2 The Evolution of Black Film

From the very beginning of American cinema in the 1890s, Afro-Americans appeared on the screen. One might argue that these early films were not truly black because their function, more or less, was to tell whites about the black curiosa on the periphery of their culture. Early topical vignettes in Thomas Edison's films included watermelon-eating contests, Negroes leading parades, black soldiers in Cuba, reenactments of campaigns against guerrillas in the Philippines, and fragments of anthropological ephemera such as West Indian women dancing, coaling ships, or bathing babies. There were occasional bits, such as Biograph's A Bucket of Cream Ale (1904), which was drawn from a vaudeville routine in which a "Dutchman" is hit in the face with a growler of beer tossed by his blackfaced maid. In a small way these films attained a range of black imagery that has gone remarkably unnoticed. In their day, the films were black only in the sense that they thrust a heretofore invisible image upon general American viewers. Their roots emerged from a faddish popular anthropology that had been a fountainhead of European exploration in Africa, complete with rival expeditions in search of the sources of the Nile, voyages to polar icecaps, attempts by the U.S. Department of the Interior to collect Indian lore, and even white-water adventures down the Colorado River. Therefore many early black figures on the screen were no more than the subjects of a quest for the legendary, the curious, and the bizarre, through darkest Africa and Carib isle. Along with stray vaudeville routines and gag shots, occasional faithfully recorded visual records appeared, such as that of Theodore Roosevelt's journey to Africa and The Military Drill of the Kikuyu Tribes and Other Native Ceremonies (1914). In another vein, cameramen pursued the black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, either to record his frequent breaches of racial etiquette or to document his hoped-for eventual defeat.

But if early films, lacking as they were in black sources, point of view, or advocacy, whetted black appetites, they hardly could have satisfied them. In fact, within a dozen years of their beginnings, the early black appearances were snuffed out by a renewed fascination with the Civil War era brought on by the approach of its Golden Anniversary. During these early years, amidst the stereotyped crap-shooters, chicken thieves, and coon shows that the screen inherited from Southern popular literature, movies also offered, in addition to reportorial film of exotic locales, Edwin S. Porter'sUncle Tom's Cabin (1903) with its wisp of Abolitionism and a flurry of authentic cakewalking. A genuine bit of "rubberlegs" dancing in Biograph's The Fights of Nations (1907) was another example of occasional deviations from Southern metaphor. But after 1910 the celebration of the Civil War removed almost all authentic depiction of black Americans from the nation's screens, the semicentennial serving as an inspiration to put aside realism in favor of romantic nostalgia as a mode for presenting Negroes on film.

In a movie world populated by Afro-Americans who embraced slavery, loved the Union but not the principle of Abolition, expressed their deepest humanity through loyal service to white masters, and counted the master class, its families, and fortunes above their own, there could not have been a genuinely black film. The movie slaves either served the white cause in such films as A Slave's Devotion (1913), Old Mammy's Charge (1914), The Littlest Rebel (1914), His Trust (1911), His Trust Fulfilled (1911), and Old Mammy's Secret Code (1913), or they at least stood by passively, lending atmosphere to the Southern setting in The Empty Sleeve (1914),Days of War (ca. 1914), For the Cause of the South (1914), A Fair Rebel (1914), The Soldier Brothers of Susannah (1912),and literally hundreds more.

Coincident with these social forces, the editorial techniques of filmmaking had been growing more sophisticated. In 1915, D. W. Griffith, a sentimental Southerner with a feel for Victorian melodrama and a keen visual sense, synthesized nearly a decade's observation and practice into a film of unprecedented three-hour length— The Birth of a Nation—and sold it through the grandest publicity campaign ever given a motion picture. The film was an illiberal racial tract that celebrated Southern slavery, the fortitude of the Ku Klux Klan, and the fealty of "good Negroes."

The national Negro leadership, just beginning to enjoy the fruits of a quarter century of experiment (and tinkering with various Afro-American Leagues, the National Negro Business League, the Niagara Movement, and the like), came together in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its urbane bourgeois members, including many whites, felt singularly offended by the hoary Southern metaphors signified by Griffith's imagery. Unfortunately for the future of black film, they countered with censorship rather than filmmaking, resulting in a briefly successful campaign that unwittingly had the long-range effect of driving all but the most comic black roles from the screen.

During the year following The Birth of a Nation, black genre film began in earnest. Although newspaper stories hinted of a few early attempts in the Middle West—notably those of Bill Foster—the first two genuinely black film companies were those organized by Emmett J. Scott and the brothers George and Noble Johnson.

Scott's group promised more, but perhaps because it came first, suffered the more resounding failure. Scott, a former Texas newspaperman and Booker T. Washington's secretary at Tuskegee Institute for almost twenty years, looked to filmmaking as a first step to his independence after the death of the authoritarian Washington in 1915. At first Scott, together with the NAACP, pursued an impossible course, making Lincoln's Dream, a film graced with the scholarly credentials of historian Albert Bushnell Hart, written by a veteran scriptwriter, financed by matching funds from the NAACP and Universal Pictures, and showcased in a prestigious premiere. Unfortunately, Carl Laemmle of Universal, the prospective "angel," backed off. When the NAACP was paralyzed by a resulting internal debate, Scott was forced to take up negotiations with a small and greedy Chicago firm.

2. The cover page of the stock prospectus of the Birth of a Race Corporation demonstrates the desire to develop a black film genre based on race pride as early as 1916. (Julius Rosenwald Papers, The University of Chicago Library)

The resulting Birth of a Race (1919) suffered from the absence of a strong black voice in defense of a film concept, scattered and often deferred shooting schedules and locations ranging from Chicago to Tampa, and a theme and plot that shifted its emphasis from a biblical to a pacifist idea conditioned by the coming of World War I. After almost three years of shooting and cutting, most of all the black elements had been pushed aside by presumably more timely and universal themes. Despite a glittering opening in Chicago and a few additional bookings, the film dropped from sight and Scott gave up cultivating prospective black middle-class investors in a film project.

Nevertheless, the project attracted the attention of the Johnsons: George, then a postman in Omaha, and Noble, a Universal contract player. In 1916, together with black investors from Los Angeles and a white cameraman, Harry Gant, they had set out to make motion pictures with a black point of view.

Like most of the black middle class in the 1920s, they embraced the American success myth brought to light by Horatio Alger. Between 1916 and 1922, the Johnsons' Lincoln Motion Picture Company averaged almost one film per year, each filled with individualist heroes, who promised blacks the hope of success and the conquest of despair. By Right of Birth (1921) was an anatomy of the genteel black upper class of Los Angeles. It starred Clarence Brooks, who later appeared in John Ford's Arrowsmith (1931), and Anita Thompson, a tall, stylish actress from the cast of Runnin' Wild, a black revue.

Another Lincoln film, The Realization of a Negro's Ambition (ca.1917) recast the Horatio Alger legend in black terms. The Trooper of Troop K (ca. 1920) recounted the yarn of the rough western loner, played by Noble Johnson, who, carrying a pure heart under his saddle dust and army blues, proves his goodness and wins the girl after fighting in a reenactment of a famous cavalry battle with Mexican marauders in the Southwest.

3. By Right of Birth was typical of black genre film in its portrayal of positive images as middle-class success figures. (George P. Johnson Collection, Research Library, UCLA)

The marketing efforts of both the Birth of a Race Company and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company revealed the hazards of distributing movies outside established Hollywood channels. Hollywood had become an oligopoly that controlled almost all aspects of American filmmaking. All independent companies, whether "B" producers on Hollywood's "poverty row," Yiddish moviemakers in Manhattan, or race movie makers, suffered from both a lack of capital and outlets for sufficient distribution. Their finished films generally ran only in small second-run "grind" houses which owed no scheduling obligations to the large theater chains that were the backbone of Hollywood profits. At both ends of the production line, the economic structure threatened independent filmmakers with either loss of control or actual extinction. The Johnsons' inventive but eventually unsuccessful solution employed a string of black newspapermen, who both plugged their movies and acted as bookers.

