Reconstruction 7.3 (2007)
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A History Without Lightning: African American Image in Early Cinema, 1895-1915 / Zach Saltz
Abstract: This essay explores the growth and subsequent ramifications of the introduction of African Americans into mainstream film in America. The paper is not so much structured in a linear chronology, but rather explorations of omnipresent recurring themes of the era. The first portion of the paper analyzes the structures of film at its birth. Cinema, a novelty art form at the turn of the century, transcended the limitations of the printed word by attracting a larger, more disparate prospective audience - namely the inclusion of uneducated immigrants (African Americans were not permitted to enter most nickelodeons at this time). One theme that runs tangibly throughout the paper is the staunch bureaucracy of Hollywood, thus making the initial integration of "decadent" blacks into mainstream cinema seem paradoxical. But the paper argues that producers pursued this action primarily as a repudiation to the sudden upsurge of popular African Americans whose sheer bravado seemed to conflict with white sentiment that blacks were only to remain submissive, docile creatures. The second concept the paper attempts to illuminate is stereotypes applied to black characters in early American cinema. The mammy, the Tom, and the tragic mulatto are some of the figures explored. These archetypes were exercised in order to form the greatest film spectacle of the era - D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) which proclaimed a blatantly racist and neo-Confederate platform of black servility. Due to its unprecedented success among filmgoers, Birth of a Nation represented a regression from the fervent progressiveness of Roosevelt and Wilsonian politics, and gave rise to even more negative public perception of blacks in America, as evidenced by the findings of later social scientists. The early portrayal of African Americans in cinema not only speaks of Hollywood's largely racist roots, but perhaps the untapped racism of audiences nationwide.
<1> The cultural relevancy of the media is nothing new. Historians routinely look at a wide array of documents, ranging from the plays of Shakespeare to the Federalist Papers, to establish a cultural context of popular attitudes and mores of the era from which these documents were written and published. Ray B. Browne tells us: "Pictures as history are exceptionally effective because, although words lie flat and dormant to some readers (indeed, to a certain extent to all readers), it is difficult to miss messages carried in a motion picture as it explains a historical period or event." [1]
<2> This assimilation of media into the consciousness of factions traditionally stricken with little or no formal education (i.e. African Americans) has been largely positive, and few would deny this. What is problematic, however, is the fact that while African Americans on a whole have increased their awareness of the media and its message, this very same media has not reflected this positive growth. Hollywood has always been (and still is today) a largely bureaucratic institution, as Thomas Cripps tells us, serving as an "ideological conduit for the ruling class." [2] Thus, with the management of television and film companies still firmly in the grasp of the white male majority, little has progressed in terms of treatment of African Americans in these mediums. What is especially dangerous is when we couple the notion of unfair treatment with the cultural context in which television and film are viewed. When these are not so much realities but exclamations of broad stereotypes, the media has in effect crossed over the line of what is to be trusted by viewers and historians as an accurate social barometer.
<3> To establish a proper assessment of where and how African Americans are portrayed 21st Century media - specifically in the film industry - we must first examine their roots in this field and the later archetypes molded out of these earliest representations. In the first decade of commercial cinema, beginning in 1895, moving pictures were still largely shrouded in the conventions of popular literature of the time. While technical restrictions limited new filmmakers in terms of story continuity and employment of cinematographic and editing techniques, great movie spectacles nonetheless stood at the pinnacle of the public's imagination. In urban areas such as New York, film was accepted as a mere continuation of vaudeville, with the poorer classes and immigrants rushing to the scene, as they had with the earlier theatrics on stage (neither vaudeville nor motion pictures were intellectual enough for the wealthier and more established classes). Small nickelodeons would run as many as four shows every hour for thousands of onlookers, the majority of them poor immigrants - but no blacks, of course, because blacks were largely forbidden from entering these early theaters.
