s essay deals with strange career of the 'buck' stereotype which despite having virtually disappeared from the screen for fifty years still had to be refuted once the movies began to mature a bit in light of the Civil Rights movement.
Intuitively it might seem as though this stereotype was employed in mainstream films during this period. But there is an absence of any discussion of such roles in histories of African Americans in the movies. None of the volumes by Woll and Miller, Guerrero, or Bogle, for example, discuss films in which the stereotype was portrayed. To a certain extent this was due to the perception in Hollywood that The Birth of a Nation succeeded despite angry protests over its racist preaching. The studios were not interested in controversy of this sort and sought safer subjects and safer portrayals of black Americans. And, as they well knew, there would be few films whose power and command of the medium would equal the talents of Griffith that, to a certain extent, enabled many people to overlook the film's racism. Certainly it was also true that no studio wanted to make films that would be banned from the Southern markets and this has frequently been cited as an explanation for the absence of serious black characters on the screen. Whatever films were made had to play in all sections of the country in order to be profitable.
But, as Bogle argues, this particular stereotype disappeared because the Griffith portrayal was so vehement and the controversy was so strong that "movie companies ignored and avoided such a type of black character for fear of raising new hostilities" (Bogle 16). Neither, however, did the kind of sensationalized depiction of "the rape or molestation of white women by blacks," or even the horror of an actual proposal of marriage from a second character, offer promising material for directors less concerned than Griffith with presenting a historical (or an ahistorical) picture of th...