Rather than holding out the promise of another stride toward a black genre, the next stage of black filmmaking revealed a negative aspect of making race movies. The Ebony Motion Picture of Chicago, like a number of other small white companies, produced films for black audiences behind a facade of black managers. But apparently their white "angels" and Southern white writer, Leslie T. Peacock, insisted on films like A Black Sherlock Holmes (ca. 1918) that were mere mirror images of white movies. Ebony's Spying the Spy (1919), for example, employed a talented black comedian in the role of an American spy in pursuit of a stereotyped German agent; the film's climax was an orgy of editorial effects which played upon the old-fashioned notion of the Afro-American fear of ghosts. While many blacks had migrated to cities, surprisingly, little of urban black life appeared on the screen. Furthermore, interest in foreign exotica had declined into a cycle of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan with its African supernumeraries. Revived by the coming of sound, blackface roles persisted.

Before 1925, strong black roles were brought to the screen by a corps of black Hollywood regulars in a handful of films that touched some unconscious truth about American racial life. Madame Sul-te-Wan, Onest Conley, Carolynne Snowden, Nathan Curry, Zach Williams, Raymond Turner, and boxers Sam Baker and George Godfrey brought conviction to these few roles. Noble Johnson typified their accomplishment and captivity by white Hollywood. His career spanned from World War I with Lubin, to a job as the Indian hothead, Red Shirt, in John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Because his work with the Lincoln Motion Picture Company competed with the movies produced by his white employer, Universal Pictures, Johnson was asked to give up his work at Lincoln. Thereafter, through World War I, not only did he continue as a stock heavy in Universal's various "B" western series, Red Feather, Red Ace, and Bulls' Eye, but went on to appear as scores of Indians, Latins, Asians, and primitive tribesmen in such movies as Robinson Crusoe (1917), Leopard Woman (1920), Kismet (1920), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) (in which he was one of the mounted plagues), The Ten Commandments (1923), Flaming Frontier (1926), Aloma of the South Seas (1926), Ben Hur (1927 ), and Lady of the Harem (1926). In some years he appeared in a half dozen or more pictures, ranging from major "epics" to routine "programmers."

The other source of strong black characterizations appeared in white movies in an indirect, muted way that barely hinted at the fact that American society had begun to deal with a new Negro who had migrated to Northern cities. In 1916 Bert Williams, the distinguished black comedian of the Ziegfeld Follies, appeared in Fish and A Natural Born Gambler, two movies that used blackface routines in a fresh way. In the former Williams was a gangling country boy, who tries to sell a fish as it grows stale. In A Natural Born Gambler he presides over the card table at his fraternal lodge while contriving to elude the white police. In the same period, Vitagraph made two parodies of white boxers whose fear of Jack Johnson formed the basis of comedy—Some White Hope (1915) and The Night I Fought Jack Johnson (1913). A black confidante far shrewder and more knowing than the Civil War cycle maids appeared in Hoodoo Ann (1916). Aggressive and even derisive black women appeared in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Several children's series that set the mood for the debut of Hal Roach's egalitarian Our Gang began in the late 1920s. The variety of black roles expanded to include French and American soldiers, wise old boxing trainers, horse trainers, and a number of servants who resembled Tonto, the Lone Ranger's sidekick, more than they did Rastus, the ante-bellum butler.

Despite their contribution to the wearing away of old icons that had symbolized the former inferior status of Afro-Americans, these deviations from ancient norms spoke little of the "new Negro" who was already celebrated in Northeastern literary circles. If white moviemakers understandably failed to take into account the changed circumstances of urban blacks, their black counterparts also failed to fill the existing void. Nor did a growing number of black critics suggest new images to replace the outdated ones, except for a vague plea for presenting "positive"—meaning middle-class—xcharacters on the screen.

But the condition of the "new Negro" was not that clearcut. As Afro-Americans moved from Southern farms to Northern cities, they fell prey to oppressive forces from outside the group. Their plight may be likened to that of the Germans, described in an essay by Erich Kahler (1974). In the Middle Ages, Germans, like blacks, spoke a language built upon linguistic traditions from outside the group; lived in rural regions and disdained the city or found it alien; embraced millenial ideals rather than small victories; and chose in-group stratification as a means of preserving the group, despite anarchic forces pressing from the outside. Moreover, in the face of these external forces, whether Frankish kings in Paris, Italian condottieri in the pay of the Pope, or Magyar invaders, the Germans often responded with in-group aggression.

The wide gulf between white movies and black aspirations may be seen in a fragmentary glance at some of D.W. Griffith's 1920s films. After the release of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith went on to make several masterpieces such as Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921). Like most of his works, these films commented on social issues from the safe vantage point of the past or foreign locales. In the mid-1920s, however, Griffith addressed himself to modern times.

Here Griffith's racial vision, like that of most of his white countrymen, was unable to distinguish rural blacks from the new urban Negro. The black characters in One Exciting Night (1922) were strikingly off the mark. The central character, an improbable detective, was a "Kaffir, the dark terror of the bootleg gang." The remaining black roles were played by blackfaced whites as traditional servile flunkies, who trailed through the plot. A year later in The White Rose (1923), Griffith attempted to return to Southern ground, but his critics leapt upon him for his "mawkish sickening sentimentality" and his "jumbled and pointless plot." According to them, he seemed a "genius out of touch with the world." Next he began His Darker Self (1924), another blackface picture starring Al Jolson, who eventually deserted the project. Still later Griffith made an unsatisfying and fruitless appearance on the set of Universale Topsy and Eva (1927), an exploitation spinoff from that studio's successful Uncle Tom's Cabin. In every case these were "white" movies, retailing Negroes almost as an in-group joke.

At last in the mid-1920s black critics on black newspapers, among them Lester Walton of the New York Age, Romeo Daugherty of the Amsterdam News, J. A. Rogers, and D. Ireland Thomas, began to develop a common vision. A few white papers also developed a racial sensitivity; in particular, Variety crowed in glee when the Ku Klux Klan muddled a filmmaking project. When promoters gave a press preview for a racist tract called Free and Equal (1925), Variety howled: "it is not only old fashioned but so crudely done that the Sunday night audience laughed it practically out of the theater."

But neither Griffith nor the press provided the fairest gauge of Hollywood's inability to deal with black themes. Rather, it was the mixed response that blacks gave to the best and most well-meaning Hollywood movie, Universal's Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1926 Carl Laemmle started the project by signing Charles Gilpin, the most distinguished black actor of his day, to play Tom. However, Gilpin was soon replaced by James Lowe, who gave one of the finest black cinema performances in a faithful rendering of the spirit of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel.

Unfortunately for Laemmle, black critics and audiences alike split in their judgment of the film that had been aimed at a "crossover" audience of blacks and whites, who would like either its abolitionism or its nostalgia. But no amount of mere preaching on the subject of race satisfied those blacks who looked to film as a medium for communicating to a black audience.

Nevertheless, in comparison with the films of the early 1920s, blacks saw in Uncle Tom's Cabin a new Hollywood that seemed to promise a fair representation of black characters, liberal progress, and cause for hope. One producer promised a movie of the new Broadway hit, Porgy (1927); John M. Stahl put a serious black love scene in In Old Kentucky (1927); William Wellman's hopeful Beggars of Life featured a fine role by Edgar "Blue" Washington; DeMille's Old Ironsides (1926) carried a crew that included strong black roles, as did Alan Crosland's The Sea Beast (1926); and Monta Bell's Man, Woman, and Sin (1927) established its urban milieu with neat vignettes of black city life.

