"[7] Riggs excelled at Nurnberg American High School, where he played football and ran track, and was elected President of the Varsity Club while only a sophomore.

He also performed a solo interpretive dance in the school's talent show depicting American slaves' experiences from Africa through emancipation.

[8] As he began studying the history of American racism and homophobia, Riggs became interested in communicating his ideas about these subjects through film.

Riggs entered graduate school[9] and received his master's degree in journalism with a specialization in documentary film in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley, having co-produced/co-directed with Peter Webster a master's thesis titled Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues, a half-hour video on the history of blues music in Oakland, California.

The documentary also presents a set of contemporary interviews with historians George Fredrickson and Lawrence Levine, the cultural critic Barbara Christian, folklorist Patricia Turner, and Black memorabilia collector Jan Faulkner, who discuss the consequences of historical African-American stereotypes.

Tongues Untied had political backlash; Republican Senator Jesse Helms famously argued to defund the arts after its release.

[12] In 1988, while working both on Color Adjustment and Tongues Untied, Riggs was diagnosed with HIV after undergoing treatment for near-fatal kidney failure at a hospital in Germany.

[citation needed] In 1991, Riggs founded Signifyin' Works, a non-profit production company that produces films about African-American history and culture.

[citation needed] The 1992 documentary Color Adjustment was Riggs's second film shown on P.O.V.,[11] focusing on the representation of African Americans in primetime television from Amos 'n' Andy to The Cosby Show.

[citation needed] In 1992, Riggs directed the film Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret), in which five Black gay men who are HIV-positive discuss how they are battling the double stigmas surrounding their infection and homosexuality.

[5] The project was completed posthumously by the co-producer Nicole Atkinson and the co-director/editor Christiane Badgley, under the supervision of the board of directors of Signifyin' Works: Herman Gray, Vivian Kleiman, and Patricia Turner.

Queen," Riggs discusses how representations of Black gay men in the United States have been used to shape Americans' conceptions of race and sexuality.

[7] As a graduate student at Berkeley, Riggs was educated in journalism and conventional documentary filmmaking, which stresses objectivity and an academic stance.

[citation needed] There is a section of a subsidized housing unit named The Marlon Riggs Apartments/Vernon Street located in Oakland, California.

[17] In 2014, Signifyin' Works challenged the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism to match a donation of $100,000 and create the "Marlon T. Riggs Fellowship in Documentary Filmmaking."

Signifyin' Works President Vivian Kleiman and Brooklyn Academy of Music film curator Ashley Clark collaborated to launch the year with a retrospective Race, Sex & Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs.

[18] Other screenings included: Los Angeles, Mexico City, Atlanta, London, Paris, Bogota, Istanbul, Mumbai, and beyond.

In 2022 Tongues Untied was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

[11] Artists stressed their basic right of free speech, of representation on public airwaves, and vehemently opposed censorship of their art.

However, several right-wing United States government policymakers and many conservative groups were against using taxpayer money to fund what they claimed were repulsive artistic works.

"[20] Riggs defended Tongues Untied for its ability to "shatter this nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference."