Cotton Comes to Harlem is a 1970 American neo-noir[2] action comedy film[3] co-written and directed by Ossie Davis and starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx.

Deke "Reverend" O'Malley, a con man, is selling shares at a Harlem rally, for the purchase of a Back-to-Africa movement ship to be called The Black Beauty.

Two Harlem detectives, "Gravedigger" Jones and "Coffin Ed" Johnson, chase the car, and a bale of cotton falls out of the vehicle, unremarked at the time.

Though the authorities approve of O'Malley, regarding his "Back-to-Africa" movement as a way to solve American racial problems, both Jones and even more so Johnson are hostile towards him, viewing him as a charlatan who is exploiting the impoverished black community of Harlem.

Captain Bryce—who has a portrait of Richard Nixon prominently displayed in his office—tells Jones and Johnson not to treat O'Malley as a suspect, orders that the duo ignore.

Jones and Johnson expose the Reverend O’Malley to the audience of the theater as the fraud that he is, remarking that he could have been another Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X, but instead he chose to be just a petty conman who exploited ordinary people.

Detectives Jones and Johnson then blackmail Tom, a white mob leader, to give them $87,000 — to be restored to the original donors — after discovering that Uncle Budd has run off with the stolen money and emigrated to Ghana, to live in retirement with his ill-gotten gains and a harem.

[11] Melba Moore, who sang the film's theme song, “Ain’t Now But It’s Gonna Be” (written by Ossie Davis) was contemporaneously starring in the hit Broadway musical, Purlie!

[...] However, like the dancer's balloons, fans and feathers, the movie's stick-ups, shootouts, chases, murders and wisecracks say little about the Black Experience except that Ossie Davis, when given the opportunity, can turn out a ghetto comedy-melodrama that is almost as cold and witless as Gordon Douglas' Gold Coast fables, Tony Rome and Lady in Cement.

[26] Ossie Davis declined to direct a sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem, due to strong artistic differences with Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. and his studio executives.

The eventual sequel, Come Back, Charleston Blue, loosely based on Himes' The Heat's On, with much original material injected, ended up being directed by Mark Warren and was released in 1972 by Warner Bros..