In the absence of movies that spoke directly to black concerns, a kind of black underground grew outside the major studios. Although largely white-owned, it nonetheless attempted to reach the black audience that was untouched by Hollywood. Strapped by poor distribution channels, paltry budgets, amateurish actors, technical failings, and untrained crews, these production companies were somehow able to release films for black audiences throughout the silent era. Their films reached beyond mere representation of Negroes on the screen to depict Afro-Americans as a presence in American life.

Most of these race movie makers felt an obligation to present blacks as icons of virtue and honor. One case in point, the Douglass Company of New Jersey, used war film heroism "to show the better side of 'Negro life' " and to "inspire in the Negro a desire to climb higher." They also adapted films from the works of popular Negro authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Scapegoat (1917). Another Douglass project, The Colored American Winning His Suit (1916), followed the career of the Negro hero who was "getting ahead." Other companies turned War Department films into From Harlem to the Rhine (ca. 1918), Our Hell Fighters Return (1919), anl other compilations showing black troops in combat.

By the early 1920s the New York Age headlined that COLORED MOTION PICTURES ARE IN GREAT DEMAND. The filmmakers were undaunted by any topic; the whole black world was their stage, and their regional roots gave a varied flavor to the black experience they recorded on film. This excitement stirred still other prospective producers to grind out glossy prospectuses that promised great black films which would never be made. Their known films included the Norman Company's all-black westerns shot in the famous all-black town of Boley, Oklahoma, starring the New York actress Anita Bush. The Cotton Blossom Company and the Lone Star Company made similar pictures in San Antonio. Dr. A. Porter Davis made The Lure of a Woman (1921), the first film produced in Kansas City.

After 1922, the Renaissance Company made black newsreels. White producers like Ben Strasser and Robert Levy (whose Reol Company made a movie from Dunbar's Sport of the Gods [1921]) joined the ranks of race movie makers. War movies persisted as a genre. Among these, Sidney P. Dones's Injustice (1920) was a wartime tale of Negroes and the Red Cross; two others, Democracy, Or a Fight for Right (1919) and Loyal Hearts (1919), "a smashing Virile Story of Our Race Heroes," were released by the Democracy Photoplay Corporation

4. Race movies provided the only vehicle through which black authors could reach the screen. Dunbar's work,The Sport of the Gods, appeared in 1921. (George P. Johnson Collection, Research Library, UCLA)

The most dogged of the race movie makers was Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux, a young black who had been a homesteader on the Dakota prairie, survived nearly twenty-five years in a desperately cutthroat business, turning out approximately two dozen movies in Chicago, New York, and New Jersey. As early as 1919, Micheaux tried unsuccessfully to link up with the Lincoln Company, a union that failed because the Johnsons considered him an upstart, a mountebank, and an untrustworthy hustler—ironically all traits that would help him achieve success.

Micheaux's production style gave texture to black genre films even if his work was not noted for its excellence of cinematic technique. To make up for a lack of technical expertise his black and white casts and crews exhibited a fellowship that blended the ideals of African tribal communities with the like values of a typical John Ford stock company of the 1940s. Ford's people shared the dust, cursed the heat, and passed the whiskey bottle together, thereby giving an unmistakeable Ford quality to their films. Micheaux never shot a film in the desert, but his companies, by sharing poverty, late paychecks, and shabby working conditions, somehow managed to give a generic texture to their films.

In like manner, Micheaux's shooting in idle and antique studios in Chicago, Fort Lee, and the Bronx; the jarring effect of the uneven talents of his actors; his use of unsung, under-employed white cameramen abandoned by the drift of filmmaking to Hollywood; and his shoestring operation which reflected the cast's own lives, all lent the enterprise an aura of outlawry. By merely finishing a film, Micheaux's company was like the legendary tricksters of black folklore, who win the game against the system. Thus the low pay, borrowed equipment, and nagging debtors helped define the character of the completed movie.

The difference between Micheaux and the other producers of the black genre can be compared to the difference between Orson Welles and Irving Thalberg. Welles was the outsider, flippant and contemptuous of established custom; Thalberg was the middle-class company man, loyal to MGM until his dying day, who succeeded by not offending either boss or audience. Micheaux, like Welles, had the gall to be opinionated in the presence of more experienced filmmakers. Welles once described his studio facilities as the finest Erector set a boy could ever hope for. Like Welles from his vantage point outside the system, Micheaux may have experienced a similar feeling of raw, fey power over the conventional filmmaking regime.

Motion pictures gave Micheaux the power to say, however amateurishly, what no other Negro filmmakers even thought of saying. He filmed the unnameable, arcane, disturbing things that set black against black. When others sought only uplifting and positive images, Micheaux searched for ironies.

A recurring theme appeared in his work from his very first film in 1919. The autobiographical The Homesteader recounted the story of a farm boy torn between rural values and urban glitter, a vehicle later used by Richard Wright in Native Son and Ralph Ellison in The Invisible Man. In this film, the conflict between the values of Southern black migrants to the city and the urbane sensibility that had scant room for enthusiastic religion, filiopietism, and the pride of land ownership, was examined.

Save for his densely packed polemic against jackleg preachers, Body and Soul, Oscar Micheaux's silent films are lost. But surviving reviews indicate that Micheaux was capable of an arrogant variety of themes, each one bringing some corner of Negro life to the screen. Indeed, he explored even white life as it impinged upon blacks–a rarity in race movies. His movies formed an anatomy of black filmmaking by the breadth of their topicality. In Within Our Gates (1920), Micheaux reconstructed an anti-Semitic lynching he had witnessed in Atlanta. The Brute (1925) starred black boxer Sam Langford. The Symbol of the Unconquered (1921) indicted the Ku Klux Klan at the height of its Middle Western revival. Birthright (1924) adapted T. S. Stribling's novel about the racism that blighted the life of a black Harvard graduate. The Spider's Web (1927) dramatized the ghetto's love-hate affair with the infamous gambling system, the numbers game. With the release of The Conjure Woman (1926) and The House Behind the Cedars (1927), Micheaux revealed his most unabashed nerve by persuading the distinguished black novelist, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, not only to sell the movie rights to two of his books for a few dollars, but also to tolerate Micheaux's heavy-handed rewriting.

5. More than any other maker of race movies, Oscar Micheaux brought social issues to the screen. Within Our Gates purported to be based on an eyewitness account of a lynching.

Sadly, only Body and Soul, the lone survivor of Micheaux's early films, reveals the quality of his silent work. Although flawed by censors' efforts, Body and Soul made use of the young and marginally employed football player, singer, budding actor, and preacher's son, Paul Robeson, to make a strong case against venal preachers. This film helped make Micheaux a central figure in black genre film, if for no other reason than he willingly, even sensationally, assaulted black problems. In addition, he brought black fiction to the screen, criticized American racial custom, and made his own migratory life an allegory for the black experience in the twentieth century.

Parallel to Micheaux's career in the 1920s, another variant of black genre film producers emerged: the company rich in white capital, technical capacity, and leadership, with a self-conscious ambition to present films that reflected the lives of its Negro audiences. Unlike their competitors who ground out shabby black mimics of white life, this enterprising group of easterners kept a keen ear tuned to black circles and a sharp eye on box office trends as sensors of black taste. In the early 1920s, the best of them, theater owner Robert Levy, a backer of the Lafayette Players black theatre group, founded Reol as a studio that intended to produce such films as Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition.

Still another white force was the owner whose theater gradually had turned "colored" and who subsequently made films for the new audiences. On the eve of sound film, such a group led by David Starkman and a white studio crew united behind Sherman "Uncle Dud" Dudley, a black vaudevillian and impresario from Washington. The resulting Colored Players Company produced its first film by July 1926, A Prince of His Race, a melodrama on the theme of the black bourgeois fear of lost status. By the end of the year they released a black version of the old temperance tract, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, starring Charles Gilpin. Far from a rehash, the brief film used its all-black cast to achieve a certain poignancy, as though the actors themselves were making a special plea to urban blacks, warning them against urban vices in a manner reminiscent of Micheaux.

