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The image of African Americans in film has made a gradual shift from that of the past. From the degrading and negative stereotypes of the early minstrel shows, to the inspirational and uplifting depiction of race movies, to the breaking of role barriers of modern day films. This gradual shift has allowed the African American culture to develop and expand along with the likes of the motion picture industry, all the while dealing with, experiencing and overcoming the racial stereotypes that served as barriers for African Americans in the beginning.
The early images of African Americans, stemming from that of the times of slavery, were depictions of an uneducated people, happy go lucky people, people who sat around doing nothing all day but dancing and singing, eating and sleeping.
These images were images that derived from the times of slavery. The stereotypical images and misconceptions of African American images in movies have been a constant theme of mockery and ignorance since slavery. The ideas, thoughts, story and content of the movies derived from the narrow and racist mindframe of White America and the White culture. These misconceptions and racial depictions of African Americans developed into the very controversial minstrel shows. The way of life for African Americans during the time of minstrel shows, was a mockery. And as their way of living made it to the stage, the only way to be heard through entertainment for many African American actors, was to convey the portrayal of their culture and image through the racially stereotypical form.1
The African American image was depicted in such a negative way through the racial stereotypes of the minstrel shows, perpetuation of the African American slave life, yet with the development of these minstrel shows, their negativity and very stereotypical subject matter and racial classification, an opportunity and a chance paved the way for African Americans to enter into the motion picture industry.
With the introduction of the motion picture industry, white America now had a way to visually project the stereotypical views of African Americans. The industry became the medium to reinforce many commonly held beliefs about African Americans. The most demeaning held that African Americans were good for entertainment purposes. Soon those ideas and perceptions of African Americans were projected on screen and White America was now able to create and reconstruct stories and visually project them onto the screen for viewing.
Yet the neither the creating nor constructing took place, for they simply incorporated the popular cultural symbols, images and views of the time. The end result, images of African Americans on screen that mirrored the racial and stereotypical images of society. White American Filmmakers borrowed their racial themes and characters from white sources. Unwilling or unable to develop new material for a growing movie audience, many filmmakers played on race humor, with African Americans as the center and theme of many jokes and pranks. This particular practice continued as more and more imagery of African Americans were incorporated onto the movie screen.
An outcry to this depiction and portrayal of African Americans inspired many African American writers, producers and actors to develop a genre that would be inspirational and uplifting to the African American people. A new genre that would show that African Americans were full of dignity and pride, very talented and capable of playing educated and highly interesting theatrical roles. This genre that developed for the inspiration of African Americans were called race movies and they served the specific purpose of inspiring and uplifting, and erasing the racial stereotypes that had already been form.
The race movies became a success and introduced many new and non-stereotypical roles for African Americans. Race movies were made specifically by and for African Americans and it was no wonder that the downfall of the race movie era centered on the whites trying to capitalize in on the success of them. Yet nonetheless, with the integration of African Americans and whites in the motion picture industry, new roles, new perceptions and new pathways were set. This particular relationship of whites and blacks lead to the development of the modern day films of today where African Americans are taking on mostly the same kind of inspirational and uplifting, educational and talented roles of their white counterparts.
The year now, is 00, and looking back, it has been a long, long road for African Americans in the film industry. It is important to understand just how and why the African American image and presence in film has such a significant importance to those of African American descent especially but to those who are
interested in their struggle as well. In order to understand just how and why African Americans came to where they are now in 00 in the motion picture industry, one has to take a trip back to the beginning and ride along that paved path that gave birth to the gradual shift of African Americans in film today.
The Movie medium itself was invented during the late 1800's with the invention of the motion picture camera and projector. Movies were not the invention of one person First, the device to photograph moving objects had to be invented, the motion picture camera and then a device to project those pictures, a projector. The entire development process involved six people Etienne Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, William K. L. Dickson, and Auguste and Louis Lumiere. 1
Each inventor contributed significantly to the development of movies, however, it was Thomas Edison who organized the first public American showing of a motion picture premier with an improved camera developed by inventor Thomas Armat on April , 186.1 This was an important start for the motion picture industry and with that, movies became sideshows and then nickelodeons, and then into full screen pictures. In addition, in 188, African-Americans first appeared on the screen, appearing only months after the first theatrical projection of moving images.
