African Americans and film

• SIGNIFICANCE: Cinematic representations of African Americans have been the subject of debate and contest since the inception of the film industry. Struggles over stereotypes within film and over who controls the production of images of African Americans are firmly linked to broad cultural understandings and conceptions of race.

The social and political stakes of film for African Americans were dramatically expressed early on, in the reception of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation. As the first full-length feature film, Birth of a Nation helped inaugurate the studio system, and Griffith’s work as director supplied some of the basic elements of cinematic grammar. The film represented African Americans in purely stereotypical roles (as happy and loyal slaves, mammies, bucks, and brutes) while glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. Because the film was released while lynching was at its peak, the material it portrayed raised some concern, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested the film. As Ed Guerrero notes in Framing Blackness (1993), screenings of the film were often preceded by people dressed as members of the Klan riding through towns, and there was a march of twenty-five thousand Klansmen through Atlanta, Georgia, on opening night. Although the NAACP was not able to prevent the film from being shown, it did succeed in bringing enough political and economic pressure to make Hollywood executives think twice before producing a film that celebrated organizations like the Klan.

Although Birth of a Nation may have presented an unusually virulent form of racism, stereotypical cinematic representations of African Americans would predominate in mainstream films for decades to come. However, these films never existed without contest or debate. Some African Americans believed that the best way to counter stereotypical representations was to protest in the courtrooms and streets; others decided to produce their own images. In the late 1920s and 1930s, a series of “race films” that were produced, written, and directed by Blacks attempted to present more realistic images of African Americans. Oscar Micheaux was the most famous of these filmmakers, releasing thirty-four films during a thirty-year period. Micheaux and the other independent Black filmmakers who were his contemporaries had very limited resources, and it was not always clear that their representations were any less stereotypical than those of their mainstream counterparts. Nevertheless, they did manage to address Black themes and to provide exposure for a large number of Black actors while explicitly addressing a Black audience.

Impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

Although this early independent Black film industry started to decline in the face of increased competition from Hollywood studios and the economic toll of the Great Depression, some of its concerns were eventually addressed by mainstream cinema. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements increasingly targeted Hollywood and helped create an environment in which some of the earlier depictions of African Americans were increasingly untenable. Stereotypes such as “mammies” and “bucks” never disappeared from Hollywood films, but they were eventually supplemented with more nuanced images of Blacks. Although mainstream films in the years immediately after Birth of a Nation tended to support the ideals of segregation, Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s had an integrationist ethic, which was marked most clearly by the growing stardom of African American Sidney Poitier in such films as Edge of the City (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958).

At the height of the Black Power movement, African American audiences expressed dissatisfaction with integrationist narratives that failed to address the contemporary realities of racism. This, coupled with Black political power and the severe financial problems that were facing the Hollywood studios, led to a new wave of Black-centered films that were released in the late 1960s and early 1970s and were labeled “blaxploitation” films because they were cheaply made and generally relied upon the same kinds of sexuality and violence that Hollywood used in its “exploitation” films.

Some of the most famous blaxploitation films, including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (1972), and Superfly (1972), featured supermasculine Black heroes who often had to fight against an oppressive social system. Occasionally, these heroes were women, including Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier in films such as Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Coffy (1973), who were just as macho as their male counterparts, Fred Williamson and Jim Brown. Although the depictions of strong African American heroes who were able to confront the problems surrounding them appealed to many Blacks, the films were criticized and protested for their tendency to reproduce stereotypical images of African Americans as prostitutes, pimps, and violent drug dealers. By the mid-1970s, the genre had died out, as Hollywood studios discovered that they could court African American audiences without relying on Black-centered films.

Backlash and Beyond

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, a conservative backlash against African American protests and gains (in the cinema as well as in the broader society) produced a series of films that openly relied upon racial stereotypes. However, films in which African Americans are presented solely as stereotypical or peripheral figures (such as the Rocky series, 1976–1990, or Caddyshack, 1980) were eventually joined by works from innovative Black filmmakers such as Robert Townsend and Spike Lee who achieved success in the 1980s and 1990s. Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987) was an explicit critique of Hollywood’s representations of African Americans. It follows the career of a young and talented Black actor who finds that there is plenty of work available in Hollywood, but only in stereotypical roles, as pimps, muggers, and so on.

The most powerful African American filmmaker to emerge in the 1980s was Spike Lee. Lee’s first commercial film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), which was criticized for its depiction of Black sexuality and its apparent acceptance of a Black woman’s rape, nevertheless presented African Americans as fully realized human beings in a Black-centered world. However, it was Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing that established him as one of the most important and influential directors of the decade. The film, which follows events that lead to the death of a Black man at the hands of White police officers, had tremendous box-office success although it was also the subject of immense controversy. It is widely credited with enabling the success of a variety of 1990s Black filmmakers such as Matty Rich, the Hughes Brothers, and John Singleton.

The 1990s saw a proliferation of Black-centered mainstream and independent films. Some of the most interesting of these films (such as Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, 1997, and John Singleton’s Rosewood, 1997) were intended, in part, to question or correct Hollywood’s past treatment of African Americans. Others, such as Kasi Lemmon’s Eve’s Bayou (1997), depict African American social worlds without any apology for the omission of White characters. Of course, African American characters were also present in a wide variety of films in which they were not always central to the narratives, and Black stereotypes resurfaced and were reconfigured in seemingly endless varieties. Just Cause (1995) and A Time to Kill (1996) in particular are remarkable for the ways in which they critique, reconfigure, and redeploy the figure of the Black brute/rapist. The tension between and within films in the 1990s and into the twentieth century serves as a condensed history of the always contested cinematic representations of African Americans.

The 2000s and 2010s produced films that unfolded the horrors of Black slavery. Although these type of films had been done in the past, these new works showed a more accurate representation of slavery. The 2013 film 12 Years a Slave, for instance, is a brutal and graphic account of African American slavery in the 1800s. Based on the memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, the film was received with praise. The film won several awards and introduced African American actors, such as Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o, to Hollywood and the film industry. The 2016 film The Birth of a Nation, directed by Nate Parker, is equally brutal. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was praised for its acting and cinematography. In the same year, the documentary 13th was released, which examined the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and how it allowed for the continuation of slavery for convicted prisoners. In 2019, Harriet was released, depiciting the true story of former slave and underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman. Actress Cynthia Erivo, who depicts the heroine, was nominated for a number of awards for her role, including an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

Writer and producer Jordan Peele’s successful 2017 film Get Out brought Black horror films to the forefront of Hollywood. The psychological horror depicts a young Black man as he meets the family of his White girlfriend and discovers a shocking and terryfing secret to the town. The film received critical acclaim, marked out Peele as a talented director and write, and set of a new age of Black horror. Following the success of the film, other horror films reflecting Black experience were released, including the 2020 film Antebellum and Peele’s 2022 film Nope.

Bibliography

Anderson, Lisa M. Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen. Rowman, 1997.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. Continuum, 1992.

Fernandez, Jay A. "Birth of a Nation and 10 Essential Movies about Slavery." Signature, 6 Oct. 2016, www.signature-reads.com/2016/10/birth-of-a-nation-and-10-essential-movies-about-slavery/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.

Guerrero, editor. Framing Blackness. Temple UP, 1993.

Lang, Robert. The Birth of a Nation. Rutgers UP, 1994.

Silva, Fred, editor. Focus on “The Birth of the Nation”. Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Thompson, Clifford. “The Past and the Iceberg Black Horror Films, Then and Now.” Cineaste, vol. 46, no. 2, spring 2021, pp. 36–40, EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=148761925&site=ehost-live. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.