In 1928 the Colored Players Company achieved its finest hour with The Scar of Shame, which, in the wrong hands, might have become no more than a sentimental "women's picture." In style, mood, and theme, however, the Colored Players' film brought a sophisticated close to the silent film era. Scriptwriter David Starkman, two Italian collaborators, director Frank Perugini and cameraman Al Ligouri, and black stars Lucia Lynn Moses, Harry Henderson, Lawrence Chenault, and Pearl McCormick, combined efforts to produce a wistful satire on the color caste system that stratified urban black society. The completed film went beyond its premise by adding a commentary on the American success myth. Perhaps because authors can most successfully romanticize or satirize what they know from a distance, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Xanadu, J. M. W. Turner's painting of a shimmering man-o-war in the tow of a steam tug, or J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, the largely white Colored Players sympathetically exposed an anomaly in black life—Negroes, the victims of racial discrimination, sometimes stratified into fraternities, professions, marriages, and even churches along lines denoted by skin color.

The boom of the 1920s ended sadly for Afro-Americans. The Great Depression proved a shattering experience, hitting blacks sooner and more severely than it did whites. Even the Republican party cast them aside in Herbert Hoover's so-called "lily white" convention of 1928.

And yet, the sound film era began at the same time, holding out the promise of revolutionary change for blacks in Hollywood. MGM and Fox stumbled over each other trying to exploit sound film through the use of Negro themes and motifs. These studios were so successful that their work instigated the gradual turning away of black film audiences from race movies, toward Hollywood.

Although Christie Comedies had once used Spencer Williams as a writer, for the first time Hollywood producers really made use of black consultants. MGM's Hallelujah! benefitted from the counsel of Harold Garrison, the studio bootblack, and James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP. Fox's Hearts in Dixie, like the MGM film, brought black religion, tragedy, music, and emotion to the screen with the help of Clarence Muse and other blacks on the set.

Immediately a rash of musical shorts emerged from the studios. The worst of them, such as Christie's comedies, were based on Octavus Roy Cohen's old Saturday Evening Post dialect stories. The best of them used black performers in ways that allowed them to influence the ambience of the films. Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller, the comedy team from the original Shuffle Along revue of 1921, the dancing Covans, the Hall Johnson Choir, baritone Jules Bledsoe, Duke Ellington, and many others were signed by Hollywood studios.

The best of these appeared early in the decade. Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway infused a strong jazz beat into I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You (1932), Minnie the Moocher (1932), Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932), and Jitterbug Party (1935). Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle enlivened Pie Pie Blackbird (ca. 1932). The Nicholas Brothers brought their jazz acrobatics to Barbershop Blues (1933) and The Black Network (1936). Jimmy Mordecai, one of the greatest jazz dancers, did a stylized, moody rendering of Southern folk life in Yamacraw (1930). These films continued until World War II when Lena Home, Teddy Wilson, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson did a musical fantasy of the disinherited, Boogie Woogie Dream (1944).

The most balanced combinations of mood, lighting, music, black social themes, and theatrical elements were offered in Duke Ellington's Symphony in Black (1935) and Black and Tan (1929). Symphony was scored in four movements with stylized bits of black history cut to match the beat of work songs, chants, and fervent religious moods. The film's ending featured Billie Holiday and Earl "Snakehips" Tucker in an urban scene that symbolized Negro migration from Africa, to the South, to Harlem, to modern times. Almost ritual in form, the film demonstrated the possibilities of black art emerging from a Hollywood factory. In like manner Black and Tan recreated a similar ambience but stressed plot more than music by focusing on Ellington's woman, who, despite poor health, dances so that he might finish his composition; but she dies on the dance floor, a martyr to black music. Both films were effectively heightened by chiaroscuro lighting of a quality that seldom graced feature movies.

6. During the Harlem Renaissance, black genre works often were influenced by white intellectuals. Here Dudley Murphy, Duke Ellington, and Carl Van Vechten (left to right) confer on the set of Black and Tan. (International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House)

A few musical films made outside Hollywood provided still more promising avenues of black expression within the context of a medium dominated by whites. The best single case is Dudley Murphy's The St. Louis Blues (1928). Its gritty black mood emanated from the musical contributions of W.C. Handy, Jimmy Mordecai, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Bessie Smith. It was as though Murphy served only as a neutral vehicle which carried the black imagery to the screen.

Five years later, another combination of cinematically inexperienced blacks joined Murphy to produce a unique film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1933). O'Neill's play mixed psychological depth with racial grotesques through the treatment of a black hero, who aimed beyond traditionally accepted black channels of endeavor. Murphy's film became an instrument through which white writers, and black musicians and performers combined to construct a black film. Paul Robeson, Fredi Washington, and Frank Wilson starred in the black roles and Rosamond Johnson scored the music, using traditional black themes, motifs, and styles.

Many Hollywood movies that followed treated Negroes with awareness if not sensibility, with politesse if not equality, and affection if not understanding. Nevertheless, these films of the depression years amounted to a quantum jump from the old-fashioned racial metaphors of the previous decade. These gestures toward a liberalized cinema promised enough to attract larger black audiences into 1930s movie palaces. As a result, during the Great Depression, producers of race movies lost ground to their Hollywood adversaries. The black press, motivated by increased studio and theater advertising and loyalty to black actors, cheered the trend. In contrast to the Hollywood product, race movie makers appeared more than ever as inept, erratic mavericks.

The trendy black images ranged broadly, if not deeply. Lewis Milestone's Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933) featured a black hobo among its down-and-outers. A cycle of exposés of horrible prison conditions featured black prisoners. Etta Moten and Ivie Anderson sang important songs in Gold Diggers of 1933, Flying Down to Rio (1933), and A Day at the Races (1937). Louis Armstrong and Martha Raye's raucous interracial number in Artists and Models (1937) shocked southern censors. Stepin Fetchit, the archfoe of the black bourgeoisie, worked steadily, though with ever narrowing range. Following a trend set by MGM's Trader Horn (1931), the worst painted-savage stereotypes faded from major movies, although they continued to survive in the "B" pictures shot on the backlots of "poverty row." A few movies depicted the South in unflattering terms and its Negroes as less than happy with their lot. Among these were Cabin in the Cotton (1932), I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Slave Ship, Jezebel (1938), and The Little Foxes (1941). Black boon companions grew more humane in Dirigible (1931), Broadway Bill (1934), O'Shaughnessy's Boy (1937), Prestige (1932), The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), and especially Massacre (1934). A few genuinely fine roles appeared: Clarence Brooks's Haitian doctor in John Ford's Arrowsmith, Fredi Washington's wistful mulattoes in Imitation of Life (1934) and One Mile from Heaven (1937), Muse's angry rebel and Daniel Haynes's big-house butler in So Red the Rose, Hattie McDaniel's prickly servants in Alice Adams (1935), The Mad Miss Manton (1938), and Gone with the Wind (1939), and Clinton Rosamond's outraged father in Golden Boy (1939).