<4> Contrary to popular belief, there were many black characters portrayed in early cinema - so many that Thomas Cripps has argued that early cinematic African Americans "appeared on the screen in a more favorable light than they heretofore had done in any theater or fiction." [3] According to Donald Bogle, Uncle Tom was the American movies' first black character. [4] What was most paradoxical about this turn-of-the-century Uncle Tom was that he was not even black. He was first portrayed onscreen by a nameless, slightly overweight, balding white man fruitlessly disguised in blackface. The tradition of blackface was nothing new, either - a wholly American theatrical convention beginning shortly after the Revolutionary War, growing exponentially with the increased popularity of traveling minstrel shows. Like contemporary motion pictures, these minstrels played a vital role in shaping perceptions and prejudices from white audiences toward blacks. What was "safe" about these shows for white audiences was that the Negroid mask provided a boundary between reality and fantasy. While there was a certain sentiment for the struggle of the Negro, blackface provided a wholly comic edge, still crucially avoiding the legitimate race issues that dominated the day. Eric Lott writes: "The black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening - and male - all the while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them." [5]
<5> The Tom character (the epithet Uncle was dropped in order to generalize the term to a wider range of black men, young and old) was one of the two early motion pictures' responses to the antebellum era's Jim Crow. The Tom is the embodiment of the socially acceptable Good Negro, emerging to white audiences as a clumsy hero of sort, with his generous yet hearty submissiveness to his white massas. He is innocuous in his gleeful demeanor, and will gladly pledge himself wholly for the well-being of his white master, reflecting the gradual shift after the Civil War in downplaying the original antagonism between master and slave. In the 1910 short Confederate Spy, the Tom (here called "Uncle Daniel") serves as a Negro spy for the south and dies before a northern firing squad, content, in his last moments of life, that he "did it for massa's sake and little massa." [6]
<6> Likewise, the legendary Stowe novel where Tom had first spawned (both into the literary and cultural vehicles) was famously adapted several times during the silent period: Edwin S. Porter (The Great Train Robbery) made the first adaptation, a twenty-minute, two-reel motion picture put into fourteen scenes and performed by members of a traveling minstrel; and later adaptations, in 1909 and 1913, respectively, were put on screen but were received as rather lifeless and unexceptional by critics and audiences at the time. But in 1914, history was made when the black stage actor Sam Lucas was cast as Uncle Tom. This was the first time in the history of Hollywood that an African American performed as a title character in a motion picture, and the new trend immediately caught the attention of later directors such as Harry Pollard and Hal Roach, who followed suit in their own films. The casting of Lucas as the leading male was not so much an act of the filmmakers seeking a greater sense of realism in their pictures, nor was it a political maneuver advocating the integration of blacks into cinema. It was, ironically enough, primarily a response to well-known Negroes such as Jack Johnson who outwardly proclaimed their superiority with brazen confidence, something that was largely resented by the white factions in Hollywood (especially with presence of Johnson in boxing pictures of his own, playing around the country in filled movie houses). The Tom caricature would surely show filmgoers and the rest of society the proper place for African Americans, even if it meant actually casting one of them.
<7> The other revisionist cinematic archetype was the Coon, who was similar to the Tom in his dim-witted nature and sheer frequency, but deviated slightly in his obedience to his massa. The pure Coon is a no-account nigger who is lazy to an almost subhuman extent (hence the name Coon, deriving from "raccoon") and is "good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting crap, and butchering the English language." [7] He serves primarily as an object of amusement for the viewer, and is often shown as prolonging work or disobeying his master in humorous and inordinate ways. The Coon has no hopes or dreams or any real reason to live except to work for his master, subsequently slack off, and pay for it later with a beating, complaining about it in his droll pidgin language.
<8> The prototypical (non-blackface) Coon evolved into cinematic lore when played by Stepin Fetchit, an experienced vaudevillian who acted in some fifty films, playing Coons with names such as Snowshoes, Spasm Johnson, and Swifty, the handyman. Equipped with a gifted comic presence onscreen, Fetchit became the first black actor to receive top billings in films featuring white characters, and by the 1930s, he was a millionaire. His popularity among white viewers was directly related to the manner in which he portrayed and unintentionally advocated the increasingly-archaic Coon image. Like a beautiful young woman paid millions to expose her breasts on film, Fetchit was paid vast sums of money to exploit the one thing he had to offer to audiences - perpetuation of the Coon. And for this, his career has subsequently been marred with controversy.
<9> Nearly all black children (called Pickaninnies) portrayed in early cinema had characteristics of the Coon; they were harmless little screwball creations who had big eyes that lit up and dirty mouth to boot. In Stowe's novel, the character of Topsy fits the mold of a pickaninny by distracting readers from the dramatic rising action through lighthearted misadventures and slapstick antics (Topsy was so popular among whites that she was even given her own film in 1927, Topsy and Eva). The Topsy tradition was continued by the most famous cinematic little boy of the early 20 th Century, Farina, of Our Gang fame (played by Allen Hoskins). His cornball name reflected the inferior status of his race, unable, even in factions of small children, to achieve any sort of honorable recognition. What Hoskins is most remembered for were the effeminate pigtails on his head, reflecting the ridiculous incapability of keeping his own gender straight.
<10> Blacks would somewhat begrudgingly take the role of a Tom or Coon or Pickaninny, hoping to someday present more realistic interpretations of Negro life, keenly aware, however, that working in an overtly racist Hollywood institution in front of lights and cameras was far more preferable than working for an overtly racist Dixie institution in cotton fields and ramshackle huts. Non-Hollywood blacks attempted (ultimately in vain) to create their own motion pictures and studios; the most notable of these "outsiders" was none other than Booker T. Washington, who made personal inquiries into the purchases of motion picture stock. Plans were made at the Tuskegee Institute to make unassuming pictures about black life, but Washington's sudden death in 1915 halted plans permanently. But mostly these efforts failed because they were conjured simply in retaliation to the most widely-seen film of the era.
<11> In 1915, D.W. Griffith made the greatest spectacle ever to shine the silver screen at the time - The Birth of a Nation, based on the staged novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon. It was (and still remains today, according to many historians) the crowning achievement of early cinema, a superior marriage of magnificent storytelling mixed with the seamless editing of shots (using complex techniques such as cross-cutting) and nondiegetic sound into a single product. It also represents the pinnacle of negative black archetypes in film, employing both the Tom and the Coon and popularizing two new figures previously exclusive to print - the Tragic Mulatto and the Mammy. There were no holds barred in the making of the film, and even Dixon was utterly unforgiving in how he hoped the reaction of his filmed story would play out: "My object is to teach the north . . . what it has never known - the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful reconstruction period . . . To demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme." [8]
<12> Why then did the film resonate so well amongst audiences, particularly those philanthropic, urban, socially-conscious viewers of the north? To explain the enigmatic nature of the public and critical response to the motion picture, we must first analyze the historical context in which the film was released. The public first saw The Birth of a Nation fifty years after the end of the Civil War and (perhaps more importantly) sixty years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. While Stowe's novel had deployed melos, pathos, and action to invite the northern casual reader into a non confrontational and idolized world of the "good nigger" Tom as a familiar and friendly icon, The Clansman and the motion picture that followed solidified a new national feeling of racial antipathy. The black man was no longer a trusted ally of his master, but an object of grave white fear and loathing. This radical change in ideology personified the shift in American racial sentiment: from antebellum to carpetbagger, from slave to sharecropper . . . and then back again to an overtly bigoted structure.
<13> Was there any truth in the film's famed images of black men (played by white men in blackface) savagely chasing after chaste white women? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that Birth of a Nation displayed a level of cinematic verisimilitude that had never before been seen or felt by motion picture audiences, or any sort of theatrical spectators for that matter. With a running length of well over three hours, Griffith's film was a good one or two hours longer than the normal motion picture, enabling greater poeticism in the film's visceral imagery and acute character development. Griffith clearly demonstrated a keen eye in transitioning large shots of enormous scope to smaller, more intimate shots. The effect of the film on its many audiences was undeniable. President Woodrow Wilson famously screened it in the White House, and later called it "writing history with lightning." [9] Respected author and critic James Agee wrote that Griffith had achieved what no other known man had achieved. Even George Foster Peabody, the legendary philanthropist and Negro sympathizer, gave the film his endorsement, which was soon proudly displayed in bold letters on large advertisements for the film in metropolitan newspapers.
<14> But blacks immediately and vehemently declared no, the film did not have a grain of truth to its supposed "representations" of southern strife. The NAACP, the Crisis, and practically every other recognized organization serving the interests of blacks brought pressure upon leaders in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles to censor the film, and met with some success that ultimately proved ephemeral. The city of Los Angeles banned the film, while the National Board of Censorship was successfully convinced to cut out some of the film's more heinous depictions. But the curiosity of the public was too much for the black leaders to suppress, and Birth of a Nation continued to rack up astonishing profit (a single ticket was sold for $2.00, roughly equating today to $18.00). The use of blackface, one of the NAACP's chief objections, was fervidly defended by the film's lead actress, Lillian Gish, who claimed that no usable black actors were available in California at the time (a clear untruth). But in a strange way, the blackface exploits the racial sentiment of the time rather than accentuates it, at least for the modern viewer. Roger Ebert says: "His [Griffith's] blackface actors tell us more about his attitude toward those characters than black actors ever could have." [10] Black actors were avoided because Griffith found it easier to use white actors, and because he was in the business of advocating "a mythological view of history."
<15> As mentioned above, The Birth of a Nation also gave rise in cinema to two black archetypes usually reserved for women. The Tragic Mulatto was commonly the result of the debasement of a Negro woman by a white man - the man in question usually being the most aristocratic of the Caucasian plantation characters. As the Mulatto grows into society, she represents a dualistic struggle of white upper crust purity helplessly stuck in an internal battle with Negro brutality and rage. She was usually prone to alcohol and substance addiction, bouts of depression (sometimes leading to suicide), and sexual perversion. She loathes and laments and is helplessly stuck in racial and social limbo; in John Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934), the tortured Mulatto Peola, ashamed of her black mother, bewails, "Don't come for me. If you see me in the street, don't speak to me . . . You have to give me up." She is essentially outcast by her society - a telltale warning toward blacks and whites that miscegenation and interracial sexual relations are immoral and debauched.
<16> In Birth of a Nation, this myth was manifested in the characterization of Lydia, the Mulatto housekeeper, who seduces the naive white politician Austin Stoneman. She is described (on one of the film's title cards, no less) as a "weakness that is to blight a nation." The other Mulatto in the film is Silas Lynch, one of the sparse male Mulattos to appear onscreen in early cinema. Unlike his female counterparts, this male Mulatto is characterized as just as corrupt and immoral and unchaste as the Coon. He is apparently void of any and all of his sacred white blood, and is nothing but power-hungry and sex-starved. Lynch viciously seeks the hand of the fair Elsie while "drunk with wine and power" as he conspicuously conspires with other blacks to overthrow the steadfast reign of the Ku Klux Klan. His strikingly lascivious overtures are never mistaken for anything but sadistic sexual desire in the form of demonic black lust, especially when he kneels beside the seated Elsie and unashamedly presses the hem of her white blouse to his lips.
