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.
This week, Boots returns to his father’s home state on tour promoting his latest movie, anti-capitalist caper I Love Boosters. While many of the sprawling Riley family have moved out of Durham, several of Riley’s cousins remain in the Triangle and are involved in UE150 (the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union) and other working-class struggles.
Starring Keke Palmer and LaKeith Stanfield and released in May, I Love Boosters follows a group of professional shoplifters taking down a billionaire fashion designer—stealing by one name, redistribution by another. The film screens on September 17, as part of the Duke Cinematic Arts program’s weekly free Screen/Society series; a 1:30 p.m. screening features Riley in conversation with several Duke professors and a 7 p.m. screening will include a Q&A with Riley.
After Durham, Boots heads to Winston-Salem for a 7:30 p.m. September 18 event that kicks off Scene & Heard, a new annual film series that is a partnership between The School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a/perture cinema, and RiverRun International Film Festival. Ahead of the event, the INDY spoke with Riley about I Love Boosters, his North Carolina ties, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY: I’d love to hear the story of your dad joining the NAACP.
BOOTS RILEY: There were 11 kids, and so everybody had their own job, and one of the things to do was to go into Raleigh. So he went into Raleigh and he saw a picket line there. He was 12 years old and he asked what was going on. They told him, and he was hooked on the fight.
While he was still 12, at one point, he apparently said to the main pastor [at his church] that they should get involved in the civil rights movement. The pastor said in front of the whole congregation—which was small, we’re talking Pentecostal storefront churches—that that was blasphemous, that the church should not get involved in worldly matters. My father said, “Well, if Jesus doesn’t want to be a part of my liberation, I don’t want to have anything to do with him.”
They kicked him, and for a while, the family out—they couldn’t kick out the whole family because my grandmother was also a preacher there, so that was a big thing. But my father never went back. He was involved in the NAACP, and then later, he also joined [The Congress of Racial Equality]. He was involved in what he likes to point out was not integration, but desegregation—meaning that what they looked at was figuring out how to dismantle power structures.
Your dad had this moment of political inflection. Do you have a similar moment where the dots connected?
There’s a few points I can talk about. I was 14 and I ran into [a youth organizer] somewhere, they ended up coming by the house with a van full of 14-year-old girls. They were like, “You want to go to the beach?” And I was like, “Hell yeah, I want to go to the beach.” And [they said] “OK, but we’re gonna stop and support the Watsonville cannery workers’ strike first, so you got to come to that.”
When I got into the van, all these same girls were talking to each other about world events, things that were happening on the news that I had tried to avoid. They were not only aware of them, but talking about them, debating them, and it became clear by the end of the trip—partly because what we were doing was going and supporting these striking cannery workers and passing out flyers and stuff—that the reason that they knew about this stuff, the reason that they paid attention to what was on the news (and I know now, reading other newspapers), is because they thought they could do something about it. When you don’t feel you can do anything, you’re like, “Why even learn about it? Why even know about it?” But they felt empowered.
I started off wanting to flirt with these girls, but I ended that van ride wanting to be them. That year, I joined Progressive Labor Party myself, and got involved in a summer project in which we went to help support the farm workers that were organizing a union in McFarland and Delano, in the Central California Valley. They were making something called the Anti-Racist Farmworkers Union. They were radicals intent on making a movement that could become revolutionary. They talked not only about their organizing on the job, working in the fields, [but also] their organizing in relation to this larger thing that they wanted to build outside of that valley, something that could actually help organize the working class to overthrow the ruling class. That was what captured my imagination.
You talk about this moment when someone feels like it’s actually possible to do something. Can you talk to me about the potential of art to make people feel like they have agency?
There are different kinds of artwork. With music, there may be a song, and throughout your life, you play it in the background while you’re washing dishes, while you’re arguing with your significant other, while you’re going through some beautiful experience in life— falling in love, or whatever. It becomes part of the narration of what’s going on, part of the filter.
Whereas with a movie, as far as your brain is concerned, you’re going through these experiences. I think it can be an analysis tool that feels like an experience. What organizers do is similar. For instance, if someone is helping bring a group of workers through a strike on a job site, the workers may go from knowing, “OK, the cops harass me and they’re just assholes”—then they might have a strike and see the cops come and protect the boss, and they’re like, “What the fuck? They’re stealing from me. Why are you protecting them?” And then they gain an understanding of the police being on the boss’s side and that starts going into their view of how the world works.
In a film, you go through that—you start seeing that world inside there in a different way. You’ve gone through an experience that changes what you think you have to do in the world. I think it has a powerful potential to help. I’ve seen it in a few ways with my work. I’ve had anecdotal evidence. From 2020 to 2024 was the largest strike wave in U.S. history since the 70s and during that [time] I was getting message after message of organizers saying, “We didn’t think that we could get this particular group of workers to join us in this union, or join us in this strike. It was looking not so great, and then we had them watch Sorry to Bother You and they voted to join this strike, to join this union.”
There was a story in Baltimore of a 60-person job site where there was going to be a show of hands on whether or not to have a union. The organizers thought they had done a pretty good job and they hoped they’d win but they knew it was going to be by the skin of their teeth because there had been organized pushback. When it was time to show hands for yes, let’s join the union … someone in the middle of the crowd said, “Equisapiens! Let’s be out!” which is a line from Sorry to Bother You. Everybody laughed, and then every single person raised their hand.
You were working on this movie during this big stretch of labor victories—you know, “hot labor summer.” It seems like that momentum has cooled a bit, or at least that mass visibility has maybe cooled. I’m curious what it’s like to be bringing a movie about class struggle into a timeline where maybe people aren’t feeling that energy as much, if that’s fair to say.
I don’t know that I see it as different. When are you saying was the hot labor summer?
I think 2023, when the United Postal Workers were preparing to strike.
You’re looking at [this year] in relation to 2023. I’m looking at it in relation to 2013, 2003. When you have a graph that goes up, you’ve got little bubbles up and down. I was on the Davey D show—it’s this guy in the Bay Area—the other day, and you know, I’d been going on his show since the early ’90s. We were talking about, like—there was a time when the only people publicly calling themselves communists had newspapers in their hand on the corner, right? And right now, it’s all over the place. People are like, “I’m socialist. I’m communist.” People are talking about the kind of world they want to see.
While there isn’t as much in the news as was happening, at that time, there’s so much still happening. People organizing on the job, and other things happening, where some of the folks that were putting out the idea that it was a hot labor summer are now focused on midterms, things like that—which is the contradiction that you know I always talk about with, where do we put our energy? However, that shows signs that what happened during that hot labor summer—that sentiment is still around.
So you feel hope.
Yeah, yeah, I see, I see hopeful things all over the place.
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