Quick Overview: This figure honors a real-life community mentor who carried Hermes' Web into youth programs, prisons, and neighborhood outreach. A meaningful piece for practitioners doing community-based work, especially in African-American communities and reentry programs.

Bobby Hickman, an activist on the North Side of Minneapolis in the African-American community became a good friend after he gave the main address at our conference called PRISON AS CRUCIBLE. Bobby was my friend, mentor, student, colleague. He took to the Web and toys right from the beginning and carried a big kit of them with him in the community. He always wore a button I’d come up with: DO NOT BE A NOT SEE! He introduced me to many community elders and leaders and brought me in on working with youth at the City, Inc, North and South. He even came to the beleaguered Minnesota Sex Offender Program to work with the African-American clients and mentor them, quite effectively in fact, even though the commotion they made in their meetings was unsettling to the security who had to stand outside the doors.

When Bobby returned from being in the Air Force, where he was an airplane mechanic, he got a job at Delta Airlines. Unfortunately, and characteristic of the times, they didn’t allow him to use his mechanic skills and only gave him a job picking up trash. That burned him inside and likely spurred Bobby into his work in the community. It was often Bobby who ultimately walked a young man in who had murdered someone - making sure the man was safe as he came into custody, being entrusted with that task.

What has this to do with SHAFT? Bobby’s Uncle, Gordon Parks, directed the 1st SHAFT film and was a well-known photographer as well, and even had a cameo in the updated SHAFT film directed by John Singleton. What made SHAFT stand out was that SHAFT was the first big-time movie where an African-American man had more EQ (emotional intelligence), more IQ and skills and sexiness than the white men in the film. He was ultimately more alive!

SHAFT is a pivotal figure, a declaration of equality, a challenge to the domineering class. More alive, more sexual, more innovative, more daring and not afraid to show it. Not unlike Bobby or his uncle!

When working in Stillwater Prison, in my Missing Pieces group, I liked to use Candyman and Shaft at the same time, to discuss Shaft’s importance, and also the rage carried in African-Americans because of the widespread and institutionalized abuse they suffered lifelong and for generations. Even when granted their freedom after the Civil War, persecution did not end. And today, there is huge resistance to examining our past, easier to just call it “the past” and sequester it off limits, trying to outlaw or forbid the use of Critical Race Theory. Isabel Wilkerson’s book CASTE underscores the undercurrents still flowing steadily in our culture that attempt to diminish the life of African-Americans and other non-whites.

SHAFT is important: as a historical marker and as an archetype of sorts celebrating the fullness of life that humans strive for - resplendent in their mad plumage! Not muted or diminished. Full tilt boogie! SHAFT the toy serves as a transitional object and focal point for these discussions and for processing the full spectrum of emotions attached to these troubling and persistent issues, especially in a time where cultural regression is attempting to assert itself.