<17> The Mammy also plays a part in the film, though not portrayed as evil or deviant as the Mulatto. Mammy is a rotund, jovial, coarse, maternal figure who had a smile as large as her waistband. She is a savvy figure in the kitchen and around the house, doing daily chores while humming contently and simultaneously promoting the myth that the only true place for black women was inside the white household doing chores. She finds great humanity in the institution of slavery and is often more loyal to her white masters than her own family. In antebellum literature as well as Birth of a Nation, Mammy is completely desexualized, because of the habitually high number of children she will bare, as well as suppressing the belief that unmarried black women embodied sensuous flesh and satanic sin. Indeed, Catherine Clinton argues that Mammies alleviated any interracial sexual tension: "The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum period." [11]
<18> In Birth of a Nation, one of the very first motion pictures to feature her, Mammy's role is limited to incidental housekeeper with occasional wisecracks such as "Who dat uppity nigger from de No?" She was present for the same reason the Tom and Pickaninnies were also onscreen: To show the contentment of blacks as slaves on plantations. The tradition of the Mammy was most famously continued by Hattie McDaniel, who won an Academy Award (the first by any African American) for her performance in Gone With the Wind. What Stepin Fitchit was to the Coon, McDaniel was to the Mammy archetype, performing in nearly one hundred films, the majority of them featuring her as a maid or cook.
<19> The Birth of a Nation naturally spawned many imitators in the tradition of grand cinematic spectacle, and so did the archaic caricatures the film so readily employed and advocated. The Tom, Coon, Pickaninny, Tragic Mulatto, and Mammy did not go away so much as they simply took on new forms, with the onset of more modern and complex stories. They became jesters and New Negroes and militants and badasses and eventually superstars. But many scholars argue that the basic shape of the African American image in film has never truly changed, and as a direct result of this, racial attitudes have never really changed, either.
<20> In 1933, two social scientists from Princeton University, Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braley, conducted a pioneering study of the manner in which undergraduates at the University perceived black Americans based on prevailing assumptions primarily from motion pictures and other popular forms of entertainment at the time. From the responses garnered, Katz and Braley determined that whites perceived blacks to be "superstitious," "happy-go-lucky," and "lazy." Similar studies were facilitated in 1951 and 1991, and both had similar conclusions - whites believed that blacks were lazy, incompetent, and prone to violence. No doubt these stereotypes were reinforced by a motion picture industry and media with little knowledge of its impact on the casual viewer. And, conversely, Hollywood still maintains the notion of showing people what they want to believe to be real. This complementation creates a vicious circle of unwitting prejudice and stereotype that, while sometimes unintentional, is nonetheless devastating in its influence. Peter C. Rollins writes: "Without intending to act the role of historian, Hollywood has often been an unwitting recorder of national moods." [12]
<21> "It is like writing history with lightning." The most evocative seven words to describe The Birth of a Nation also apply to the history of African Americans in early cinema. Their portrayal onscreen and the archaic archetypes given to them reflect an era of racism. We can learn from these films, however troubling they may be, about the ongoing assimilation of blacks into the modern white media - as well as to truly appreciate the significance that modern black filmmakers and actors, such as Sydney Poitier, Spike Lee, and Halle Berry, have had on the previously ravaged and prejudiced industry. It has been a very long struggle from the harsh chains of blackfaced Uncle Toms and portly Mammies to the intelligent, original, thoughtful cinematic African Americans of today. But perhaps what is most forgotten about this struggle can be summed up by the words spoken by Woodrow Wilson immediately following that first comment: "And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." [13]
Works Cited
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 1973. New Expanded Ed. New York: Continuum Publishing Company. 1989.
Browne, Ray B. Foreword. Hollywood As Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. 1983. Revised Ed. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. ix-x.
Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, Inc. 1982.
Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993.
Ebert, Roger. Roger Ebert's Video Companion 1998 Edition. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing. 1997.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993.
Rollins, Peter C. Introduction. Hollywood As Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. 1983. Revised Ed. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 1-8.
Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universi
Notes
[1] Browne, p. ix [^]
[2] Cripps, p. 132. [^]
[3] Cripps, p. 8. [^]
[4] Bogle, p. 3. [^]
[5] Lott, p. 25. [^]
[6] Bogle, p. 6. [^]
[7] Bogle, p. 8. [^]
[8] Cripps, pp. 140-141. [^]
[9] Williams, p. 98. [^]
[10] Ebert, p. 722. [^]
[11] Clinton, pp. 201-202. [^]
[12] Rollins, p. 1. [^]
[13] Williams, p. 98. [^]
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