Looking Back On Blacks In Films

Ebony Magazine, 1972

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A visit to the downtown theater district of almost any major American city today will let you know one thing for sure, blacks are in films and in them in a big way. The Superflys, Shafts and Slaughters are packing in the crowds and the Sounders and Lady Sings The Blues are getting Oscar nominations. Even the X-rated films are adding the titillation of black performers and it probably won't be long before the cartoons take the black plunge.

To read most newspapers and magazines, one might gather that the movies have just discovered blacks and blacks have just discovered the movies.

But this is far from the truth as a new book with the tantalizing title of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks points out. Subtitled An Interpretive History of Blacks In American Films, the Viking book by young black writer and former EBONY editor Donald Bogle traces the movies back to their black beginnings. Bogle starts his first chapter with: "In the beginning, there was an Uncle Tom. A former mechanic photographed him in a motion picture that ran no longer than 12 minutes. And a new dimension was added to American movies.

"The year was 1903. The mechanic turned movie-director was Edwin S. Porter. The 12-minute motion picture was Uncle Tom's Cabin. And the new dimension was Uncle Tom himself. He was the American movies' first black character."

Actually, the role of Uncle Tom, like many black roles in both plays and movies of the early years, was played by a white actor in blackface, but the die was cast, black characters were a part of what was to become an integral part of American culture-motion pictures.

According to Bogle, the "tom" character was soon joined in films by "the coon, the tragic mulatto, the mammy and the brutal black buck." In other words, white movie makers portrayed black characters as the stereotypes they saw in blacks in real life. According to Bogle, successful black actors for the first half century of movies can be fitted into his five characterizations. Bill (Bojangles) Robinson played a Tom; Stepin Fetchit, the coon; Nina Mae McKinney, the tragic mulatto; Hattie McDaniel, the mammy; and, in the early days, Walter Long, a white actor in black face in Birth Of A Nation, was the brutal buck. Bogle says that the characterizations were later "modernized" by Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., Dorothy Dandridge, Ethal Brown.

The one movie that had the most effect upon blacks in the early days was the first truly big "Hollywood" spectacular, D. W. Griffith's classic Birth Of A Nation. Made in 1915 for a then phenomenal $100,000, the three-hour long movie advanced film making by leaps and bounds with its technical innovations (close-ups, cross-cutting, split screen shots, realistic and impressionistic lighting) but it threatened to set back the black man's cause every bit as much as it advanced fi]m techniques.

Based on the novel The Clansman (and originally named The Clansman), the film told the tale of the idylic life in the South before the Civil War with happy, contented, well-cared for slaves and how this whole life was changed by the war and the freeing of the slaves, unleashing big black bucks to rape and pillage. The film showed how the Klan "had to" develop so that order could be restored in the South.

Blacks throughout the nation protested the film with demonstrations and boycotts. The NAACP picketed the theater at the film's premiere in New York City. Race riots developed in some cities where the film was shown.

D. W. Griffith protested until his death that he was not a racist and that his film was not racist but he was constantly disputed. And among blacks there was the additional distaste because the black characters, the Uncle Toms, the mammies, the tragic mullato and the brutal bucks of Birth Of A Nation were all played by whites in blackface.

The hue and cry against Birth Of A Nation stirred up controversy in the film industry itself and blacks heard the same answer from white film makers of that day that they are hearing even today. "If you don't like the films we are making, why don't you make your own?"

Today, blacks are trying to do just that, but this is not the first time. Many blacks, even many of them involved in films, do not know that in the '20s and '30s a huge black market developed for black films and black pioneer film makers attempted to supply that market.

Donald Bogle tells of that period in the following excerpt from his book.

"After The Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, there came the great public furor against its racism. At the time, a standard reply to protests about how Negroes were depicted in American films was that blacks should develop their own crop of film makers. To some extent that standard reply prevails today. The truth is that black Americans have made their own films for many years. While the mainstream of Hollywood film makers demeaned and ridiculed the American Negro, an underground movement gave rise to a group of independent black film makers who flourished in the late 1920s and the 1930s. They tried to present realistic portraits of black Americans, but more often than not were trapped by the same stereotype conceptions as their white competitors. And always they were plagued by financial, technical, and distributing problems. Yet some came up with remarkable achievements that survive today. A host of black writers, directors, producers, and technicians gained valuable experience from working on these films. In fact, had it not been for such underground features, many blacks would never have worked in films at all.

The films also offered employment for a great number of actors. Paul Robeson, as we have seen, started his movie career in a film directed by Oscar Micheaux. The only surviving recorded performance of the legendary black stage actor Charles Gilpin was in an independently produced black film. During the late 19.30s and early 1940s these films offered exposure and experience to Lena Horne, Eddie Anderson, Spencer Williams (who later starred as Andy on the television series "Amos 'n' Andy"), Nina Mae McKinney, Mantan Moreland, Louise Beavers, Herbert Jeffery, comics Moms Mabley and Pigmeat Markham, and even Stepin Fetchit. All in all the underground black film movement provided film history with an exciting interlude, perhaps now of greater interest for sociological rather than artistic reasons.

