H B C U
T I M E S
FROM POLITICS TO PRODUCER
BY YOLANDA McCUTCHEN
D uane Cooper’s path since graduating from Hampton University in 2002 has taken him to receiving a standing ovation on the floor of the South Carolina State Legislature to founding a film company and executive producing a documentary nationally distributed by PBS, entitled “Downing of a Flag,” about the history and removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the grounds of the S.C. State House in 2015. Cooper majored in biology at Hampton and is the second of his siblings to attend the university. Both of his parents are HBCU graduates (Winston Salem State University and North Carolina A&T State University). After graduation, he landed a position on the reelection campaign of South Carolina’s then governor, Jim Hodges. The governor lost the election, but Cooper won a new career interest and continued in the political arena for over a decade. He worked on several state-wide campaigns for Democratic candidates, lobbied for the South Carolina School Boards Association and became Executive Director of the S.C. House Democratic Caucus. However, Cooper’s interest in movies that developed during his childhood in Hemingway, S.C. was ever present, “I’ve always loved movies, and I’ve watched a lot of films over the years. Back then, I wasn’t thinking I want to be a filmmaker, but I’ve always looked at different situations and thought that would make a good story,” said Cooper. In 2010, he began researching about how he could enter the film industry and tell the stories that he knew existed but was not seeing represented in films, “One of the main reasons I thought of making my own films was the lack of diverse stories. For Black films and TV shows, everybody’s a club owner or drug dealer or a ball player. At the time I was lobbying, there’s not a story about a Black lobbyist but we exist. I wasn’t the only one. Our people
28 | 2 0 2 1 F A L L I S S U E
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker