A former mechanic photographed him in a motion picture that ran no longer than twelve minutes. And a new dimension was added to American movies. The year was 1903. The mechanic-turned-movie-director was Edwin S. Porter. The twelve-minute motion picture was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And the new dimension was Uncle Tom Himself. He was the American movies’ first black character. The great paradox was that in actuality Tom was not black at all. Instead he was portrayed by a nameless, slightly overweight white actor made up in blackface. But the use of whites in black roles was then a common practice, a tradition carried over from the stage and maintained during the early days of silent films. Still, the first Negro character had arrived in films, and he had done so at a time when the motion-picture industry itself was virtually nonexistent. The movies were without stars or studios or sound. There were no great directors or writers and the community of Hollywood had not yet come into being. After the tom’s debut, there appeared a variety of black presences bearing the fanciful names of the coon, the tragic mulatto, the mammy, and the brutal black buck. All were character types used for the same effect: to entertain by stressing Negro inferiority. Fun was poked at the American Negro by presenting him as either a nitwit or a childlike lackey. None of the types was meant to do great harm, although at various times individual ones did. All were merely filmic reproductions of black stereotypes that had existed since the days of slavery and were already popularized in American life and arts. The movies, which catered to public tastes, borrowed profusely from all the other popular art forms. Whenever dealing with black characters, they simply adapted the old familiar stereotypes, often further distorting them. In the early days when all the black characters were still portrayed by white actors in blackface, there was nothing but the old character types. They sat like square boxes on a shelf. A white actor walked by, selected a box, and used it as a base for a very square, rigidly defined performance. Later, when real black actors played the roles and found themselves wedged into these categories, the history became one of actors battling against the types to create rich, stimulating, diverse, characters. At various points the tom, the coon, the tragic mulatto, the mammy, and the brutal black buck were brought to life respectively by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Stepin Fetchit, Nina Mae McKinney, Hattie McDaniel, and Walter Long (actually a white actor who portrayed a black villain in The Birth of a Nation), and later by such performers as Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dorothy Dandridge, Ethel Waters and Jim Brown. Later such performers as Eddie Murphy, Lonette McKee, Whoopi Goldberg, and Danny Glover also found themselves struggling to turn old stereotypes inside out. Often it seemed as if the mark of the actor was the manner in which he individualized the mythic type or towered above it. They types were to prove deadly for some actors and inconsequential for others. But try as any actor may to forget the typecasting, the familiar types have almost always been present in American black movies. The early silent period of motion pictures remains important, not because there were any great black performances—there weren’t—but because the five basic types—the boxes sitting on the shelf—that were to dominate black characters for the next half century were first introduced then.
w s ’ r e t P o r n g l i n e of in a lcceptable a ys a w l A . s r e c h a r act , h a r d e s a h c logged, enslaved fe faith, n’er tur o
a e h n i a m and re nerou e g , c i o st T . d n i k y r e v o oh-s elves to w thems es and e th
c n e i d u a r s f o s e o r e h o
t s r i f e h t s wa ially f sodc Negro Goo ms are as t o , d e d n u o h , d e rda, asndsinsulted, they skaeesp,
as m r i e h t t s n i a g a n r ssive,
i m b u s , y d n art a , s s e l f l us, se ey endear h t s u h T
whitege as emer rts.
ev er y ot he r Al th ou gh to m wa s to ou td ist an ce of bl ac k co on s. Th ey ap pe ar ed in a se ri es th e pu re c sin gl e-m ind ed ne ss of to m. Th er e we re
of Th e pi ck an in ny wa s t he fi r st th Ne g r o ch il d ac t or hi s pl ac eosine ha ir cr ea ti on wh os e ey es po pp ed , wh
ve rt ing . Th om as Al va Ed iso n pr ov e pr es en te d Te n Pic ka nin nie s in 190 4
in 189 3, Ed iso n, ha d ph ot og ra ph e
ni es �, t he si de ef fe ct s mo v Ne gr o ch il dr en ro mp ed an so un ds , ba d ch il lu n, in ky ki d In du e t ime , t he pi ck an in n
ac to rs as Su ns hin e Sa mmy , Fa rin su mmi ts . In al l t h e ve rs ion s ly pic ka nin ny , u se d so le ly f
t he ch ar ac t er wa s sin gl de rf ul ly br ig ht yo un gs t
he r ey es ro ll ba ck an d fo rt h
wh en sh e is fo un d by t en an ce .� In he r da y, be ca me su ch a fi lm fa v in w hic h he r fa r- fe t ch ed pr ov al .
