Feature
Presentation:Race Movies
Beginning in the 1910s, a separate film industry began to take root, in part, to remedy the negative depiction of blacks in motion pictures. One of the motivating forces behind this movement was the racist depictions of blacks in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Early responses to this, such as The Birth of a Race (1918) [click here to view a clip from the film] and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company's The Trooper of Troop K (1916), did not achieve box office success but ushered in a new subset of films in America, commonly referred to as "race movies."
Race movies served as an alternative for black movie-goers where they could see people of their own race in positive, uplifting roles rather than the 
stereotypes prevalent in the white movie industry. While few race movies were comedies, to try to avoid the "comedic" bumblings of Toms, Coons, Mammies, and Sambos in Hollywood, actions, dramas, and westerns were common. Christian morality tales were also popular, such as Spencer Williams' Blood of Jesus (1941) and Go Down, Death! (1944).
The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, founded in 1916, was one of the earliest producers of race movies with the stated purpose:
"To picure the Negro as he is in his every day life, a human being with human inclination, and one of talent and intellect." [from "Lincoln Motion Picture Company", by Jane Gaines, African Americans in Cinema: The First Half Century]
With the star power of Noble Johnson, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company pursued this ideal in their first picture, The Realization of a Negro's Ambition (1916), which told the tale of a young black man who leaves his home to make his fortune. The final film the company produced was By Right of Birth (1921), only fragments of which survies today. While the company only lasted five years, their impact on race movies was great.
Oscar Micheaux began his filmmaking career after negotiations with the Lincoln Motion Picture Company to adapt his novel The Homesteaders to the screen broke down and he determined to make the film himself in 1919. He would go on to produce more than forty more in his long and distinguished career, including Body and Soul (1925), Paul Robeson's motion picture debut. (For more on Oscar Micheaux, click here)
Some white-owned studios, such as Norman Studios in Jacksonville, Florida, saw an opportunity in making race movies. Richard E. Norman began his career in filmmaking in the 1910s making motion pictures for white audiences but soon began producing all-black cast films. After a failed attempt at inserting comedic scenes into the all-black cast remake of his 1916 all-white cast production of The Green Eyed Monster (1919), Norman removed the scenes and it became a hit with black audiences. Thereafter, the specialty of Norman Studios was actions and westerns. One such western, The Bull-Dogger (1921) [click here to view a clip from the film], featured the bull-dogging skills of black cowboy Bill Pickett. Norman Studios continued producing race movies through the 1920s but never made the transition to talkies in the 1930s and instead began distributing films from other studios.
With the invention of "talkies," or films with sound, Hollywood began to experiment with using black musicians such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway in their pictues in an attempt to introduce blacks without offending the white audiences. This stereotype, however, did not equal representation in Hollywood, so race movies continued to flourish throughout the 1930s and 1940s with Micheaux, Spencer Williams, and others producing films for black audiences. It wasn't until crossover actors, such as James Edwards in Home of the Brave (1949) and Sidney Poitier in No Way Out (1950), began securing roles of characters with dignity in Hollywood that the race movie era began to wane.
Sources:
- Green, J. Ronald. Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000
- Klotman, Phyllis. African Americans in Cinema: The First Half Century [CD-ROM]
- The Richard E. Norman Collection - Black Film Center/Archive
- Race Movies--Popular Art of the 1920's (1985)
Suggested Readings/Viewings:
- Black Shadows on a Silver Screen (1976)
- Bowser, Pearl, Jane Gaines and Charles Musser, eds. Oscar Micheaux & His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001
- Bowser, Pearl and Louise Spence. Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000
- Cripps, Thomas. Slow fade to black : the Negro in American film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993
- Ethnic Notions (1986)
- Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies (1994)
Race Movies Profiles:
More Feature Presentations:
- William Greaves (January/February 2003)
- Oscar Micheaux (March/April 2003)
- Camille Billops (Summer/Fall 2003)
- African American Oscar Winners (Spring/Summer 2004)
- Africana Women Filmmakers (Fall 2004 - Spring/Summer 2005)
