No one will challenge the fact that the permeation of ideas, standards of taste and information pictured in American motion pictures have been one of the most powerful, influencing worldwide media. Until the 1970’s, imagery was the period of a film industry, controlled by whites. Negroes themselves did not appear on the screen in actuality. White actors who smeared their faces with black grease-paint portrayed color people, presenting a source of comedy for the early American producers.
In 1905, in a short film, The Wooing and the Wedding of a Coon the producers described it as a “genuine Ethiopian comedy”, showing a color man and his bride as stupid and immoral. Following in 1907, one year after the founding of the Niagra Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the movie producers presented its second film on the “place of colored people” in white America. It was as if t his movie, The Masher, dealing with social relations between colored and white people, was made to answer Dr. Du Bois’ Niagra Proclamation that Negro Americans would not accept less than their full manhood rights.
As the Niagra Movement industry was established, Negroes depiction settled into two categories: films in which colored people were the butt-end of crude and insulting jokes and films in which colored people were portrays devoted slaves who “knew their place”.
To give Negroes a voice in the film industry and to state the case of American racists, D.W. Griffith used his unusual motion picture craftsmanship to create The Clansman, re-titled The Birth of a Nation. Gary Null, interviewing Charles Woods, reviews that “all of the stereotyped characters were present in The Birth of a Nation. D.W. Griffith gave us the black buck, the mammy, the coon – all of the images were there. The film, set during the Civil War, showed blacks in such a poor light that it glorified the formation of the Klan.” Although this was the first film to be so honored by Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States at the time, the film aroused a storm of protests throughout the Northern states, colored and white people uniting in attacking the picture because of its extreme bias and many historical inaccuracies.
Overall, the movie industries portrayed blacks on film as part of the normal course of looking exotic. Relating to their second-class status, national customs, and community mores, blacks have been equated with bad, inhuman or subhuman, and soulless. Although African Americans have also been denied the liberty, justice, and equality in films, whites have been pictured as good, mature, pure and civilized. From the early 1900s to the 1930s, Hollywood repeatedly turned to the “southern”, presenting an idyllic, pastoral region of large plantations and a gentry sustained by faithful slaves.
In motion pictures women have generally been depicted in a negative and usually sexual way. Sadly many times blacks were showed as the butt of jokes, cowards, and simpletons. If women were not seducers in films, then they were already preoccupied with a man. Also, African American women were shown as aggressive and Amazonian. Basically, these women were crass in the films and strongly depicted as women who did not value romance. African-American women specifically were given the roles of servants, maids, prostitutes, or other minor roles. Often, these women were stereotyped as “the sign of a whore.” (African American Women and Sexuality and in the Cinema) Everything about the films “[asserted] that black female characters [were] ‘sexual outside the context of marriage,’ more ‘sexually free,’ and ‘sexually ready’.” It was not until the late 1930’s and early 1940’s that African-American women were given bigger roles. In 1939, when Gone with the Wind came out, Hattie McDaniel, an African American woman, was given an academy award for Best Supporting actress. In 1954, Dorothy Dandridge was the first of women to be nominated for an academy award for Best Actress. Until Dorothy Dandridge there were no top African-American Women playing top bill roles on screen. Overall, it was in 1970 that African Americans were truly considered inside the Hollywood Entertainment Industry. Even then, the black women were shown in degrading images and most movies showed them as drug-taking, aggressive, intimidating women. They were not presented as women with depth and intelligence.
Hattie McDaniel
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