7. The marshalling of black creative forces outside of Hollywood allowed the commanding presence of Paul Robeson (right), here with Dudley Digges, to come to the screen as The Emperor Jones. (© United Artists)

A sample taken from twenty months at mid-decade reveals the broad sweep of change in Hollywood Negro roles during the New Deal. Despite the changing times, some traditional roles persisted. Old Southern legends were faithfully served by Bill Robinson's dancing servants in The Little Colonel (1935) and The Littlest Rebel, along with nostalgic relics such as Edward Sutherland's Mississippi (1935). Stepin Fetchit's career reached high gear in a string of Fox's celebrations of rural folk life such as Steam Boat Round the Bend (1935), David Harum (1934), Judge Priest (1934), and The County Chairman (1934). Bullets or Ballots (1936) and Hooray for Love (1935) brought Negroes into urban contexts through Louise Beavers's "numbers' queen" and Bill Robinson's street-dandy. John Ford's The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) depicted black soldiers as well as slaves. A few Broadway successes brought strong black roles to Hollywood intact, among them Edward Thompson's "Slim" in The Petrified Forest (1936), Leigh Whipper's "Crooks" in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939), and Rex Ingram's "De Lawd" and "Hezdrel" roles in Marc Connelly's fable of black folk religion, The Green Pastures (a less than total success among black critics). Universal's remake of Showboat (1936) brought "Joe" to the screen in the person of Paul Robeson. And Fritz Lang and Mervyn LeRoy made indictments of lynching, Fury (1936) and They Won't Forget (1937), although each was weakened by placing blacks on the periphery rather than depicting them as victims of mobs.

8. The Petrified Forest was one of dozens of films made during the Great Depression that competed with race movies by reflecting a trend toward more significant black roles. Here Edward Thompson as "Slim" (right) is part of Duke Mantee's (Humphrey Bogart) outlaw band. (© Warner Brothers)

Black critics and audiences waffled. On the one hand they were happy to see more blacks on the screen, but on the other, they fretted over Hollywood's superficiality and its ignorance of black life.

David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind grew into the media event most symptomatic of black division over the merits of a Hollywood movie. Nominally a film version of Margaret Mitchell's overweight novel of the South during Reconstruction, the movie quickly developed a split personality. Selznick was torn between the conflicting goals of wishing to accommodate to liberal political trends by having (according to a memorandum) "the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger," at the same time that he was striving for historicity and genuine Southern ambience.

To achieve this all but impossible ambition, Selznick hired experts —Atlanta architect, artist, and antiquarian Wilbur G. Kurtz and Susan Myrick of the Macon Telegraph —to authenticate details of regional atmosphere and racial etiquette. They saved the film from countless errors of manners, accents, and clichés, such as warning the company against having the slaves rise in song; in the latter episode, they worked in cooperation with Hall Johnson, the black choirmaster. From the North, writers Sidney Howard, Ben Hecht, O.H.P. Garrett, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in deference to modern tastes, elided references to the Ku Klux Klan and depictions of the Yankee army as marauders and looters. The hoped-for result, Selznick felt, would be that authentic black maids, mammies, and field hands were considerably more humanized than those appearing in earlier Southern genre films.

Despite its brilliance as a work of popular art, Gone with the Wind inspired both black praise and calumny, revealing a still unsatisfied hunger for a black genre cinema. On one side many urban blacks agreed with a Pittsburgh Courier critic who found that "much of it was distasteful to the Negro race." On the other, Bill Chase of the Amsterdam News responded with exaggerated disbelief. "Ye gads, what's happening to Hollywood?" he wrote. Several writers focused on the black acting, especially that of Hattie McDaniel, who made mammy "more than a servant" and won an Oscar. She tipped still more black opinion in favor of the movie.

This is not to say Gone with the Wind revolutionized Hollywood into a center of black genre filmmaking. Yet, the film stood astride two epochs. In the period between the wars, black roles had slowly moved away from tradition. With the coming of World War II, the liberal drift became part of the rhetoric of Allied war aims.

Gone with the Wind admirably expressed the tension between the two poles of racial ideals–tradition and change–with the result that on the eve of World War II, Afro-Americans responded to cinema in two distinct ways, both of them new departures from convention. They tempered their customary cynical view of Hollywood with a renewed faith in their own ability to change Hollywood through social and political pressure. Perhaps as a result, many black filmmakers lost direction and affiliated with white "angels." Micheaux joined first with Frank Schiffman, then with Jack Goldberg. William Alexander affiliated with Emmanuel Glucksman; Spencer Williams with Alfred Sack; George Randol and Ralph Cooper with Harry Popkin; and so on.

Thus by the late 1930s independent filmmakers reawakened interest in black genre by simply recreating Hollywood genres, i.e., gangster movies infused with black cops, crooks, judges, and jailers. Where the first generation of black filmmakers had examined black social issues, the new crop, including many whites, focused on tried and proven Hollywood genre formulas recast in black form, with an admixture of racial awareness. Thus, on the eve of World War II, more than ever black film would be identified by its content more than technique. Like the western and the gangster film, black genre emerged from a melding of legendary, ritual themes, aspiration, solidarity, and pride, set in immediately identifiable locales.

Exceptions to the trend were the expatriates Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker. Baker, who had gone to Paris in a chorus line in the 1920s, became a sensation in the Folies Bergére. Eventually she turned up in a string of exotic primitive roles in such vehicles as The Siren of the Tropics (1928), Princess Tam-Tam (ca. 1938), and Zou-Zou (ca. 1935), all of which failed, in the words of one critic, because her work "renders the Negro ignoble." While Robeson was more thoughtful in choosing roles, he was rarely more successful. Most of his British movies celebrated sentimental working class comradeship, African folklore, and British colonialism with equal vigor. King Solomon's Mines (1937), Sanders of the River (1935), Jericho (1937), Proud Valley (1940) —each exploited his presence while avoiding his politics. The void in Hollywood and abroad left the field to the independent race movie makers.

9. Obscured by the success of Gone With the Wind, Way Down South pioneered by giving credits to black writers Langston Hughes and Clarence Muse. (© RKO; National Film Archive, London)

10. Overseas films contributed little to black genres. Josephine Baker's exotic primitive movies such as The Flame of Paris differed only marginally from Hollywood stereotypes. (Hoffberg Productions)

However, economic stress had driven some black producers, among them Micheaux, into bankruptcy and resulting dependence upon white money. After 1931, blacks raised capital from Frank Schiffman of Harlem's Apollo Theatre, Robert Levy of Reol, and white Southern distributors like Ted Toddy and Alfred Sack. By the end of the decade, the Goldberg brothers, Arthur Dreifuss, Edgar G. Ulmer, Arthur Hoerle, Emmanuel Glucksman, Harry and Leo Popkin, Robert Savini, Ben Rinaldo, and Jed Buell, all white, prevailed.

The new generation of race movies revived interest in the genre precisely because they were like Hollywood movies. Although they seemed less black, these films did try to include blacks in the American myth, through inclusion of the total subculture, rather than integration of individuals. Because the films crackled with black heroes, heavies, cops, grifters, boxers, and scientists, the black audiences could claim the right to these roles in real life.

Not since the 1920s had black critics held such high hopes for race movies. Early Depression movies had been bad, including Micheaux's Ten Minutes to Live (1932), The Girl from Chicago (1932 ), and The Exile (1931); Rosebud's A bsent (1931); Harry Gant's Georgia Rose (1931 ); Donald Heywood's parody of Garveyism, The Black King (1933); and Robert Mintz's and Louis Weiss's Drums O'Voodoo (1933), the first movie based on the work of a black dramatist, J. Augustus Smith.

But by 1938 technically competent whites directed black actors in a manner similar to that of a "B" picture assembly line. Gangster films like Ulmer's Moon over Harlem (1939) and Dreifuss's Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941) combined studio proficiency with a black social message, calling for sacrifice and solidarity. Only Micheaux and Spencer Williams wrestled with their white "angels" for control. Labor usually divided along the lines of white enterprise and black creativity. On the West Coast, for example, Million Dollar Pictures formed around white Hollywoodians Harry and Leo Popkin, black actor Ralph Cooper, and black director George Randol. The gangster subgenre included Dark Manhattan (1937), Gang War (ca. 1938), Bargain with Bullets (1937), Underworld (1937), Mystery in Swing (1938), and Double Deal (1939). In a fair example, Ralph Cooper played a doctor torn between a decision to patch up crooks or to open a free medical clinic in Harlem.

