By Carlos Hernández Gómez
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Rodgers, whose father was a musician, grew up in Greenwich Village, where in his early teens he started hanging around with a group of young anarchists called the Resistance. “I was disillusioned with the way the peace and civil rights movement was going,” he says. “Becoming a Panther was a natural progression.” But though he’d heard about the Oakland-based organization on the national news, he wasn’t sure where to find the Panthers in New York. “There were no Panthers in the Village, so I first hung out with opportunists who just dressed like Panthers to get girls and rip people off,” he says.
Soon, though, he came into possession of a copy of the party’s newspaper, the Black Panther, that asked all members in the tristate area to report to Mount Morris Park in Harlem. There he met Jamal Joseph, then the party’s local leader, who gave him his first orders. “I was in Harlem standing guard where Sister Betty Shabazz was speaking,” he says. “It was a great responsibility, an honor.”
They struck up an immediate rapport. “I could depend on Bernie; he was so together,” Rodgers remembers. They formed a group of their own and, after a name change and a number of rejections, sold the single “Dance Dance Dance” to Atlantic in 1977. The sound Chic introduced made Edwards and Rodgers the dynamic duo of disco. In addition to Chic’s hits–“Le Freak,” inspired by a rebuff at the entrance to Studio 54, gained them access to the club for the duration of its life–they also wrote and produced Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” and Diana Ross’s “Upside Down.”
But he agreed to be interviewed for the film because he “wanted to put a human face on this organization that was so wrongfully maligned.” And his success hasn’t lulled him into believing race relations in the U.S. are smooth. Recently, in Westport, Connecticut, where he now lives, he was pulled over for no apparent reason while driving his decked-out SUV. “At the end of the day, no matter how rich or successful we are, we can still be victims just because of the color of our skin,” he says. “Maybe someday I’ll include it in a book called ‘What Every Black Person Knows.’…But I’m always hopeful. We all want the same stuff, a sense of relaxed joyfulness.”