Sh or tl y af t wa
it ion fr om a gr ou p of et mp co us rio se d ha he , me ho d an th ty pe an d do min at e Am er ica n he ar n. Th ey la ck ed th e oo ff bu k ac bl d an ct je ob nt me se lm s pr es en t in g t he Ne gr o as amu
fi
an d th e un cl e re mu s. ny nin ka pic e th : pe ty his of ts an co on an d tw o va ri it s sc r ee n de bu t . It g av e
he t ke ma t yp es t o sc r ew b al l le t t li s, es ml r ha a s wa he , ly al r he bl ac k pa nt he on . Ge ne ea sa nt an d dipl re we cs ti an e os wh d an t, en em oo d on en d wit h th e le as t ex cit
r st is ty pe wh en he th of ion at or pl ex d an ion at oit ed to be a pio ne er in th e ex pl ng his ca me ra ex pe rim en ts ri Du . es ri se ng Ga r Ou h ac Ro l Ha e 4, a fo re ru nn er of th ct s. ” In “T en Pic ka ni n-
ef fe de si g in t es er t “in as ks ac bl me so ed na me le ss of p ou gr a as n io t ac he t of t on ve d t o t he fo re fr ub s, er ch s, ll ba ow sn as o t ed rr fe re d ra n ab ou t wh il e be in g on ie s. eb bie ub ch d an s, ie on eb e t cu s, mb la ds , sm ok y ki ds , bl ac k 0s an d th e 193 0s , su ch ch ild 192 e th In s. me na r he ot by ed ll ca ie s we re t o be an d ca rr ied it to ne w le nt ma ny nin ka pic e th up d ke pic na , St ym ie, an d Bu ck wh ea t te d as a liv een es pr s wa y ps To ild ch e av sl of Un cl e To m’s Ca bi n, t he en ed ,
Ca bin op m’s To e cl Un of n io rs ve 7 192 he t fo r co mic re lie f. Wh en y, a wo nRa na Mo by ed ay pl is sy op “T e: ot le d ou t by on e cr it ic wh o wr ao rd ina ry fa sh ion ... tr ex in r he of rt pa dy me co e th t er wh o se em s to ha ve he r pl ig ht
fo r ng ki li no s ce in ev so al e Sh m. ar al h in un co y on eb r he on er wd po g in bb da M is s Op he li a wh il e an d l ol dr d an sh ni ow cl s wa y ps To er t he ch ar ac t ), 7 92 (1 a” Ev d an sy op “T in ed r ar vo r it e t ha t sh e st nc e ap die au ss ma n wo g in ny in an ck pi r he d an d me an de r in g s
nin ny in 190 4, th e pu re co on mad it s ka pic te r (19 05 ). Th is sh or t de pic te d on Co a of ing dd We d an g oin Wo in ay on to th e sc re en in g er t ut st d an g in bl um st as le up co a ho ne ym oo nin g ba ck er ”
Ed iso n in t ro du ce d t he
Ma sh he “T in ed ar pe ap on co he t er t La idi ot s. la e it wh ed yl t -s lf se a t ou ab s wa h (1 90 7 ), wh ic th e wo me n he l al by d fe uf eb r is o wh n ma s’ die s ve ile d wo man wh o pu rs ue s. Wh en he me et s a my st er iou he he r o r es po nd s t o hi s pa ss es , t he av en . t hi nk s he ha s ar riv ed at his bl ue mo ve s t he An d so fi nd in g su cc es s, he re
veil only to discover that his mystery lady is colored! Without much further ado, he takes off. He may have bee looking for a blue heaven, but certainly did not want a black one. Before its death, the coon developed into the most blatantly degrading of all black stereotypes. The pure coons emerged as no-account niggers, those unreliable, crazy lazy, subhuman creatures good for nothing more than eating watermelons stealing chickens, shooting craps, or butchering the English language. The final member of the coon triumvirate is the uncle remus. Harmless and congenial, he is a first cousin to the tom, yet he distinguishes himself by his quaint, naïve, and comic philosophizing. During the silent period he was only hinted at. He did not come into full flower until the 1930s and 1940s with films such as the Green Pastures (1936) and Song of the South (1946). Remus’ mirth, like tom’s contentment and the coon’s antics, has always been uses to indicate the black man’s satisfaction with the system and his place in it.
