Marlon Riggs

Marlon Troy Riggs was born on the third of February 1957 at Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Alvin Riggs — a United States Air Force sergeant — and Jean Riggs. He was raised at military postings across the United States and Federal Republic of Germany before the family relocation to Hephzibah, Georgia in 1969.

He completed the bachelor's degree in American history at Harvard University at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1978 — graduating magna cum laude — and the master's degree in journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley in 1981.

He joined the Graduate School of Journalism faculty at Berkeley in 1987 as assistant professor — and was tenured at Berkeley in 1991 as associate professor in documentary journalism.

He directed his first documentary, Ethnic Notions, in 1986 — a fifty-six-minute documentary essay on the Black caricatures of nineteenth-century American popular culture, including the mammy, the Sambo, and the brute. Ethnic Notions won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Programming at the Daytime Emmys of 1988.

He directed Tongues Untied in 1989 — a fifty-five-minute autobiographical essay on Black gay identity in late-1980s America, weaving together personal narrative, choreography, poetry, and documentary footage. Tongues Untied was funded in part by a grant of five thousand dollars from the National Endowment for the Arts. Its broadcast on the PBS Point of View series in July 1991 became the principal flashpoint of the early-1990s American culture war over public funding of the arts. Approximately eighty percent of the PBS affiliate stations declined to air the film. Senator Jesse Helms repeatedly cited the broadcast in his Senate-floor speeches against the National Endowment for the Arts across 1991 and 1992.

He directed Color Adjustment in 1992 — an eighty-six-minute documentary essay on the representation of Black Americans in American television from Amos 'n' Andy of 1951 to The Cosby Show of 1992. Color Adjustment won the Peabody Award of 1993.

He directed two further posthumously-completed documentaries: Black Is, Black Ain't of 1995 — a documentary essay on Black identity finished after his death by his editor and collaborator Christiane Badgley — and No Regret of 1992 on Black gay men living with AIDS.

He died at Oakland, California on the fifth of April 1994 of complications of AIDS, at thirty-seven.

He is honored here as the director of Tongues Untied.