Running Head: ADJUSTING THE COLOR: THE SHATTERING OF BLACKNESS 1 Adjusting the Color: The Shattering of Blackness through Race Films 1916-1929 Paul Grammatico San Jose State University ADJUSTING THE COLOR: THE SHATTERING OF BLACKNESS 2 Abstract This paper examines the Race film genre from 1916 through 1929. This paper also examines the early motion pictures of Thomas Edison and the introduction of racial stereotypes of African –Americans, how D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation caused outrage in the black community with its racist agenda, the rise of Race films to show a more accurate representation of black life, the reasons for its decline, and how we must obtain and preserve the “lost” films and the films we have already discovered in order to preserve this part of American history. Keywords: film, race, stereotype, director, producer, cinema, theatre, preservation ADJUSTING THE COLOR: THE SHATTERING OF BLACKNESS 3 Introduction Since the first motion picture created by Thomas Edison in 1894, African-Americans bared the brunt of stereotypes in various nickelodeons displaying short films created by different white directors as film aesthetics continued to grow. When director D.W. Griffith released the first epic motion picture The Birth of a Nation, he showed African-Americans (portrayed by white actors in blackface) as the following stereotypes: The Coon, the Mammy, the Tom, and his own creation, the brutal Buck. These hurtful and degrading stereotypes gave rise to African- Americans creating a more realistic version of black life through “Race” films. The term “Race films” as scholar Pearl Bowser states in the 2006 commentary track on the Oscar Micheaux DVD Body and Soul (1925): “The term Race film comes from the Chicago Defender – an African-American newspaper at the time. They would use the term Race women or Race men. No one used the word “black” at the time and the R was always capitalized. These were considered the leaders…the doers for the benefit of the Race.” How did these stereotypes arise in the films of early cinema? How did Race films combat these stereotypes? This essay will attempt to explain how Race films emerged, the monetary, censorship, and alienation these filmmakers faced in a white dominated media, and the rise and decline of these Race films from 1915 – 1929. Many of these films are lost or of poor quality and are in dire need of restoration and will be illustrated further in this article. Early Depictions of Black Stereotypes in Film – 1896 - 1915 The period between the mid-1890s and 1915, when the movies became one of the most important forms of mass entertainment in the United States, was a period in which racial libels abounded (Leab, 1975, p. 7). When Edison started making short films for the nickelodeon peep ADJUSTING THE COLOR: THE SHATTERING OF BLACKNESS 4 shows in the 1890’s, there became the emergence of black stereotypes in his short films as Ten Pickannines (1904), showing African-American children dancing, and Watermelon Eating Contest (1898) to which he followed up with Watermelon Contest (1900) that display African- Americans devouring the fruit. As these hurtful stereotypes were developing and constantly evolving well into the 20th century, three main stereotypes of black people emerged (mostly portrayed by white actors in blackface): The Tom The Tom character first emerges in Edwin S. Porter’s film Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903, which was done by the Edison Motion Picture Company. Porter’s Tom was the first in a long line of socially acceptable Good Negro characters. Always as toms they are chased, harassed, hounded, flogged, enslaved, and insulted, they keep the faith, n’er turn against their white massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind. Thus they endear themselves to white audiences and emerge as heroes of sorts (Bogle, 2001, pp. 4-6). In Porter’s 12-minute film, based on the Harriet Beecher Stowe play of the same name, shows Uncle Tom as a willing slave to the St. Clair family. When the character Eliza tries to convince Tom that he should escape from the plantation, Tom refuses, remaining loyal to the St. Clair family and is willing to bow and scrape to his master’s wishes. Tom also becomes a surrogate parent to the St. Clair’s daughter little Eva, saving her from drowning, giving her lots of attention and care, and grieves horribly when she inexplicably dies. When Tom is beaten repeatedly in the film, he never fights back, somehow feeling he deserves each and every blow that is given to him. Another strange