Pam Grier’s harrowing story about her childhood is a reminder that the horrors of racial violence in this country are more recent than many give credit. Speaking to “The View” about how racism shaped her upbringing, she told a brief story about witnessing a lynching to illustrate how commonplace the terror was.
The actress, known as an icon of the Blaxploitation genre, was born in 1949 and grew up in a military family. She moved frequently depending on where her father was stationed. At one point, the family lived in Columbus, Ohio. She told the hosts on “The View” that since they were Black, they were not allowed to live on the base and were instead forced to find accommodations nearby.
“You couldn’t take a bus, couldn’t afford a car, your dads walked to the base,” she said, recounting those days. “Sometimes, we’d go from tree shade to shade to get back to the apartment — my brother and I and my mom — with bags.”
She recalled a moment on those trips where her mother had to avert their eyes to protect her and her brother from seeing a lynching.
“My mom would go, ‘Don’t look! Don’t look! Don’t look!’ and she pulled us away because there was someone hanging from a tree. And they have a memorial for it now, where you can see where people were and left.”
She continued, “It triggers me, today, to see that a voice can be silenced. And if a white family supported a Black, they’re gonna get burned down or killed or lynched as well.”
After living in several parts of the U.S. throughout her childhood, and at one point spending two years in Swindon, England, her family settled in Denver, Colorado. Grier moved to Los Angeles in 1967, first working on a job at the switchboard of American International Pictures, and eventually going on to star in films like “Foxy Brown,” “Coffy,” and “Sheba, Baby.” She became ubiquitous with the 1970s Blaxploitation genre, where films starring Black people often controversially leaned into stereotypes of Black people in urban areas, often times (though not always) created by white producers and filmmakers.