In this period of the independents, producers explored and experimented with black themes. Films were made exclusively to please black audiences, and on occasion revealed black fantasies. The era had opened rather inauspiciously in 1914, when a lanky and limber black comedian dressed himself outrageously in a zoot suit and top hat for his motion-picture debut. The comedian was the legendary Bert Williams. The film was Darktown Jubilee. When it opened in Brooklyn, the picture was greeted with howls and bellows. When it closed, it did so amid race riots. In other areas, the film was met with undercover boycotts.

Darktown Jubilee was the first attempt of an independent film company to star a black actor in a movie. But in 1914, white audiences refused to accept a black in a leading role, unless, of course, he played a tom. The attempt became the first catastrophe, and with very little left for anyone to jubilate about, Darktown Jubilee was lifted out of circulation before it had ever really been in it.

The real father of the movement was a most unlikely candidate, a mild-mannered scholarly man named Emmet J. Scott, who was a secretary for Booker T. Washington. After the release of The Birth of a Nation a number of American blacks hoped to produce a short film to cite the accomplishments of colored America as a counterattack to Griffith's alleged racist propaganda. The NAACP toyed with the idea but eventually decided to fight the Griffith feature through the courts and picket lines. As the NAACP shied away, the scholarly Scott strolled to the foreground. He enlisted the aid of the black bourgeoisie, which furnished him with the capital for Lincoln's Dream. Initially, Scott hoped to tack this Negro-achievement short onto The Birth of a Nation as a prologue. But later Scott's modest proposals stretched to larger proportions. Scriptwriter Elaine Sterne expanded the short project into a feature. The script was submitted to Universal but rejected. Finally, the movie was shot in Chicago and Florida, where the company was haunted by bad weather, poorly designed and constructed sets, an inexperienced cast and crew, and inadequate lighting facilities. When the production ran into dire financial difficulties, Scott had to seek support from white backers, who altered his film's theme and sentiments. After three long hard years, Lincoln's Dream was some twelve reels long, ran three hours, and was retitled The Birth of a Race. Publicity posters promoted it as "The Greatest and Most Daring of Photoplays. . . The Story of Sin. . . A Master Picture Conceived in the Spirit of Truth and Dedicated to All of the Races of the World." It opened at Chicago's Blackstone Theater in 1918 and was a disaster artistically and financially. Yet it served as an impetus for others.

The organization to pick up where Scott had left off, the first of the black company pioneers, was the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. Incorporated in 1916 (before Scott's film was even completed) and based in Nebraska, the organization was the brainchild of black actor Noble J. Johnson and his brother George. The Realization of the Negro's Dream was one of the company's first products. Like Scott's, this film extolled Negro achievements. Another release, Trooper K, was about the massacre of Negro troops of the famous Tenth Cavalry and the historic rescue of Captain Lewis S. Morey by the "unknown and unhonored" Trooper K. Both films were distributed to ghetto theaters. George Johnson had shrewdly noted that because of segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North, a number of all-black theaters were opening. A growing black audience was anxious for black merchandise. The Lincoln Motion Picture Corporation made movies for the black market until the early 1920s, turning out approximately ten films, each no longer than three reels.

The Reol Motion Picture Corporation, headed by Robert Levy, emerged after World War 1. The Call of His People was an early project. This film, made in Irvington-on-the-Hudson, New York (the estate of the Negro millionairess Leila Walker), was an adaptation of the novel The Man Who Would Be White by the black writer Aubrey Browser. Its theme-- the Negro light enough to pass for white-- later developed into a favorite among the independents. More often than not, these "passing" films seemed to be wish-fulfillment yearnings of their producers. But the theme revealed the preoccupation of black America at the time: how to come as close as possible to the great White American Norm. Other Reol films included The Jazz Hound, The Burden of Race (the best title of the lot), Easy Money, The Spitfire, Secret Sorrow, and Sport of the Gods, the last based on a work by black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Reol was one of the first companies to make film versions of black classics. The company also boasted of a circuit of three hundred theaters throughout sections of the South and in many of the Northern big-city ghettos. Finally, Reol titillated the black mass imagination by launching the first colored movie star. Edna Morton was billed as the "colored Mary Pickford" and was described as a "teasing brown" torrid dancer "with the grace and abandon of her race."

Whereas Reol had its "colored Mary Pickford," another black company soon boasted of its "black Sherlock Holmes." This was the title of the film with which the Chicago-based Ebony Film Corporation formally opened. The company specialized in a series of one-reel comedies, mostly parodies on popular white vehicles, as the Holmes title suggests.

According to film historian Hobert Cripps in an article in Negro Digest, a rash of film companies grew to supply the seven hundred or so ghetto movie houses that had sprouted up by the late 1920s. In the years to come, more than one hundred firms and corporations were founded to produce Negro films. Among them were the Foster Photoplay in Chicago; the Gate City Film Corporation in Kansas City; Constellation Films, formed in 1921 in New York; the Renaissance Company, which produced all-Negro newsreels and was headed by black actor Leigh Whipper in New York in 1922; and Dunbar Pictures and Roseland Pictures and Recording Laboratories, both based in New York in 1928 and 1929. From Jamaica, Long Island, Buddy Holman headed Paragon Pictures in 1932. The company released the films The Dusky Village and Crimson Fog.