The first films showed black soldiers embarking for the Spanish American war of 188. From there on, as editing for the moving images improved, black figures
fell more in life with the racial stereotypes of the day, appearing as chicken thieves, venal preachers, and the like. They only rarely turned up in marginally authentic roles in films such as the Rights of Nations (107) which depicted black culture in a warped form.
As the anniversary of the Civil War approached in 110, African American slaves, once the focus of combat, were reduced to sentimental figures who often sided with their Southern masters against their Northern liberators.
The first steps toward a specifically black cinema arose out of these rituals of white chauvinism. Bill Foster, an African American whose work has been lost, made such films as The Railroad Porter, probably a light comedy set in a particularly black milieu in 11. The Birth of a Race (118), two years in the making and perhaps three hours in length, began as a response to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (115), the most renowned and artistically, the most compelling of the genre of African American films. 4
After World War I, the American movie industry gradually moved to California- Hollywood. The so-called Jazz Age offered little new to African Americans. Few movies offered blacks parts with any authenticity. Such parts included the grizzled hobo in Jim Tully's tale of the lowly, Beggars of Life (18); the seaman boldly played by the boxer George Godfrey in James Cruze's Old Ironsides (16). However, blacks generally played out conventional roles as chorus girls, convicts, racetrack grooms, boxing trainers, and flippant servants. These roles were simple reminders of previous years when the African American actor had
only certain stereotypical roles they portrayed or played. These roles were defined through that of Minstrel Shows.
Minstrel Shows developed in the 1840s, peaked after the Civil War and remained popular into the early 100s. Minstrelsy was product of its time, the only entertainment form born out of blind bigotry. In the shows, white men blackened their faces with burnt cork to lampoon Negroes, performing songs and skits that sentimentalized the nightmare of a slave life on Southern plantations. Blacks were shown as innocent buffoons who sang and danced the days away.4 White entertainer Thomas Rice, better known as Tommy "Daddy Rice, who witnessed a handicapped black man dancing and singing the Jim Crow song, popularized blackface in the early 1800's. He took this dance, exaggerated it and performed in black face. This type of performance, blackface, became a hit and perpetuated all the racial stereotypes of African Americans. This became a popular misrepresentation since slavery times. Minstrel shows were so popular that even some African American performers had to use them to be heard. "African American performers, even the most talented, could not escape the fantastically artificiality of the caricature in which they had been imprisoned". Light skinned African American actor, Bert Williams had to "blacken"5 up just to perform. Even though he was a well-spoken man, he had to perform like the stereotypical sambo in a show called Real Coons. Al Jolson, another performer of blackface, was far the most famous graduate of minstrelsy. He toured with the traveling minstrel shows before entering Broadway and
Hollywood. He his especially known for his blackface role in that of the "The Jazz Singer" (18).1
No one ever accused Al Jolson as being a racist. Jolson, a Russian born Jew, openly advocated equal rights for blacks at a time when it was very dangerous to do so. He insisted that blackface gave him the emotional freedom to take risks as a performer.
Whatever his intentions were for the performance in blackface, the sight of a white man covered with burnt cork singing " Mammy" was an unsettling reminder of the racial and cultural mindset to African Americans that was portrayed through the performance of minstrel shows.
Yet, no matter how unsettling the sight was and how much minstrelsy reminded African Americans of the racial and cultural mindsets or the perpetuations of African American stereotypes, the popularity of these images on the stage entered into the likes of the motion picture industry; paving the way for African Americans to enter the motion picture industry after the Civil War.
However, with this unsettling remainder, many African American producers, writers, and actors wanted to be portrayed in an uplifting light. They wanted African Americans in film to play roles that did not stereotype their culture but inspired it. They wanted films that were not based on the slavery life or the old African American life of singing and dancing, joking and jiving. As time moved on, many African Americans wanted more from the pictures they were acting in, they no longer wanted the roles of the uneducated black person.5
Beginning in 110 and continuing through World War II, a new genre arose in the film industry. This new genre called "race movies" was a development by African American independent filmmakers who were frustrated with the stereotypes of African American people. The race movies came into being because white Hollywood refused to acknowledge that African Americans were anything more than shufflin', scratchin', and grinnin' people who leaned on brooms and spoke bad English. The independent filmmakers, frustrated, decided to take their own cameras and make their own films, in order to show that the African American people were more than what Hollywood had stereotyped them to be.
