Who says the term doesn't fit? Perhaps in the American psyche, he holds all the wisdom and dignity born of struggle and forbearance, he is an exemplar, a transforming figure

I remember in the early 60's before the hippie movement was born......intellectual guys would talk down about the bourgeois and hold blacks in high esteem. Black Orpheus was a fave film at the time......and Taste of Honey.....and A Patch of Blue.

Black Orpheus....The slums of Rio during Carnaval (as depicted in the film) was a world that made individual blackness irrelevant because heterogeneity was the norm (I don't remember if everyone in the movie was black, or if it was a mix)....

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I thought (in real life) there was a lot of mixing, so that all sorts of skin tones were present.

THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE - Awful. Geraldine Page, the hard-nosed mother of a cop, makes you think you're watching a great film, and Daryl Hannah isn't bad, but Eric Roberts is insufferable as the hyper-loony buddy to Mickey O'Rourke. These two could have killed the NY ethnic Italian schtick for a generation. O'Rourke can't seem to address his sidekick without laying hands on him. And the script....if I had written it, I would be all the time saying, "No, no!......They're ad libbing there."

That and Runaway Train turned me off Eric Roberts (although he's in the tv series Heroes and is neither particularly good or bad). About the only movie where I thought he was any good was The Coca-Cola Kid.

Of those three, I've only seen Black Orpheus, but my take on the term "miracle negro" is that those intellectuals missed the boat.

There's a movie titled To Heal a Nation, about Jan Scruggs, the man behind the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, played beautifully by Eric Roberts. It's only on VHS but is well worth seeing. Roberts is also excellent in It's My Party, an AIDS movie. Roberts has had a lot of drug problems, apparently, but is an intermittently fine actor. His relationship with his younger sister Julia is famously troubled.