Marlon Riggs

Marlon Troy Riggs was born on the third of February 1957 at Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Alvin Riggs and Jean Riggs. His was a childhood of many horizons, shaped by his family's ties to the United States military, which carried the household across postings from Texas to Georgia and onward to West Germany. That early passage through worlds and languages sharpened in him a lifelong attentiveness to how people are seen, named, and pictured.

He returned to the United States to study, taking his bachelor's degree in history from Harvard University, magna cum laude, in 1978, and a master's degree in journalism, with a specialization in documentary film, from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981. He would later teach documentary filmmaking at Berkeley, becoming one of the youngest tenured professors in the arts and humanities there, giving to a rising generation the craft he had made his own.

Riggs turned the camera on the deepest currents of American life. In Ethnic Notions he traced the grotesque caricatures that had long distorted Black identity; in Color Adjustment of 1992 he examined the shifting image of Black Americans on television. In Tongues Untied of 1989 he gave voice, with unflinching tenderness, to the lives of Black gay men, breaking a long silence with poetry, testimony, and defiant love. His final film, Black Is... Black Ain't, was completed after his passing.

He died on the fifth of April 1994 at Oakland, California, of complications from AIDS, at the age of thirty-seven. Marlon Riggs gave a face and a voice to those history had rendered invisible, and in doing so enlarged the dignity of us all. May his witness endure, and his name be honored.