Between 110 and the early 150's, more than 500 race films were produced, directed, and distributed, mostly by African American film companies, to what were primarily African American owned theaters and their African American audiences. " I was blown away from seeing those black images in stories that were dramatic" says Pearl Bowser, a film archivist and producer of the race-film documentary "Midnight Ramble". "I felt a presence of identity was going on the screen. It was stimulating- a time when you could connect with the people in the movie."
Oddly, so-called race movies, many of which have been lost, were inspired by D.W. Griffith's glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, " The Birth of a Nation." The 115 epic, which the American Film Institute questionably lists as one of the greatest American movies of all time, gives a naïve and one-sided view
of Reconstruction, and portrays African American men as ugly animals who love to rape women. "The film is almost universal recognized as a milestone in the development of world cinema".5
It portrays the freed slaves as brutes out to conquer the white women. The film includes just bout all the stereotypes of African Americans that had been developing in the movies since the mid 180s" (leap 5). Contrary to the blatant racial stereotypes in this movie, it is still considered by many to be a masterpiece. The outcries against The Birth of a Nation did nothing more than drive the racism underground. Future film portrayals still held underlying racism and stereotypes. African Americans were not able to attain any dignified roles. If an African American was allowed any stature at all, it was in servile role.
A year later after D.W. Griffiths tale hit the screens, two brothers, George and Noble Johnson produced through their Lincoln Motion Picture Company, " The Realization of a Negro's Ambitions". This film was the first feature-length film produced, directed and starring African Americans. George Johnson described the film, about an African American man who strikes oil and becomes a millionaire, as " the first successful, Class 'A' Negro motion picture minus all burlesque and humiliating comedy." This production indeed opened the path for race movies.5
Most notable in the movement was Oscar Micheaux, who is considered the Dean of Early Black American cinema and had made over 40 films known during
his lifetime and is considered the prolific African American filmmaker. Oscar Micheaux was born in 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois. 5
After living in Chicago in the early 100s, Micheaux believed the only independent future for the African American man lay on the Western Frontier. Inspired by the teachings of Booker T. Washington and the pioneer philosophy of Horace Greeley, Micheaux believed that there was no future without the access to and ownership of land. He was a determined entrepreneur who literally went west to make his fortune.5
In 108, he began writing novels and with the production of the film by the Johnson brothers, they approached Micheaux and asked to purchase the film rights for his popular novel, the Homesteader. He adapted the novel "The Homesteader," about an African American man living on the plains of South Dakota, into a film in 117; it was released in 11, gathering rave reviews and tremendous box office success.5
Micheaux covered a variety of subjects in his movies. He portrayed African Americans in melodramas, dramas about social problems, gangster stories and musicals all without resorting to stereotypes. Micheaux's films offered a wide range look at African American life in early 0th century America, and his themes reverberate with contemporary urgency, probing such issues as the politics of skin. In contrast to the usual Hollywood treatment of African Americans, Micheaux frequently showed them in positions of authority and respectability. Despite criticisms that they were unrealistic, they were a source of pride to the African American Community. They offered depiction of fully developed black
characters that were an alternative to the simplistic and often cruel stereotypes of mainstream cinema. Some 0-race film companies were formed after his triumph, with hundreds of the movies being shown in black-owned theaters across the country. There were independent companies producing race films in such diverse locations such as Jacksonville, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York.5
According to Dr. Adrienne Lanier Seward, a professor at Colorado College, "films were popular with black audiences, despite their low budgets and technical inferiority compared with the mainstream productions because they catered specifically to the imaginations of African Americans." " The appeal to often lay in their ability to capture the social themes of education, upward mobility, race, pride, social achievement and patriotism, which were daily concerns in African American life in the decades before and after World War II," noted Seward. More important, she adds, interest in those themes conveyed the notion that " black audiences were not inherently different from…whites."
Indeed, Oscar Micheaux attacked such topics head on, talking up taboo subjects of lynching and other injustices visited upon African Americans in the South after the Civil War. Others focused on color and class in the black community, and the effects of social ills like alcoholism and domestic abuse.
The moviegoers were not the only ones who benefited. William Greaves, an actor who starred in several race films, including "Miracle in Harlem" and " Souls of Sin", says the movement also created an outlet for actors who were tired of the
buffoon roles offered to them in movies like D.W. Griffith's " The Birth of a Nation" and " Gone with the Wind."
