The political, economic, and social reality of slavery in U.S. history was in the background of atrocities against African Americans. It was particularly true prior to the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Even though the Civil War ended and Lincoln freed the slaves, racism, prejudice, segregation and violence toward Blacks continued unabated well into the mid-20th century in American society. More remarkable, perhaps, is that attitudes informing overt racist atrocities may not have necessarily shifted over the course of the 20th century; the phrase hate crime is a contemporary one. On the other hand, American popular culture, informed by the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement, has demonstrated and even celebrated the gradually increasing access by minorities, particularly African Americans, to mainstream social goods in a way that has made overt expression of racism carry social costs. The purpose of this research is to explore how films as representative artifacts of mainstream popular culture has fed and been fed by the evolution of civil rights in the U.S.
The evolution of civil rights legislation and of the culture into which it was inserted must have seemed highly unlikely in the first part of the 20th century. Civil rights as a concept seems to have been nothing if not arcane in an America where what can now be seen as shocking statistics went largely unremarked:
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, two or three black southerners were hanged, burned at the stake, or quietly murdered every week. In the 1890s, lynchings claimed an average of 139 lives each year. The numbers declined in the followig decades, but the percentage of black victims rose to 90 percent. (Litwack, 2000, p. 589)
Litwack argues that southern fears of "'uppity,' 'troublesome,' ambitious, and independent-minded black men and women who had not yet learned the rituals of deference and submission" dro...