During this period a number of whites moved in and began making all-black films for ghetto audiences. White backers organized the Famous Artists Company in 1927. . . . Whites were behind the Colored Players of Philadelphia, yet this company produced two remarkable films: Ten Nights in a Barroom with Charles Gilpin in 1926 and Scar of Shame in 1929. The latter remains an effective piece of work. Slow-moving and melancholy, Scar of Shame tells the story of an ill-matched marriage between a black concert pianist and a poor lower class black girl. Secretly ashamed of his wife, the young man keeps her hidden from his socially prominent middle-class mother. At the same time, the girl's derelict drunken father plans to kidnap her, in hopes of having her sing at the nightclub of one of his racketeer friends. During a confrontation between the girl (who is about to leave her husband when she learns he is embarrassed by her), the racketeer (who is about to take her off for his nightclub), and the husband (who pleads with her to stay with him), the husband accidentally shoots and disfigures the wife. He is sent to prison but later escapes. He begins life anew and falls in love with another woman, only-- through circumstances beyond his control-- to meet up with the wife again. She still loves him but knows she can never be his equal. Socially-- despite the fact that both are black-- they are of different worlds. Despondent, the wife commits suicide. Afterward the husband marries the new girl of his dreams.

Despite the rapid growth of the new black audience, particularly between 1915 and 1923, a number of unfortunate events halted the burgeoning black industry. A flu epidemic in 1923 had a devastating effect, closing many ghetto theaters and amplifying the problem of distribution. When talkies came in, many companies lacked the capital to keep up production and to acquire the sound equipment the new era demanded. The release of the big studio productions Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah spelled disaster for the small independents. Finally, the Depression finished off all but the sturdiest.

During the Depression, independent black films for black audiences were being made almost entirely by white movie makers; thus, the underground movement then went into a bizarre second phase. The new films concentrated on major Hollywood genres; mystery, melodrama, boy-meets-girl love story, musical, western. White writers and directors, using pseudonyms, constructed the vehicles. In the late 1930s, producer Jed Buell filmed Harlem on the Prairie, touted as the first Negro western. Buell also filmed Lucky Ghost, which featured an eye-rolling coon hero, and a series of successful films with Mantan Moreland.

During this second phase, there were films that treated blacks sensitively, among which The Emperor Jones was probably the best of the lot. The Southland Pictures Corporation released Bud Pollard's The Black King in 1932. Filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the movie centered on a back-to-Africa movement reminiscent of Marcus Garvey's endeavors. In 1937 National Pictures released The Spirit of Youth, dramatizing the meteoric rise of a black boxer. Joe Louis played the central character, a figure closely related to the champ himself. As might be expected, Louis's acting was wooden. . . .

Some of the more prominent white-backed film corporations were Astor Pictures, Herald Pictures Incorporated, and Million Dollar Pictures. Astor, headed by the white Southern-born Robert M. Savini, turned out comedies such as Tall, Tan, and Terrific in 1946 with Mantan Moreland and Big Timers in 1946 with Stepin Fetchit. It also released black musicals such as Beware, directed by Bud Pollard in 1946 (a forty-five-minute feature starring the jazz musician Louis Jordan) and Ebony Parade in 1947. Two energetic brothers, Jack and Dave Goldberg, organized Herald Pictures Incorporated. The company released shorts starring the black blues singer Mamie Smith as well as such features as Harlem Is Heaven with Bill Robinson and Miracle In Harlem in 1947 with Stepin Fetchit. The latter, a combination mystery gangster melodrama, was considered a technical landmark in the history of the all-black film. The Goldbergs' 1938 western Bronze Buckeroo is another of their films that remains interesting because of its "color design." Light-skinned performers Herbert Jeffrey and Artie Young played the leads and were actually white figures. . . .

Million Dollar Pictures was organized. by the handsome black actor Ralph Cooper and a group of white associates. The company turned out a 'healthy series of hits in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. One of the company's first big hits was a black gangster movie, Dark Manhattan, in 1937. One Dark Night featured Mantan Moreland in a serious role. In Reform School Louise Beavers undid her kerchief for one of the few times in her career. This film was so successful that Million Dollar Pictures later made a sequel to it. The company also released Bargain with Bullets and Life Goes On. Still noteworthy today is Million Dollar's The Duke Is Tops which starred Ralph Cooper opposite a pretty little "bronze colored gal" then making her movie debut. That gal ,was Lena Horne, who afterwards starred in other independent all-black productions.

From phase one to phase two, the black independents supplied ghetto theaters with an array of entertaining black products. Even when blacks could view films at white theaters, most still preferred the ghetto movie houses, where they could "give full rein to their feelings and impulses." The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier has said that it was in these ghetto theaters, some battered and broken down, others poorly heated or ventilated, that black audiences felt most comfortable because they were with their own people. In this respect, the black market cinema was a triumph of sorts. The films today might appear dated or naive, but they were a source of pride to black America."