African-American Cinema: a History and a Tradition Worth Exploring

Every February we take time out of our busy schedules to learn more about Black history. One aspect of African-American history that we often overlook is the complex relationship between the history of film and the history of race. Historically film was a space in which the ideas that enabled segregation and racism were dramatized and broadcast to a wide audience. But it has also been a crucial space in which racism and segregation were challenged and countered. Over the next three weeks I will explore this history in a series of articles. This week I will explore cinema from its origins until World War II. Next week I will focus on film since World War II. And, the series will end with a list of films to view and books to read.

Part I: Jim Crow and Early Cinema

Part II: Civil Rights, Black Power, Multiculturalism and Cinema

Part III: Forgotten Gems of African-American Cinema

Jim Crow and Early Cinema

Early cinema from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries can seem completely foreign to a modern audience. In these early years filmmakers had not yet established the visual techniques and narrative strategies that we have become the standard for American cinema. Early film often used simple shots and single camera angles and was composed of multiple short vignettes rather than long, cohesive narratives. This is very different from the visually and narratively complicated films with which we all grew up. Even after filmmakers started to develop modern cinematic techniques and narrative styles, film remained “silent” until 1927.

It is interesting to note that the first films to employ modern cinematic techniques and narrative style and the first film to employ fully synchronized sound were both films that dealt intimately with African-Americans and race relations.

D.W. Griffith was a true pioneer of early cinema and the development of cinematically diverse, narrative film. His 1915 masterpiece Birth of a Nation introduced many of these techniques and was one of the first “blockbusters.” Based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, Jr., Birth of a Nation follows the fates of two white families, one northern, the other southern, who are torn apart by the Civil War but then reunite to fight against emancipated slaves who the film depicts as having run amok and in the process of destroying the nation.

The climax of the film comes when a white woman named Flora is stalked by an African-American man named Gus who intends to rape her. When her family and friends find her body they form the first chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and hunt Gus down and enact vigilante justice by lynching him.

It is not mere coincidence that Birth of a Nation celebrates the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the restoration of white supremacy after the Civil War. In fact, when the film is situated historically its cultural work becomes even more evident. By 1915 the promise of Emancipation and Reconstruction had withered and been replaced with the harsh realities of Jim Crow segregation. Starting in 1890 with the landmark Supreme Court decision southern and northern states had begun instituting “separate but equal” policies which enforced the physical, personal, and spatial segregation of whites and African-Americans. And, between 1890 and 1915 southern states began to adopt revised state constitutions and institute voting laws that legally or effectively prevented African-Americans from voting. African-Americans challenged these Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement policies. But while we remember Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. du Bois, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett and groups like the NAACP and their great struggles, across the rural south Jim Crow was enforced through intimidation and extreme violence. Lynching, or the public, extra-legal murder by a mob, usually included torture and ended in hanging the victim. It is estimated that between 1882 and 1968 3,446 African-Americans were lynched. The vast majorities of these murders took place between 1890 and 1925 and occurred in the deep south states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

The narrative of Birth of a Nation—it is, after all, a film about two white families who are separated by and then reunite after The Civil War—also echoes the history of the period. In 1913 the nation celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Veterans of the Union and Confederate armies camped out on the battlefield and reenacted Pickett’s Charge; but, rather than shooting each other, the veterans shook hands and made peace, reasserting the reunification of whites from the north and south. This reenactment is the most telling example of a larger memorial project in which the Civil War was recast as a war about regional separation and reunion and not a war over slavery and racism.

When we put Birth of a Nation into these historical contexts we can see that it drew from, reinforced, and normalized the white supremacy, segregation and violence of Jim Crow. The NAACP certainly made the connection and launched a nationwide boycott and protest movement against the film. Unfortunately, the film was a nationwide hit and even garnered the endorsement of President Woodrow Wilson.

Birth of a Nation is a bit jarring for modern audiences because it was a silent film. However, it was not long before filmmakers developed technologies to synchronize sound and video. In 1927 the first film with full sound, The Jazz Singer, debuted. The Jazz Singer is the story of a young Jewish man named Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, who breaks from tradition and becomes a singer or popular music.

After leaving home he takes the stage name Jack Robin and becomes a nationally famous jazz singer. The Jazz Singer was partially based on Al Jolson’s life and is the most well-known and influential film in which white actors performed in blackface. Blackface is a practice in which white actors cover their faces in dark black paint made of burnt cork; usually blackface also included red and white makeup around the mouth that gave the actor the appearance of having cartoonishly large lips. Just as in Al Jolson’s real life, Jakie Rabinowitz gained fame by performing an exaggerated version of Blackness. Jolson’s appearance, mannerisms, and singing voice mimicked and mocked African-American jazz performers.