A small western subgenre including Harlem Rides the Range (1939), Bronze Buckaroo (1938), Two Gun Man from Harlem (1939), and Harlem on the Prairie (1938) combined a black mythic hero, Herb Jeffries, as a singing cowboy with the blackface routines of Flournoy Miller and Mantan Moreland. Sports autobiography was another briefly popular subgenre. Ty Cobb, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth and other athletes had made such movies. But these could not match Keep Punching (1939) and Spirit of Youth (1937), the "bios" of black champions Henry Armstrong and Joe Louis, respectively. In particular, Louis's religiosity and intense shyness brought the metier of boxing across on film.

On the eve of World War II, race movies marched awkwardly out of step with liberal war aims. Afro-Americans and liberal whites shared with international allies a "popular front" against Fascist racism. Race movies seemed to be reactionary vestiges of past oppression. Marxists picketed Micheaux's God's Step Children (1938) because it "slandered Negroes, holding them up to ridicule." The black press condemned Mantan Moreland's Dixie National film, Mr. Washington Goes to Town (1940), as "undignified," in the mildest of many assaults on the genre.

Micheaux made one last attempt to return to independent black roots. Along with Colonel Hubert Julian, the "black eagle" who had sought to duplicate Lindbergh's flight, Micheaux attempted to produce a pair of black-financed melodramas. But after a disastrous premiere in New York dutifully attended by white politicians and celebrities, the genre lapsed into a wartime coma, followed by Micheaux's final film, a few Goldberg and Toddy releases, a few of William Alexander's All-America films, and a rush of Louis Jordan musicals.

The race movies had no place in the war years' optimistic integrationism. The NAACP called its national convention in Hollywood, in 1942, to make new demands. Walter White, the Executive Secretary, counsel Wendell Willkie, the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate, and several liberal Hollywood whites agreed to improve the quality and quantity of black roles and to expand opportunities in the studio crafts. Variety ran the page one story headed BETTER BREAKS FOR NEGROES IN H'WOOD. Unfortunately for race movie makers, the plans backfired, smothering black movies save for "soundies," the sixteen millimeter films made for jukeboxes by black Ivy League football star, Fritz Pollard, and a handful of others

11. By the end of the 1930s, race movies like Million Dollar's While Thousands Cheer exploited famous athletes and performers, rather than pressing social issues.

In the early 1940s many Hollywood Negro roles took on touches of dignity, courage, and humanity, a trend that was given modest direction by the NAACP agreement. The servants in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes were like griots of family lore. The plot of In This Our Life (1942) turned on the fate of a young black law student. Much of the mood of Casablanca (1942) was set by Dooley Wilson's "Sam." Each of the war dramas, Sahara, Crash Dive, Bataan, and Lifeboat, all made in 1943, placed a Negro in the fight against Fascism. William Wellman's film of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox Bow Incident (1943) included Leigh Whipper among the victims of a lynching. Mission to Moscow (1943) featured Whipper as Haile Selassie, while Stormy Weather focused on another historical figure, bandmaster Jim Europe. MGM's Cabin in the Sky was an all-black musical. At least six Army training films attempted to deal with racial problems in the military

12. During World War II, the international struggle against Fascism stirred a liberal trend that racially integrated the United States Navy on film many years before official policy introduced integration to the troops. In Crash Dive, Benny Carter (right) is in the front rank of an amphibious assault. (© 20th Century-Fox; Nederlands Stichting Filmmuseum)

The extent of changes in wartime racial attitudes is seen in the black response to two 1940s films that might have been lauded for efforts in social progress in the 1930s. Instead, Walt Disney's Song of the South (1946) and Julien Duvivier's Tales of Manhattan (1942) brought down the wrath of organized Negroes because of their whimsically old-fashioned roles played by James Baskette and Paul Robeson.

The black genre in the 1940s survived only in documentary film. From the days of World War I combat footage by the Signal Corps to the New Deal, the government had done little with film. Commercial producers had limited their work to pseudo-anthropological jungle films or, like the prestigious March of Time, sensationalist exposés of voodoo in Harlem and acrobatic Lindy Hoppers at the Harvest Moon Ball. During World War II, however, the War Department chose film as the medium for explaining to the troops Why We Fight. Among the projects, a training film, The Negro Soldier, fell to a young black filmmaker, Carlton Moss.

A well-constructed celebration of the contribution of Afro-Americans to their country's military history, The Negro Soldier was applauded by black journalists and went into commercial release under the auspices of the Office of War Information. The war years' liberalism eventually inspired a minor cycle of government films; among them The Negro College in Wartime (ca. 1944), The Negro Sailor (ca. 1944), and Henry Brown, Farmer (1943) are noteworthy for black contributions to them. The trend extended to Hollywood where Gjon Mili's Jammin' the Blues (1944), an evocative jazz documentary, was Life's "Movie of the Week."

By the age of integration, roughly between 1947 and 1965, black film identity blended with a general American identity. The heroes were Sidney Poitier, for his convincing portrayals of Negroes on the margin of white life, and Louis Armstrong, the perpetual ambassador to the white world. The period had grown out of the wartime exposure of the gap between American racial ideals and social facts. The liberal momentum of the war years continued in a postwar cycle of message movies in which bigotry was the heavy. Lost Boundaries (1949) examined Negroes who had "passed" into the white world; Pinky similarly traced a light-skinned girl's return to the black world; Home of the Brave (1949), shot in secret because of its volatile theme, observed the impact of racism on a black soldier's psyche; Clarence Brown's version of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1949) looked at racism from inside the white social conscience; No Way Out (1950) followed a race riot from the viewpoint of black victims; Harry and Leo Popkin's The Well (1951) showed how racism could polarize a village.

13. After World War II, racial liberalism became so fashionable that Stanley Kramer rushed Home of the Brave into secret production in order to beat the competition. (© United Artists)

In the 1950s, as though blacks had been admitted to the mainstream of American life, movie themes emphasized individual attainment rather than group solidarity. No less than two film accounts of the Harlem Globetrotters appeared, along with The Joe Louis Story (1953) and The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). While Sidney Poitier's career ebbed and flowed, three incisive studies of race relations stood out: Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Defiant Ones (1958), and the moving Lilies of the Field, for which he won an Oscar. Less successful was Darryl Zanuck's Island in the Sun (1957), which concealed rather than illuminated racial conflict. With uneven success, Hollywood tried to capture the black musical achievement on film in Carmen Jones (1954), Porgy and Bess (1959), and Young Man with a Horn (1950).

14. Because so much postwar film spoke for changing white politics rather than black hopes, Richard Wright took his own production unit abroad to make a personally controlled film version of his novel Native Son. Nevertheless, a fanciful dream sequence hindered the impact of the message.(© Classic Pictures; Library of Congress)

Black movies as a genre moved to the periphery of the industry in these twenty years of postwar liberalism. Richard Wright produced a film version of his novel, Native Son (1951 ), in Argentina, save for a few atmospheric shots of Chicago. Leroi Jones's (Imamu Baraka) Dutchman (1967) was completed in England because of the filmmaker's wish for freedom from constraints. Shirley Clarke's The Cool World (1964), a grainy street story set in black Harlem, found its main market in college rentals or as a retitled exploitation item. Marcel Camus's Orfeu Negro (1960) came from Brazil, and gave ominous new meaning to color. Larry Peerce's One Potato, Two Potato (1965), which managed to overcome the strictures of the message movie format, was infused with elements of black life, largely through sharply etched performances by Vinette Carroll and Robert Earl Jones. Among these social movies were a pair of stage successes: Purlie Victorious (1964) and Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the former a broad satire on the old South, the latter a claustrophobic, real study of a black family strained by a move to suburbia. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) was the best of several liberal morality tales. The tensions of the period were exploited by a substratum of contrivances that included Hugo Haas's Night of the Quarter Moon (1959), Stephen Borden's French import, My Baby is Black (1965), and Larry Buchanan's Free, White, and 21 (1963).