ov ed it se lf a pr at th e on e th d an on he t n pa k Th e t hi r d fi g u re of th e bl ac ma ke r’ s
da r lin g is
bt De he “T in s wa s ce an r ea p ap t On e of t he t yp e’ s ea r li es f wi s n’ ma e it wh A h. ut So d Ol he t (1912), a two-reeler about a e time s e h t t a n e r d il ch him ar be s and his black mistres
m
d n a n o s e it h w e h t Growing u p d n a e v o l in l l a f r e t h g m u latto dau e v a h o t y l n o y r r a m decide to re v e a l e d ip h s n o i t a l e r t h e ir t o g et he r
l ia c u r c e h t t a m e h to t e r a s e v i l ir e h T . t n e m mo y l n o t o n d e n i u r thus r e h t o r b e r a y he t e s u be ca — o s l a t u b r e t is s d n a a n d he r
e ’s t he c a tch— be ca us e p of the girl has a dro
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bl oo d!
.
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e.
d
In “H u m ani ty ’s C a u s e ” “In Slavery Da y and “The Octo s”, roon”, all made around 1913 , explored the plight fair-skinned
at t e m p t ing f or w h i t e . U
of a
mulatto to pas s
sually
the m u l a tt o i s l i k e a b l e —m a d e e v s y m p a thet e n i c (be-
c a u s e of h e r white blood , no doubt)—an d believes that thteheg audience irl’s life could have be en product
happy had she not
ive and
been a “victim of divided racial inherit
p of the girl has a dro
black
bl oo d!
comic coons t
distinguishe
She is usually bi
diences we Lysistrata. ettes, d
erwomen to keep t home. A en f dign
as a p perfe
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selve
l
al y they a never as headstrong
, a fourth black type, so close ly related to the that she is usually rele gated to th
ed, however, by her
sex and her
eir ranks. Mammy is fierce independence.
ig, fat, and cantankerous . She made her debut aro und 1914 wh
en auere treated to a blackf ace version of The comedy, titled Coo n T o wn Suffragdealt wit h a g r o u po
f b o y mammy wash n who organize a militasnst their good-for-nothing h movement u Aristophanes would no doub sbands at have r is f r o m h is g r a v e w it h r ig ht t e o u s innation. But the miltancy of the wash erwo
men served primer for the mammy roles Hatt ie McDaniel was to ect in the 1930s.Mammy’s offshoot is the aunt jemima, sometimes red to as a “handkerchief head.” O f t aunt jemimas are toms ed with religion or mammieen s
edge themes into the dominant whitewhcoulwt u r e . Generare sweet, jolly, good-tempere d—a bit more polite than mamm y and certainly
g. The maids in the Mae West films of the 1930s fit snugly into this cat
egory.