While blackface has become taboo within the United States, it was a dominant mode of theatrical performance for at least one hundred years. In the colonial era African-American characters were often featured as stock, comic figures in American plays. These characters were played by white actors in make-up and were often slow and lazy and added comic relief to the plot. By 1830, however, these comic sidekicks had become the central characters in a type of musical revue called the minstrel show or minstrelsy. Minstrel shows were comic performances in which white actors in blackface sang, danced, and acted their way through a series of set pieces and vignettes that mimicked and mocked African-American folks culture. Minstrel shows were especially popular among white immigrant communities in the north and helped shape perceptions of African-American inferiority that were essential to the maintenance of slavery and, after the Civil War, white supremacy and segregation.

Many of the earliest films drew from this tradition. In fact, in most early films white actors in blackface or African-American actors whose performances drew from blackface minstrelsy played African-American characters. The Jazz Singer is simply the most well-known and influential example of blackface minstrelsy in American cinema. The practice of basing all African-American characters on blackface minstrelsy was so deeply ingrained that African-American actors were often forced to perform in blackface. White audiences expected African-American characters to have the exaggerated appearance caused by blackface make up and African-American actors had to paint their faces for the stage and screen. For example, the African-American singer, dancer, and comedian Bert Williams would smear black paint over his already dark skin in order to fit the expectations of white audiences.

Although it was the common mode of African-American performance through the 1920s, Blackface slowly faded, becoming rare after World War II and being a taboo practice after the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. However, the stock characters of minstrelsy had a longer staying power. Minstrel shows had a set of stock character types with specific physical and speech characteristics: the lazy Sambo, the simplistic Uncle Tom, and the sexually tempting mulatta, among others. These types influenced early cinema and by the 1930s the vast majority of African-American characters fit a handful of specific character types. Gus from Birth of a Nation was the archetype of the most dangerous of these types, the Black Brute. But alongside this image of African-American men as sexually violent and obsessed with white women were a host of types that depicted African-Americans as intellectually, morally, and physically inferior to whites. Throughout the first decades of American film, African-American characters were often present as humorous sidekicks and foils and almost always were servants to white characters. It is much easier to disenfranchise and discount people when you think they are inherently inferior to you and it is important to remember that this typecasting of African-Americans helped perpetuate Jim Crow.

Typecasting also had the tragic effect of severely limiting opportunities for generations of brilliant African-American entertainers. Some of the finest actors and comedians of the first-half of the twentieth century were never able to gain the fame and recognition they deserved. Perhaps the three most significant examples of the effect of actors who were limited by this typecasting were Hattie McDaniel, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry.

Lincoln Perry was a gifted comedic actor who had an active career playing “Sambo” and “Coon” characters in early films. While Perry was always typecast and played to racial stereotypes, he was an exceptional physical comedian.

Similarly, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was an outstanding tap dancer who is best remembered for performing alongside Shirley Temple. In another time and place Perry and Robinson would have had the opportunity to break out of the shackles of racist typecasting.

Hattie McDaniel is best remembered for her performance Gone with the Wind. In that Academy Award-winning role McDaniel captured the essence of the stock figure that went by the same name as her character: the Mammie. Mammie’s were physically large, dark-skinned, and loud and brash African-American women who served as physical and moral foils for white women.

Gone with the Wind might be the ultimate example of the ways race was used in early American cinema. Like Birth of a Nation it retells the story of the Civil War as a struggle between good, honest whites and depicts slavery as a benign system in which happy, content African-Americans were treated well by kind white owners. The African-American characters in the film fall into two basic categories: the few dangerous, freed slave men who pose a threat to Scarlet O’Hara’s femininity and the large crowds of docile, simple, happy slaves who willingly return to the plantation after emancipation.

While the early decades of American cinema offered few options for African-Americans and helped normalize segregation, there were some bright spots.

The actor Paul Robeson, one of the finest signers and actors of his age, resisted the typecasting common in American theater and film and used his visibility to speak up for civil rights issues. However, when Robeson found America and American cinema too stiflingly, he left for Europe when he had the chance to act in more complex and fulfilling roles.

American film is a massive industry dominated by a handful of companies based in southern California. Before World War II, when the Hollywood studios controlled every step in the process from pre-production to screening, there was little chance for outsiders to break into the game. But the Hollywood studios’ lack of interest in compelling African-American characters and stories created a vacuum in which an enterprising soul like Oscar Micheaux could make films by and for African-American communities. Working with all African-American casts and crews, Micheaux wrote, produced, and directed at least forty-four films that depicted African-American life in a more complex, compelling, and proud way than any Hollywood films. One of his first films was Within Our Gates, which is often understood to be a response to Birth of a Nation. Micheaux marketed his films to African-American audiences and screened them almost exclusively in theaters in African-American communities.

While early cinema was a landscape in which African-Americans were limited to violence and buffoonery, this was a period that laid the groundwork for post-World War II film and a more nuanced, critical cinema.

Written by Dr. Matthew Barbee,  faculty contributor.