Lights, camera & the black role in movies

Ebony, Nov, 2005 by Melvin Van Peebles

WHEN I first became aware of movies messing with my mind, I was a kid. I just couldn't connect the elegant Negro I saw in the pages of EBONY, a brand new magazine at the time, or the Black people strutting around my neighborhood with the "cullud folks" the movies portrayed. On the South Side of Chicago, the men were hardworking, tough and fearless, not shuffling, quaking buffoons, and the women were majestic, regal queens, not obsequious mammies, huffing and puffing over washtubs up on the silver screen.

Then, all of a sudden, just as the Second World War was just winding down, the radio and newspapers started talking about Hollywood turning over a new leaf and a "New Negro" coming to the screen. Well, what had happened was that to win the war, the government needed everybody's help, and it had done a lot of flag-waving to unite the nation, lots of talk about the United States being a melting pot with "Liberty, Equality and Justice For all," regardless of "Race, Creed, or Color." In the flush of the upcoming victory, America was experiencing a wave of democracy, a bit of which lapped up onto the shores of the movie industry, hence Hollywood's promise to depict Negro characters with more dignity, i.e., the "New Negro." (Implicit, of course, if Hollywood could invent the "New," it meant it had invented the "Old.") Be that as it may, Tinsel Town strutted around with its chest poked out feeling pretty proud of itself for being so progressive.

Okay, the "New" treatment of the Negro was slightly more sophisticated, but the sad fact was the insults had only gone underground, and were more insidious and damaging psychologically than ever. There lurking underneath the rhetoric was the same ole paternalistic attitude, the same ole racism.

Hollywood trotted out a number of movies dealing with what White folks liked to call the "Negro Problem." Each film had a moral lesson about justice and tolerance, always with a central sympathetic White character--a doctor, a teacher, or something like that, a liberal update of the function of kindly slave owner, or Little Miss Shirley Temple in the "old Negro" movies.

Remember? There was Pinky, played, of course, by a White actress. Pinky and this White guy fall in love. He offers to take her away as long as she doesn't tell anybody about being colored; she turns him down, but all is not lost because a kindly ole White lady leaves her plantation to Pinky when she dies. There was Lost Boundaries, a light-skinned Negro, played once again by a White actor, passes himself off as a real bona fide White man to become a doctor. Eventually the truth comes out and he is ostracized by the White folks, but through the intervention of a sweet White minister who devotes a sermon to the subject of tolerance, the "Christian hearts" of the townspeople are open and he regains his practice. Another one was Home of the Brave. A Black G.I. suffers from shell shock and can't walk but he is cured by a White psychiatrist who explains to him that it is all in his head. However, that doesn't do the trick, so he calls him the N-word and the Black G.I. gets up and walks. There were others. Hollywood even did one called Black Like Me, where a White actor, played a guy who put on shoe polish or something and went down South to experience what a Black man had to go through.

Hollywood was not only racist, it was sexist, too. There are a zillion books documenting the mistreatment of actresses at the hands of the misogynist moguls, the inequities in pay, parts, power, etc. You can bet your bottom dollar if things were harsh for White women, it was infinitely worse for women of color, restricted to tragic-wanton-mulatto roles, or doing the dishes, or minding Miss Ann's babies. But rarely, even today, are the tribulations of Black actresses ever mentioned.

The "New Negro" concessions were only tactical in nature. During the '40s, '50s and on into the '60s, it was business as usual with Hollywood clinging to the cliches of the past. The long-term, strategic objective of undermining the Negro struggle and protecting the myth of "White supremacy" remained untouched. The only bright spot I can recall was Sam, the colored piano player in Casablanca. It was the only time I ever saw a Black character go through an entire movie without having to give a speech about equality-coming-soon, or kiss-butt. In the ghetto, the people were so proud that they would make the projectionist stop and run Sam's part over and over again.

Colored folks didn't exactly stampede to see the "new Negro" movies, and the film studios got an attitude at our ingratitude. They declared that the colored audience had a chip on its shoulder and that they were giving up on trying to appease us "ungrateful, belly-aching darkies." We almost disappeared from the silver screen and went from the "new Negro" to the "No Negro."

But the boycott couldn't last because Tinsel Town knew that there was money burning in those Black pockets, and they wanted some of it. Hollywood passed the baton to Sidney Poitier. Sidney was a wonderful actor, and we were proud, but nobody could really relate because the characters he was given to play were surreal more from heaven than the 'hood.