Hollywood Black

CHAPTER
1

THE EARLY YEARS

DAWNING ERA OF FILMS AND STEREOTYPES

The movies started small. Kinetoscopes. Peep shows. Then nickelodeons. Those makeshift theaters in converted storefronts with wooden seats that charged five cents for admittance and were popular from 1905 to 1915. In time, those early venues for exhibiting motion pictures led to the grand movie palaces of the 1920s and ’30s. From the start, budding audiences were excited by the flickering images, by movement itself, and, eventually, narratives that gave shape, form, and dimension to the play of light and movement. Early two- to three-reel shorts, usually crude, often comic, told stories through the use of characters and situations that were frequently stereotyped depictions of various groups, ethnicities, and cultures. No racial group or ethnicity was more blatantly distorted than African Americans.

The history of African Americans in movies would be one in which for decades talented black entertainers struggled against their stereotyped roles to come up with often remarkable, even subversive performances that sent out covert messages. Surprisingly, the early history would also be one in which independent filmmakers working outside the evolving established film industry made entertaining and informative films that often moved away from prevailing caricatures. And in time, more African American filmmakers—working both outside and within Hollywood—would alter the look, the feel, the perspective, and the stories of American movies.

But mostly during the very early years, the movies were a parade of embarrassing, insulting, demeaning caricatures—often offsprings of the rigid stereotypes of the minstrel shows that had been so popular in the nineteenth century. Most offered portraits of the Negro as a comic, childlike, often enough grotesque Dark Other—an oddity in American life and culture. The titles of early shorts often tell a story themselves: The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1905), The Dancing Nig (1907), Ten Pickaninnies (1908), and the Rastus series: Rastus and Chicken (1911), Rastus among the Zulus (1913), and Rastus and the Game Cock (1913).

Occasionally, there were attempts to tell a story with some meaning. That was certainly the case with Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903). Adapted for the Edison Company from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, the short twelve-minute movie was a sentimental and simplified version with a title character who was supposedly the essence of Christian stoicism without any of the shading or significance of Stowe’s protagonist. Poor Tom looked like a self-sacrificing dolt. Worse, Tom was played by a white actor in blackface (the director himself), as would be the case with the portrayal of other black characters in the early silent period. Still, for better or worse, a black character and a type of black story had come to the infant movies.

Another attempt at a different direction for black movie images in this period was a long-lost 1913 film produced at Biograph (fragments of which were rediscovered in 1976), Lime Kiln Club Field Day. It spotlighted America’s first black mainstream star, Bert Williams, who had performed in all-black Broadway shows and then in The Ziegfeld Follies and later in the 1916 shorts Fish and A Natural Born Gambler. From the fragments of Lime Kiln Club Field Day, there emerges a story of a romance of sorts with Williams, in blackface, courting a young African American woman who also has two other suitors eager for her hand. Interestingly enough, none of the others are in blackface. But apparently the film was never completed, leaving us only with tantalizing bits and pieces.

Otherwise, stereotyped depictions of African Americans flourished and took root in American film, just as they had in American theater and popular culture in general. But nowhere did those distorted and damaging depictions have greater prominence or cultural impact than in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The epic twelve-reel feature film ran over three hours and was technically innovative with its bold, expressive lighting and editing; imaginative use of the close-up, the iris, and the split-screen shot; and dazzling displays of crosscutting to build suspense and pull the viewer into the story itself. It was a huge hit—the first of blockbusters with patrons lined up to see it around the country. Its leading players, Lillian Gish and Henry B. Walthall, emerged as stars.

The film dramatized the Old South with its supposedly idealized way of life, in which master and slave knew and accepted their racially designated places in society. Then it moved to the supposed chaos caused by the Civil War, and on the social upheaval and supposed white disenfranchisement of the Reconstruction Era. It ended with the “return” of order to the South with the emergence of “upright,” “stalwart” white Southern men in sheets and hoods. Drawn from Thomas Dixon’s novel and play, The Clansman, as well as his book The Leopard’s Spots, The Birth of a Nation celebrated the Ku Klux Klan and brought to shocking full life basic black stereotypes that would be a part of American cinema for decades to come: the renegade and dangerous black bucks and brutes, often in pursuit of white women; the loyal Southern mammy and tom; the comic coons; the restless, troubled mulatto. Adding to the grotesque distortions was the fact that, while some actual African Americans appeared in minor roles, the major black characters were again played by whites in blackface. Like other early filmmakers, Griffith did not view African American actors as even capable of playing themselves on-screen.

The film won critical praise as “an elaborate new motion picture taking on an ambitious scale” that was “an impressive new illustration of the scope of the motion picture camera,” wrote the New York Times. Upon seeing the film at a private White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly exclaimed; “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it all is terribly true.”

But while The Birth of a Nation was heralded as a technical masterwork, it would also be remembered as perhaps the most racially disturbing and distorted feature in American film history. Its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan led to an increase in the membership of the organization. Within the African American and liberal white communities, protests sprang up. Seeing the power of the filmic image as propaganda, the NAACP denounced the film and in a major campaign, sought to have it banned. Indeed, The Birth of a Nation was censored in several cities and ultimately banned in other areas.

THE BIRTH OF BLACK FILMMAKERS

In this era, the first black filmmakers appeared, determined to tell stories that saluted African American heroism and achievement, or that presented nuanced expressions of struggle and triumph. Earlier, the black filmmaker William Foster (also known as Juli Jones) had crafted such comedy shorts as The Railroad Porter (c. 1912) and Peter P. Jones had created newsreel-style films. Now other African American filmmakers stepped forward. Among the first to appear was actor Noble Johnson, one of the earliest African Americans to work successfully in Hollywood movies, beginning his screen career in such films as A Western Governor’s Humanity (1915), Kinkaid, Gambler (1916), and later appearing in Intolerance, The Ten Commandments, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and working in the sound era, too. Playing a variety of ethnic roles, he might appear in one film as a Native American and in others as an Arab, Egyptian, or African American. Sometimes his roles were short, little more than walk-ons. Sometimes he received billing in his movies; other times he didn’t. Still, the black press dubbed him “the race’s daredevil movie star” and “America’s premier Afro-American screen star.”