and The Birth of a Nation D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was that motion picture to introduce the final mythic type, the brutal black buck. This extraordinary, multidimensional movie was also the first feature film to deal with a black theme and at the same time to articulate fully the entire pantheon of black gods and goddesses. Griffith presented all the types with such force and power that his film touched off a wave of controversy and was denounced as the most slanderous anti-Negro movie ever released. In almost every way, The Birth of a Nation was a stupendous undertaking, unlike any film that had preceded it. Up to then American movies had been two- or three-reel affairs, shorts running no longer than ten or fifteen minutes, crudely and casually filmed. But The Birth of a Nation was rehearsed for six weeks, filmed in nine, later edited in three months, and finally released as a record-breaking hundred thousand dollar spectacle, twelve reels in length and over three hours in running time. It altered the entire course and concept of American moviemaking, developing the close-up, crosscutting, rapid-fire editing, the iris, the split-screen shot, and realistic and impressionistic lighting. Creating sequences and images yet to be surpassed, the film’s magnitude and epic grandeur swept audiences off their feet. At a private White House screening President Woodrow Wilson exclaimed, “It’s like writing history with lightning!” The Birth of a Nation, however, not only vividly re-created history, but revealed it’s director’s philosophical concept of the universe and his personal racial bigotry. For D.W. Griffith there was a moral order at work in the universe. If that order were ever thrown out of whack, he believed chaos would ensue. Griffith’s thesis was sound, relatively exciting, and even classic in a purely Shakespearean sense. But in articulating his thesis, Griffith seemed to be saying that t h i n g s w e r e i n o r d e r o n l y w h e n w h i t e s w e r e i n c o n t r o l a n d w h e n t h e A m e r i c a n N e g r o w a s k e p t i n h i s p l a c e . In the end, Griffith’s “lofty” statement—and the film’s subject matter—transformed The Birth of a Nation into a hotly debated and bitterly cursed motion picture. It told the story of the Old South, the Civil War, the Reconstruction Period, and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. Basing his film on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (also the original title of the film), Griffith focused on a good decent “little” family, the Camerons of Piedmont, South Carolina. Before the war, the family lives in an idyllic “quaintly way that is to be no more.” Dr. Cameron and his sons are gentle, benevolent “fathers” to their child-like servants. The slaves themselves could be no happier. In the fields they contentedly pick cotton. In their quarters they dance and sing for their master. In the big house Mammy joyously goes about her chores. All is in order. Everyone knows his place. Then the Civil War breaks out, and the old order cracks. The war years take their toll. In Piedmont, the Cameron family is terrorized by a troop of Negro raiders, and the entire South undergoes “ruin, devastation, rapine, and pillage. ” Then comes Reconstruction. Carpetbaggers and uppity niggers from the north move into Piedmont, exploiting and corrupting the former slaves, unleashing the sadism and bestiality innate in the Negro, turning the once congenial darkies into renegades, and using them to “crush the white South under the heel of the black south.” Lawlessness runs riot,” says one title card. The old slaves have to quit work to dance. They roam the streets, shoving whites off the sidewalks. They take over political polls and disenfranchise the whites. A black political victory culminates in an orgiastic street celebration. Blacks dance, sing, drink, rejoice. Later they conduct a black Congressional session, itself a mockery of Old South ideals, in which the freed Negro legislators are depicted as lustful, arrogant, and idiotic. They bite on chicken legs and drink whiskey from bottles while sprawling with bare feet upon their desks. During the Congressional meeting, the stench created by the barefoot Congressmen becomes so great that they pass as their first act a ruling that every member must keep his shoes on during legislative meetings! Matters in The Birth of a Nation reach a heady climax later when the renegade black Gus sets out to rape the younger Cameron daughter. Rather than submit, the Pet Sister flees from him and throws herself from a cliff—into the “opal gates of death.” Then the mulatto Silas Lynch attempt to force the white Elsie Stoneman to marry him. Finally, when all looks hopelessly lost, there emerges a group of good, upright Southern white men, members of an “invisible empire,” who, while wearing white sheets and hoods, battle the black in a direct confrontation. Led by Ben Cameron in a rousing stampede, they magnificently defeat the black rebels! Defenders of white womanhood, white honor, and white glory, they restore to the South everything it has lost, including its white supremacy. Thus we have the birth of a nation. And the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. The plot machinations of the Griffith epic may today resound with the melodramatic absurdities, but the action, the actors, and the direction did not. The final ride of the Klan was an impressive piece of film propaganda, superbly lit and brilliantly edited. Indeed it was so stirring that audiences screamed in delight,
