Men dedicated its first LP to it: That EP was called Cooleyhighharmony, if you’ll recall, and many of the songs on it (including the cover “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday”) were in homage to the 1975 classic Cooley High. Set in the infamous Cabrini-Green projects of the northern South Side of Chicago, the film follows two best friends/students at a vocational high school who must face adversity amid camp galore, gritty South Side imagery a badass soundtrack of Motown hits. And tonight, as part of its “Seldom Screened: Black Directors” series (the film was directed by Michael Schultz), the Blair Caldwell African-American Research Library screens it for free.
If you can watch that trailer and not want to see this movie, then you, my friend, are a jive turkey. For everyone else, the screening starts tonight at 6 p.m. after an introduction — for context — from Senior Librarian Danny Walker. Just try not to crash that Caddy into a forklift on the way there.
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