Tall, muscular, dashing, and handsome, Johnson had the stamp of “leading man” written all over him. But he knew that would not happen in Hollywood movies. Instead, he became one of the founders of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company in Los Angeles, which produced such three-reel black-cast films as The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition, The Trooper of Company K, and The Law of Nature, all emblems of pride, racial uplift, and accomplishments, and all produced for African American audiences. An advertisement in Los Angeles’s black newspaper The California Eagle read:

Like later independents throughout film history, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was ultimately plagued by problems of finance, distribution, and exhibition, and did not last long. Still, it led the way to the emergence of other filmmakers and companies determined to tell stories about African American life and to provide entertainment for black movie audiences.

MAKE WAY FOR MR. MICHEAUX

Interestingly enough, not long after its formation, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company’s search for material to produce led the way to the arrival of one of the most remarkable figures in movie history. His name: Oscar Micheaux. Born in 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, the fifth of thirteen children of a farmer and his wife, Micheaux moved to Chicago by age seventeen, for a time living with his brother, then setting out on his own, working a series of jobs: a laborer in the stockyards and the steel mills; the operator of his own shoeshine stand in a Chicago suburb. When he landed a job as a Pullman porter, he traveled widely and met a variety of moneyed people who proved helpful to him later. Afterward, he settled as a homesteader in South Dakota. Observing the world around him, absorbed in issues of race and class, power and disenfranchisement, influenced by Booker T. Washington, and committed to the idea of racial uplift and self-advancement, Micheaux set out on a writing career, using his own life and experiences as the basis of his work, including the collapse of his unhappy first marriage. Charismatic and fiercely ambitious, he wrote seven self-published novels, which he financed by establishing the Micheaux Book Corporation and selling stock in his company to whites in the area.

Micheaux’s novel The Homesteader drew the attention of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. It was the perfect vehicle for the studio, with a leading role for Noble. Negotiations began between Micheaux and George Johnson, the brother of Noble, who was Lincoln’s booking manager, but abruptly fell apart when the bold and brash Micheaux decided he’d write, direct, and produce the film himself. It’s doubtful that anyone could take him seriously. Who did this upstart with no experience in film and no knowledge of movie world basics of finance, distribution, and exhibition, think he was? He looked doomed to disappointment and failure—but no one knew Micheaux. He established the Micheaux Book and Film Company, and, against the odds, produced The Homesteader, released in 1919.

Thus began Micheaux’s extraordinary career, in which he daringly tackled serious, unusual themes; developed strong, independent heroines and noble forthright heroes; and created a star and studio system of his own making just as Hollywood was establishing its star system. He was one of the most provocative filmmakers—black or white—of his era, determined to make motion pictures that spoke to African American audiences in the most personal ways.

The Homesteader was followed by the startling and searing eight-reel Within Our Gates. Gathering funds from investors, he shot the exteriors of the film in and around Chicago, with interiors filmed at Capital City Studios. In many respects, Within Our Gates might be viewed as a race uplift drama (as most Micheaux films were in one form or another). In other respects, Within Our Gates was Micheaux’s response to The Birth of a Nation. The film told the story of young schoolteacher Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) who after a visit to Boston leaves to teach at the Piney Woods School for Negroes in Mississippi, only to return to Boston to raise funds to keep the school operating. In actuality, a school with precisely that name existed in Mississippi, which added a certain immediacy to the drama. In telling Sylvia’s backstory, Micheaux dove into the heart of the film as he dramatized the plight of his heroine’s adoptive father Jasper Landry (William Starks), a black sharecropper who has been cheated out of money by his unscrupulous white landlord. When he is falsely accused of killing that landlord, he and his family must flee from a hateful white mob. Ultimately, the farmer and his wife are lynched. Focusing on the family, Micheaux captured the fear and terror that African Americans in the South lived with at the hands of white mobs.

Micheaux also explored other issues in Within Our Gates. He masterfully turns the tables on Griffith’s portrayal of the threatening, bestial black man as rapist. In a gripping sequence, Micheaux’s heroine Sylvia finds herself cornered in a cabin by an older white man (the brother of the landlord), who sets out to rape her. At one point, he rips open her blouse only to see a scar on her chest that reveals to him that she is the child of a black woman he impregnated so many years earlier. He is about to ravage his own daughter. So much comes to mind in this scene, above all, the torturous, debasing history of African American women during slavery who found themselves brutalized by white slave owners.

Intertwined in his story is also Micheaux’s unflagging belief in education as a way upward and out of poverty and despair for Colored America, and his view of contradictory forces in the African American community, as seen in his turncoat black characters who sell themselves out to the whites in power. There is also a love story with a heroic black doctor (Charles D. Lucas) who comes to Sylvia’s defense. Micheaux cast his film with actors from the famed Lafayette Players, notably Evelyn Preer who worked in other films for Micheaux, including The Homesteader and his next film, The Brute (1920). In the end, Within Our Gates was a powerful dramatic social document that captivated and entertained African American audiences. The film, however, ran into problems with local censors in Chicago and afterward disappeared for decades. It was a lost film until the 1970s, when a print was discovered in Spain then restored in 1993 by the Library of Congress.

Then came The Symbol of the Unconquered