TheArchive: Reviewing the Rare, Retro, and Restored

As Father's Day and Juneteenth coincide this year, it provides  TheArchive  an opportunity to feature our favorite content celebrating black fathers. We start with a  A Fight for Jenny , where we meet Kelsey and her new husband as they fight against her racist ex-boyfriend who attempts to sue for full custody of their young daughter. Now Kelsey and her husband must battle injustice to get her back. A Fight for Jenny stars father of 11, Philip Michael Thomas along with Lesley Ann Warren and Jean Smart. In On the Streets of L.A. an estranged father and son are paroled from the same maximum-security prison with one unusual condition, they must become roommates and are forced to depend on each other. Emmy winning Georg Stanford Brown and father of three directs Louis Gossett Jr., Blair Underwood, and Rae Dawn Chong. In  Livin' for Love: The Natalie Cole Story , we see Natalie Cole wrestle with the legacy of her father the late great Nat King Cole and the "unforgettable"...

In A Fight for Jenny , Kelsey and her new black husband must fight against her racist ex-boyfriend as he attempts to sue for full custody of their young daughter. Now Kelsey and her husband must fight injustice to get her back. Philip Michael Thomas, Lesley Ann Warren, and Jean Smart star. It is both a relief as to how far we've come, yet in many ways, how little progress has been made. In a New York Times review from 1986, the writer says " NBC has had some difficulty deciding how to ''play'' the television movie it is broadcasting tonight."  The network's vacillating no doubt has something to do with the movie's subject. A Fight for Jenny is about an interracial couple.  Kelsey, a divorced mother, is white. David is black.  It would be easy enough to say that interracial relationships are not at all unusual by now in American entertainments. Pop sociologists can point to everything from the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?  to the televisi...