Nevertheless, for black intellectuals and prospective filmmakers, the period held promise. Both the NAACP and federal agencies pressured studios into hiring Negroes. As a result, Afro-Americans entered the industry in greater numbers–Harry Belafonte in production, Wendell Franklin in direction, Quincy Jones in music, Vincent Tubbs in publicity. Also, blacks in ever increasing numbers began to appear in complex and varied roles, including Poitier's psychiatrist in Pressure Point (1962); Sammy Davis's hip inmate in Convicts Four (1962); Maidie Norman's rational maid in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962); the three or four dozen extras in Kisses for My President (1964); the stolid presence of Jim Brown; Poitier's reaching for breadth in Lilies of the Field, The Long Ships (1964), The Organization (1971), The Lost Man (1969), and in the ill-timed and therefore misjudged Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967); the toadies played by Sammy Davis and Woody Strode in Sergeants Three (1962) and Two Rode Together (1961), and John Ford's timid movie about the Buffalo Soldiers, Sergeant Rutledge (1960); Stanley Kramer's sermonic allegory, The Defiant Ones. These films attracted black audiences, and their studios distributed advertising dollars accordingly; in return, they earned revenues from black neighborhoods

15. Sidney Poitier's career spanned almost the entire postwar era. Poitier contended that as one of few black stars, he had a duty to portray only positive images, as in The Lost Man. (©Universal Studios)

Yet so little that could be called "black film" grew out of this period, perhaps because a rebirth of hope of eradicating past racial discrimination made uniquely black film statements counterproductive. One gem appeared: Michael Roemer's Nothing But a Man, a thin little film that caught the mood of rural black Alabama with such care and precision that one major urban library included it in its documentary collection, and James P. Murray, critic of the Amsterdam News, called it "the greatest of black motion pictures."

The situation changed drastically in the late 1960s. The period was marked not by a big cinema event but rather by a gradual shift of audience attention toward bolder, more political black films in keeping with a changing political climate abroad in the nation. Jones's Dutchman received keen attention from intellectuals, if not general audiences. Stanley Kramer's well-meaning Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was greeted by black laughter. Van Peebles's Story of a Three Day Pass (1968) attracted international attention. Radicals greeted The Battle of Algiers (1967) with strident cheers. And the TV news was filled with newsfilm of nationwide urban streetfighting. The age of the "blaxploitation" movie had begun, without forethought.

A new crop of films, among them Shaft (1970), adopted new modes and elements that played to a newly aroused audience. Shaft, the product of an interracial crew, but black-focussed advertising, was close enough to white heroic models to inspire "crossover" sequels, yet it deeply touched black urban youth with its specific references to their way of life. The hero, as played by Richard Roundtree, personified the outlaw whose streetwise skills served his society in symbiotic ways as a moralist-cop. Shaft was good for black movies. While it was typical of many black genre films, an aesthetique du cool gave it both identity and an advertising angle. Shaft's peculiarly black urban dress and flair freed him from the white heroic mode, thus recreating the detective-outlaw of film noir in black terms. Isaac Hayes's theme music, for which he earned an Oscar, sharpened the hero's identity.

Among other forms, Sounder and The Learning Tree (1968), which emerged from pastoral sources, were in the style of old fugitive slave narratives and spirituals that promised a land across Jordan. Both Martin Ritt and Gordon Parks, respectively, ćreated pastoral genre films by combining a bucolic pictorial sense with a sure knowledge of their characters.

Even before Mark Twain's Huck Finn or the migration of the black folk legend, Staggerlee, to northern cities, Americans had enjoyed picaresque tales whose visionary heroes bobbed atop the currents of opportunity. This literary genre came to the black screen in the form of such films as Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baad-asssss Song (1971), the film version of Faulkner's The Reivers (1969), and Raymond St. Jacques's The Book of Numbers (1972), each a spirited form of the familiar tale of the American trickster-hero

16. But for production problems and limited distribution that sapped its energy, Leroi Jones's (Imamu Baraka) Dutchman might have led a late 1960s movement toward a new black cinema. (Gene Persson; Nederlands Stichting Filmmuseum)

17. Pastoral films such as Sounder spoke to both black and white ("crossover") audiences through heroes who bore up under adversity with quiet dignity. (© 20th Century-Fox)

18. The best films of the "blaxploitation" era were those like Cotton Comes to Harlem that were deeply rooted in a black ambience. (© United Artists)

So important was this subgenre to its audience that inferior attempts earned millions of dollars from black moviegoers in rundown urban theaters. Counterfeits of white films provided a neat black moral twist, a certain fresh absurdity, and another source of black films. Among them were Cool Breeze (The Asphalt Jungle) (1972), Blacula (Dracula) (1972), Abby (The Exorcist) (1975), and The Lost Man (The Informer). Others, like Chester Himes's Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), were based on turbulent black novels. Even failures, either artistic or financial, like Soul Soldier (1972), Honky (1971), Georgia, Georgia (1972), Black Jesus (1971), The Landlord (1970), Leo the Last (1970), The Angel Levine (1970), and The Bus is Coming (1971) were not without interest, merit, or a sense of purpose.

Unfortunately, by the mid-1970s, the mood that had encouraged "blaxploitation" movies flagged before serious filmmakers took up neglected themes such as the familial centers of black life. Only a handful of these, like Claudine (1974) or Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), caught critical attention, and none earned outstanding profits. African subjects were rarely treated, and of these, only Ossie Davis's Kongi's Harvest (1971) came close to success. Except for the St. Claire Bourne-Woodie King poorly distributed feature, The Long Night (1976), no documentarist ventured into theatrical film. Black music on film never grew beyond compilations like Wattstax (1973) and Soul to Soul (1971), and Hollywood biographies such as Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Leadbelly (1975). At the end of the cycle, then, few films of range and integrity stood out as alternatives to "blaxploitation" films.

The young black audiences who had originally supported "blaxploitation" films soon lost interest and shifted their allegiance to other genres including science fiction or martial arts films, which traded on violent revenge themes set in Oriental locales. Black youth, then, recoiled from fantasies of lust and power, choosing instead symbols from another culture that provided metaphors for Afro-American experience despite their Oriental settings. Martial arts films offered blacks comic strips of pure vengeance dramatized in a choreography of violence unobtainable within the literal context of American social realism. In an effort to recapture the youth market, black actors even began to imitate, without success, the film style of Run Run Shaw, Raymond Chow and other Asians.

By 1975 only foundation-supported and public television documentarists broke from the pattern of exploitation. Carlton Moss, Madeleine Anderson, and St. Claire Bourne, whose credits included a rare interview film with Elijah Muhammad, were among the successful. Senior among them was William Greaves, who had worked in race movies, in Hollywood, for the National Film Board of Canada, and with television. Others, however, like Ben Land of Howard University, who made a film that was broadcast as a segment of NET's Color Us Black (1968), rarely worked at all.

19. Herbert Danska (far left) sets up a shot for Right On! with actor-poets Gylan Kain, David Nelson, and Felipe Luciano (left to right). The film, a pastiche of cinema verité film, poetry, and improvisational theater, failed to inspire followers. (© Leacock-Pennebaker; courtesy, Herbert Danska)

After more than fifty years of a hot-and-cold history, black genre film, at least on theater screens, lapsed into stasis. Both apart from and dangerously close to Hollywood, black genre filmmakers remained fearful of usurpation, hopelessly dependent on funds from outside black circles, and therefore driven to seek wider audiences through so-called "crossover" movies. This, in turn, rendered them equally fearful of white condemnation, condescension, and overpraise. Nevertheless, black genre film has survived. The battle of a small racial minority to see its image and to define its identity on the screen has not been lost. Enduring, then, was a kind of victory.

