African-Americans in Film

D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967) represent opposing poles in the treatment of the African-American male in Hollywood films. The portrayal of black men in both films is absurd, but their intentions were quite different. Griffith, the Southern-born director whose great career was a milestone in the development of the medium, claimed until his death that his film was not racist despite the thousands of African Americans and white Americans who explained why it was, indeed, a landmark in screen racism. His conception of the old stereotype of the sexually predatory black male, intent on despoiling white females, gave cinematic form to one of the most prevalent myths involved in white fear of black people. Kramer, on the other hand, was a devout liberal interested in furthering the cause of integration and he made a film that was intended to deal a death-blow to this stereotype. But his answer was to provide a black man so nearly flawless that the character tumbled over into what would have been a new stereotype except that it proved, for the most part, to be the first and last of its kind. In a way, however, the character of Gus, the renegade Negro in The Birth of a Nation (played by a white actor in blackface) who aspires to no higher goal than the white woman, was also the last of his kind. In the fifty years between these two films the many stereotypes of black people that were employed in Hollywood

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popular in the years between the two world wars. Ironically the 'miscegenation' provision in the Hays Code followed immediately after the one forbidding the depiction of "white slavery." The enslavement of black people was, however, a perfectly fit subject and one major legacy of The Birth of a Nation was the always increasing popularity of films set in an ever-glossier ante-bellum South. Between 1929 and 1941, according to Guerrero, Hollywood produced more than 75 feature films with this setting. Clearly the filmmakers recognized that during this period of intense, widespread economic insecurity audiences wanted reassurance and so they began "to conceptualize and to produce the 'Old South' as an escapist vehicle, a panacea for depression-era anxieties" (Guerrero 20). These films included such titles as Dixiana (1930), Mississippi (1935) and the Shirley Temple vehicles featuring Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, The Little Colonel (1935) and The Littlest Rebel (1935). In this cinematic trend, however, Hollywood was only interested in "perpetuat[ing] the popular myth that the American Negro was a happy, laughing, dancing imbecile" and there was little room even for the black brute type (Woll & Miller 48). There were very few exce

Category: Film - A