cheering for the white heroes and booing, hissing, and cursing the black militants. The Birth of a Nation remains significant not only because of its artistry but also because of its wide-ranging influence. One can detect in this single film the trends and sentiments that were to run through almost every black film made for a long time afterward. Later filmmakers were to pick up Griffith’s ideas—his very images—but were to keep them “nicely” toned down in order not to offend audiences. Griffith used three varieties of blacks. The first were “faithful souls,” a mammy and an uncle tom, who remain with the Cameron family throughout and staunchly defend them from rebels. By means of these characters, as well as the pickaninny slaves seen dancing, singing, and clowning in their quarters, director Griffith propagated the myth of slave contentment and made it appear as if slavery had elevated the Negro from his bestial instincts. At heart, Griffith’s “faithful souls” were shamelessly naïve representations of the Negro as Child or the Negro as Watered-Down Noble Savage. But these characters were to make their way through scores of other Civil War epics, and they were to leave their mark on the characterizations of Clarence Muse in Huckleberry Finn (1931) and Broadway Bill (1934) and of Bill Robinson in The Little Colonel (1935) and The Littlest Rebel (1935). Griffith’s second varieties were the brutal black bucks. Just as the coon stereotype could be broken into subgroups, the brutal black buck type could likewise be divided into two categories: the black brutes and the black bucks. Differences between the two are the minimal. The black brute was a barbaric black out to raise havoc. Audiences could assume that his physical violence served as an outlet for a man who was sexually repressed. In The Birth of a Nation, the black brutes, subhuman and feral, are the nameless characters setting out on a rampage full of black rage. They flog the Camerons’ faithful servant. They shove and assault white men of the town. They flaunt placards demanding “equal marriage.” These characters figured prominently in the Black Congress sequence, and their film descendants were to appear years later as the rebellious slaves of So Red the Rose (1935), as the revolutionaries of Upright (1969), and as the militants of Putney Swope (1969) But it was the pure black bucks that were Griffith’s really great archetypal figures. Bucks are always big, baaadddd niggers, oversexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh. No greater sin hath any black man. Both Lynch, the mulatto and Gus, the renegade, fall into this category. Among other things,
these two characters revealed the tie between sex and racism in America. Griffith played on the myth of the Negro’s high-powered sexuality, and then articulated the great white fear that every black man longs for a white woman. Underlying the fear was the assumption that the white woman was the ultimate in female desirability, herself a symbol of white pride, power and beauty. Consequently, when Lillian Gish, the frailest, purest, of all screen heroines, was attacked by the character Lynch—when he put his big black arms around this pale blond beauty—audiences literally panicked. Here was the classic battle of good and evil, innocence and corruption. It was a masterstroke and a brilliant use of contrast, one that drew it audience into the film emotionally. * But in uncovering the attraction of black to white, Griffith failed to reveal the political implications. Traditionally, certain black males have been drawn to white women because these women are power symbols, an ideal of the oppressor. But Griffith attributed the attraction to animalism innate in the Negro male. Thus the black bucks of the film are psychopaths, one always panting and salivating, the other forever stiffening his body as if the mere presence of a white woman in the same room could bring him to a sexual climax. Griffith played hard on the bestiality of villainous buck and used it to arouse hatred. Closely aligned to the bucks and brutes of The Birth of a Nation is the mulatto character, Lydia. She is presented as the mistress of the white abolitionist carpetbagger, Senator Stoneman. Through Lydia, Griffith explored the possibilities of the dark, sinister half-breed as a tragic leading lady. Although merely as supporting character, Lydia is the only black role to suggest even remotely genuine mental anguish. She hates whites. She refuses to be treated as an inferior. She wants power. Throughout she anguishes over her predicament as a black woman in a hostile white world. Lydia is also the film’s only passionate female. Griffith was the first important movie director to divide his black women into categories base on their individual colors. Both Lydia and Mammy are played by white actresses in blackface. But Mammy is darker. She is representative of the all-black woman, overweight middle-aged, and so dark, so thoroughly black, that it is preposterous even to suggest that she could be a sex object. Instead she was desexed. This tradition of the desexed, overweight, dowdy, dark black woman was continued in films throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Vestiges of it popped up as late as the 1960s with Claudia McNeil in A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and Beah Richards in Hurry Sundown (1967). A dark black actress was considered for no role but that of a mammy or an aunt jemima. On the other hand, the part-black woman—the light-skinned Negress—was given a chance at lead parts and was graced with a modicum of sex appeal. Every sexy black woman who appeared afterward in movies was to be a “cinnamon-colored gal” with Caucasian features.