Unfortunately, black genre film failed to penetrate the television medium, which in the last twenty-five years has gradually determined the format of motion pictures in America. Commercial television first attracted postwar audiences away from theaters, then began to make use of Hollywood's empty soundstages. Thereafter, film for theater distribution, in order to survive, reached for specialized audiences such as the "youth market" or "blaxploitation" fans, revived moribund genres such as horror films and science fiction, and larded their products with closeup violence and sex. At the same time more prestigious films explored social controversies, brought distinguished novels to the screen, or simply advanced the state of the art, attracting audiences in the face of the general decline. In contrast, the audience for television was an undifferentiated mass measured only by gross tabulations of audience samples expressed as "ratings."

Because ratings failed to reveal the size or tastes of the black audience, it was an easy matter to create television programs that avoided racial matters. Moreover, in commercial TV's long-established system of allocating frequencies to stations that based their profits on selling advertising time, an oligopoly of three networks has competed for a fixed audience. The result was a generation of conservative programming that depicted the broadest norms of American life. This tendency excluded references to Afro-American society as too precious or too deviant. Only a few local stations such as radio's WLIB in Harlem attempted to cultivate Negro audiences, and not until the 1950s did advertisers direct campaigns toward black broadcasters.

During World War II the liberal drift that had influenced movies also touched broadcasting. The Office of War Information urged the production of shows like Mutual's prime time My People (1943) and local programs like Victory Through Brotherhood (1943). Wartime dramatic programming joined the trend with such experiments as CBS's 1943 summer-replacement situation comedy, Blueberry Hill, featuring Hattie McDaniel, Mantan Moreland, and Savannah Churchill.

New York's stations led the way in local black broadcasting. WMCA's talk show, Roi Ottley's New World A'Comin' (1944) and its summer replacement, the Hall Johnson Choir, were followed by WNYC's song fest, The Voice of the City (1944) with Josh White. Despite a few old-fashioned shows such as the Blue Network's A unt Jemima, the way seemed clear for a black penetration of broadcasting after the war.

Yet no one accurately predicted the impact of television on American life. Columnist Ed Sullivan promised that "television will not disturb the balance of show business," even as the makers of "soundies" made plans to dump more than one thousand of their titles on the TV market. The issue remained in doubt as late as 1949.

By 1950, the future of television became more clear, and with clarity came a more precise estimate of a possible black place in the medium. As early as July 1949, the New Republic predicted that, in view of TV's control by advertisers and the Federal Communications Commission, both of which were responsive to social pressures, the Negro should be able to open up television as a potent medium of black expression.

As if to test the prediction, the NAACP challenged CBS by setting out to drive from the air Amos V Andy, a popular radio show that made its TV debut in 1950. For years Negroes winced at the show and yet enjoyed its broad satire of black life. But its coming to visible life on television was intolerable, no matter what changes sponsors, creators, or cast contrived. Eventually the NAACP campaign extended to sponsors, network, and press. The result was that the first black incursion into TV defined blacks negatively rather than as a developing black genre. Lost in the clatter was WOR-TV's Harlem Detective (1953), with classical actor William Marshall in the title role. Problems of sponsorship and blacklisting helped cancel the show without a murmur from black pressure groups.

The fate of Harlem Detective and Amos 'n' Andy became a model for the immediate future. Sponsors' timidity and political pressures combined to dampen the prospects for a black TV genre. Rod Serling's script about a Southern lynching was twisted into a relatively bland western. Sponsor pressure censored Josh White's singing of "The Free and Equal Blues." Sometimes, when advertising agencies did not intrude, southern stations themselves censored programs, among them ABC's "Close-Up" series film, Walk in My Shoes (1963), a sketch of black plight seen through a day in the life of a Harlem cabdriver.

The age of bland racial programs came to an end only as a result of the street fighting that gripped American cities from 1965-68. Network journalists brought strident images of black insurrection into American living rooms with, in the words of the NAACP's Clarence Mitchell, "a profoundly constructive effect." In the mind of one producer, television became "the chosen instrument of the black revolution." Indeed, the medium had greater impact with blacks than with whites. For many blacks, TV was their only source of information: more than one quarter of the nation's poor blacks watched television eight hours or more each day and black teenagers watched it five times as much as white teenagers.

Nevertheless, by mid-decade, I Spy was the only adventure show with a black lead, while CBS's In Black America (1967) series functioned with a lily-white staff. Other prime time series managed token integration– Mod Squad, The Outcasts, Adam 12–while Hal Kanter's Julia stood out as the only show with a single black star. Variety praised the trend as long overdue but still only a "multimedia stereotype." In later years the type would broaden to include black junkmen, teenagers, women, and petite bourgeoisie.

20. The television spy serial, I Spy, pioneered in bringing Bill Cosby's unthreatening and winsome persona to a "crossover" white audience. Here Cosby confers with Sheldon Leonard on a foreign location. (/ Spy Production Records, Research Library, UCLA)

At last in 1976, Roots by Alex Haley inspired a TV version which promised to break the dull trend of black broadcasting. Yet the pressures of big-time publishing and TV helped to so alter the project that any well-read viewer would be dissatisfied with the result. Haley explained the pressures against developing a TV black genre from Roots : "Multi-million dollar book-publications and TV-production plans had been set irreversibly into motion, and there was finally no way to resist them any longer."

In other words, the black media event of the 1970s was rushed on the air, shaped by pressures outside its own integrity. The fact that it pulled an audience of 130 million became meaningless; its success merely pointed to the fact that there was no black TV genre. Certainly the actors did little afterwards. As Georg Stanford Brown (Tom the blacksmith) noted, "there just isn't anything of consequence to do." But David Wolper, producer of the series, found himself in an opposite situation. "I'm busier than ever trying to keep up with the response to Roots' ' he said. "And I'm starting on Roots II."

Even at the beginning, Roots as a TV project was stimulated more by the medium than by black concerns. In summer 1974, as the first fragments of Haley's book broke into magazines, Wolper Productions' Stan Margulis was searching for a rival to Universal's mini-series, Rich Man, Poor Man by Irwin Shaw. After Margulis and writer Bill Blinn (creator of Star sky and Hutch) began adapting the unpublished Roots, they moved further from Haley's story because they based their draft on Haley's methodology lectures, rather than on the story itself.

The evidence of Roots' s weighty impact is impressive. A.C. Nielsen's rating figures are widely quoted. Black travel agencies have initiated Roots tours. Pop-genealogy books abound. Public funds are allocated for " Roots projects." White ethnic groups have taken up the search for their own roots. Publishers and community colleges alike hustle to grind out study materials and audio-visual aids designed to revive black history courses. Public Broadcasting's Black Journal interviewed Haley. And ABC is preparing not only sequels, but programs on the saga of Haley's research and motion pictures for possible theater distribution.

Notwithstanding the notion of Roots as a media event, its heady success, and its extended career in sequels and revivals, the series of films which described a black epic from Africa to Tennessee suggests caution with respect to an eventual black TV genre. Where closed circuit "guerrilla" television offers hope for future independent TV, for the moment the influence of advertisers, the vast sums that change hands in television deals, and the resulting urge to seek a "crossover" audience of millions hold out scant hope for the development of a black TV genre. As the history of motion pictures has shown, only small films made by committed filmmakers with finite resources have resulted in effective genre films. The experience of TV leads to the same conclusion: the smaller, uncelebrated public television programs allow for small-group control, which in turn results in viable genre offerings.