Many actors, who had roles of shufflin' and dancin' in early minstrel shows, now had a chance and were able to establish themselves as serious artists in the setting of race movies.
Many African American actors of the early minstrel shows were indeed isolated and depicted showing that this is how all black people were, this was the African American culture and this is how they are to be portrayed. It gave white Americans the chance to oppress African Americans with impunity by demeaning their character and standards and making sure that they were widely displayed through the film medium. The film industry itself served as a medium that reinforced the ideas and beliefs of the white culture. As long as there were racist white filmmakers, the African American image and culture would continue to be ridiculed and racially depicted.
It is for this particular reason that race movies became and were so popular and remains so today. The African American culture wants to be shown on screen in a positive way, they no longer wanted to be racially ridiculed and humiliated. The times of slavery were over and many African Americans wanted to be representative in truth and not by how White American judged them. According to Tony Cade Bambera a writer in the Bowsers documentary "Race movies are proof that certain kinds of assaults on the image of African Americans, such as Birth of a Nation, did not go unanswered, race movies were proof that there was a movement in those days to try to do justice to African American characters and to community life." "It gives us memories," Bambara says, "and a sense of the past and puts a bone in the back."4
Yet, in the midst of all of the inspiration and newfound roles that blacks had especially in the films of Oscar Micheaux. Hollywood, considered mainstream cinema, sought out a way to capitalize on the successful earnings that many prosperous race movies were having. In 1, race movies made by African American producers started to die out when Hollywood saw the market. The mainstream industry began making films with Black outcasts for Black
audiences, choking off independent producers and distributors. Which lead to the new development of Modern day films.
Once the mainstream cinema started focusing on making money from black films, they started to integrate African Americans into their world. The disappearance of race movies led to the integration of African Americans into mainstream cinema. And with the integration of African American in mainstream cinema, came new opportunities, new roles and new depictions of the African American society, though the underlying traces of racism and stereotypes were still there, African Americans as a whole started to receive better opportunities and better roles in the motion picture industry.
Yet a younger generation of African American filmmakers emerged from academic settings, asserting that black expression could be appreciated on its own terms, this new black cinema aimed to preserve black culture both within the Hollywood system and apart from it. New distributors, including Black Filmmakers Foundation, California Newsreel, and Woman Make Movies, Inc., aimed at select audiences and academic circles rather than mass markets.
The best known of the new black filmmakers during the 180's and 10's was probably Spike Lee, who managed to win large audiences for almost everything he produced, film school exercises, credit-card financed early efforts such as She's Gotta Have It (186), television commercials, and promotional pieces. He also directed a string of Hollywood successes, including one of the most
politically challenging and commercially successful films of the new black cinema Do The Right Thing (18).5
As black filmmakers became more prolific, black actors in Hollywood, Super name or not such as the likes of Denzel Washington, Danny Glover, Halle Berry, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett, among others got steady, rather than sporadic work. Denzel Washington and Halle Berry are credited with being the two first African Americans to win an Emmy Award. By the late 10s, the steadily expanding African American presence in American film seemed to assure a solid future for the new black cinema.4
So in conclusion, the gradual shift of the image of African Americans from that of the development of minstrel shows, to that of the inspirational and uplifting race movies to the modern films of today, has indeed allowed the African American culture to develop and expand along with the likes of the motion picture industry. The journey for African Americans to be able to have a positive representation on screen was a long and hard road to take and with out a doubt there are still many barriers that need to broken even today. But the change from the past to now has been well worth it and now African Americans can at least know that many roles that are available today were not even thought of in earlier days. African American have sought to change, redevelop and redefine their racially depicted image filled with racism and stereotypes held by White Americans, all the while dealing with, experiencing and overcoming the racial stereotypes that served as barriers for African Americans in the beginning.
End Notes
1. Shirley Biagi. Media Impact An Introduction to Mass Media 6th edition (California Thomson and Wadsworth, 00), 148-14.
. Leab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Boston, MA Houghton Mifflin Co 175).
. Lott, Tommy. "Black Film Issue." Black American Literature Forum 5. (17), 8-8
4. Barclay, Dolores 'A Separate Cinema' a retrospective of 'race movies' July 18. http//www.ardmoreite.com/stories/07078/ent_blacks.shtml
5. Jones, Tiffany Iruwa African Americans in Film From Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee 18. www.albany.edu/projren/18_/jones.html
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