On the third floor of the Carolina Theatre, there’s an eye-catching photo of Walter Riley, the father of Boots Riley.
Although it’s located in a movie theater, the photo has nothing to do with Walter’s famous filmmaker son: In the photo, the elder Riley—then in his late teens, looking young but poised—is shown being issued a restraining order for protesting the theater’s segregation. In 1963, two years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the city-owned venue finally integrated, allowing Black moviegoers to watch films alongside white patrons, rather than climbing the building’s 97 steps to the remote top balcony.
The son of sharecroppers, Walter spent his teen years organizing for civil rights in Durham, leading the NAACP’s state youth chapter and, when he was eighteen, moderating a historic debate between Floyd McKissick Sr. and Malcolm X. Two years later, he moved to California for college and stayed to practice law. Boots was raised in California and, taking a cue from his father, spent his youth enmeshed in organizing before becoming a rapper and, later, a renowned filmmaker known for absurdist, maximalist films like Sorry to Bother You and I’m a Virgo that are explicitly political, knocking the levers of power akimbo and celebrating the potential for collective action…