feature of this film is that the other slaves on the plantation dance no matter what circumstances they are in (even when they are up for auction!) as if this is the only way they can communicate. When Tom is dying, the white family doesn’t bring him ADJUSTING THE COLOR: THE SHATTERING OF BLACKNESS 5 into the house to take care of his wounds; he dies “heroically” in the hay in their barn as the film ends with pictures of Lincoln and the end of the civil war in the background. For the character of Tom it seems that filmmakers used white actors in Black roles when they wanted to elicit from their white audiences a sense of sympathy for or identification with Black characters (Stewart, 2005). The Tom character also personifies the director’s longing for the “good old days of slavery” and the days of the Good Negro, willing to lay his life on the line for the sake of his white master, as opposed to the horrible day of emancipation and the current decades of reconstruction. There are six film adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from 1903 to 1927. When Universal pictures filmed the 1927 version, the actor James B. Lowe was assigned the leading role. He was the first African-American actor selected to play this character in order to fit in with the “realistic demands of the times (Bogle, 2001, p. 6). The Coon Although tom was to outdistance every other type and dominate American hearth and home, he had serious competition from the coon character (Bogle, 2001, p. 7). At first, the coon was playful, dancing and young such as the character of Topsy –a female child coon- but gender in coons is viewed as arbitrary and insignificant (Wallace, 1993). As the coon character evolved, it changed into the most 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 crap, or butchering the English language. Rastus was just such a figure (Bogle, 2001, p. 8). In the 3-minute short film Rastus and the Game Cock (1913), directed by Mack Sennett, shows the character Rastus in blackface with large white lips and bulging eyes, cheating other ADJUSTING THE COLOR: THE SHATTERING OF BLACKNESS 6 blackface actors in a game of craps with Rastus supplying the dice, which are loaded. The scene then shifts to Rastus betting on a cockfight where the best rooster is undefeated and is the best of all the other roosters fighting. In a previous scene, Rastus is harassed by a “mammy” character, which looks like a cross-dressing actor in blackface, to find a chicken so they can eat. Rastus then steals a chicken from the cockfight and presents it to mammy. All hell breaks loose when the prized rooster is nowhere to be found. Rastus, realizing his buffoonery has gotten him in hot water, runs to save the rooster’s neck from the blade of mammy’s hatchet (the film cuts out there as it is poorly preserved and thus considered a fragment). This type of coon lingers on past the silent era and this central coon character paves the way for the serial Amos ‘n Andy in the 1950’s and the greatest coon of all time, Stepin Fetchit (Bogle, 2001, p. 8). The Mammy Mammy is so closely related to the comic coons that she is usually relegated to her ranks. Mammy is distinguished, however, by her sex and her fierce independence. She is usually big, fat, and cantankerous (Bogle, 2001, p. 9). Mammies are generally middle aged, and so dark, so thoroughly black, that it is preposterous even to suggest that she be a sex object (Wallace, 1993). This stereotype exists in many films such as the Rastus film listed above, but unfortunately, the films that have been mentioned such as Coontown Suffragettes (1914) or Old Mammy’s Charge (1913), both stated by Donald Bogle (2001, p. 9) and Jacqueline Stewart (2005) respectively, cannot be located or retrieved. The mammy character may be linked to the coon stereotype, but I also believe that it is kin to the tom character as well. Sassy and cantankerous as she is, she is also loyal to the white family she slaves/works for. This stereotype won an academy award for Hattie McDaniel when she portrayed the loyal house servant Mammy ADJUSTING THE COLOR: THE SHATTERING OF BLACKNESS 7 in the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind and became the most famous motion picture mammy of all time (Stewart, 2005). In Edward Mapp’s comments on the pre-World War II images of blacks in films: “When the Negro was not made an object of ridicule s/he was portrayed as the devoted slave who knew his/her place. Between 1910 and 1915 a number of such films were made…there were virtually no favorable portrayals of Negros in this period”(Simpson, 1990, p.