in tactic to counteract the new liberation movement of the Negro people, as well as to
hold back Negro and white unity. The main stereotypes of the
Negro–"primitiveness," "childishness," and
"buffoonery"–could no longer serve as sole rationalizations of "white
supremacy." Uncle Tom was needed.
The tactic was designed to erect a barrier against the rising mood of struggle for
Negro rights. Servile acceptance of inequality, collaboration with imperialism, nostalgic
beatification of slavery–this has been the thesis of films dealing with the slave South
and the Civil War during the forty years since. It implies also a slanderous belittlement
of the North’s role in the Civil War, which itself has come to be treated as a
"mistake" and its result as an "illegitimate" victory.
During that time, too, to make the tactic more effective, Hollywood began to release
its series of "white supremacy" films dealing with the "curse of
mixed-blood." Those racist melodramas, typified by The Octoroon (1913),
clearly were designed to stamp the Negro people as "social pariahs" for whom
there was no liberation and with whom there was no association. The "mission" of
such films was to accomplish, under new conditions, in the "serious" and
"tragic" way, what the utterly slap-stick, low-comedy pictures had been
manufactured to do in their way.
But as the war drums began to beat, this tactic was found wanting. Hollywood made a
decisive turn with the outbreak of imperialist World War I.
Woodrow Wilson’s call in August, 1914, upon Americans to be "impartial in thought
as well as in action" was but the opening note in that ascending scale of monstrous
demagogy which served the re-election of He-kept-us-out-of-war Wilson–five months before
he plunged us into war.
Involvement of the United States in the war was plotted from the first by the dominant
circles of Wall Street imperialism. The ominous signs were present in the increasing
direction of United States trade to the side of the Allied Powers, beginning with 1915; in
the functioning of the House of Morgan since mid-1915 as central purchasing agent for the
Allies; and in Washington’s "benevolent neutrality" toward Britain’s illegal
blockade of United States shipping, in contrast to the stern notes addressed to Germany
against her blockade.
War preparations demanded charging the atmosphere with the ideologies of jingoism,
chauvinism, racism, and brutality. Wall Street’s plans for empire demanded the
glorification of the white American "super-race." On the home scene this meant
intensified attacks upon the Negro people. The flames of hatred were kindled against the
Negro people in line with the policy of visiting the war burden upon the Negro and white
toiling masses as a whole. To cope with the mass antiwar sentiment which prevailed over
the land, it was necessary to undermine the markedly developing Negro and white alliance.
The anticipated war production, which would necessarily absorb many Negro workers into
industries, had to be guaranteed against the solidarity of Negro workers with white
workers. With the cessation of the influx of cheap foreign labor consequent upon the
outbreak of the war in Europe, Northern manufacturers had begun to stimulate the Northward
migration of Negroes from the South. Even before the incentive of jobs in the North, that
migration had started, as an escape from the unbearable conditions in the South.
"Justifications" had to be prepared for residential segregation of Negroes, for
the Jim-Crowing of Negro soldiers in the impending war, for the shameless overwork imposed
upon uniformed Negro "labor battalions" in European ports and supply centers,
and in general for the increased national oppression of the Negro people.
Thus, we read in Du Bois’ autobiographical account of that period:
With the accession of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1913 there opened for the
American Negro a period lasting through and long after the World War and culminating in
1919, which was an extraordinary test for their courage and a time of cruelty,
discrimination and wholesale murder. ( W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, New York,
1940, p. 235.)
It was in 1915 that Hollywood, in keeping with its main strategy, produced The Birth
of a Nation, which Wilson praised in the words: "It is like writing
history with lightning."
It is highly significant that Hollywood’s first "superspectacle," the
longest and costliest film produced to that date, should have been a lying extravaganza
glorifying slavery and vilifying the Negro people!
If, prior to that, the Negro had been stereotyped as clown or Uncle Tom, he was now
disfigured as "beast." The foulness of capitalist "culture" has never
been more glaringly revealed. By viciously falsifying the Negro’s role in the
Reconstruction period following the Civil War, by monstrously contriving scenes like that
of the Negro legislators in session "lounging back in their chairs with their bare
feet up on their desks, a bottle of whiskey in one band and a leg of chicken in the other
… the while intimidating white girls in the gallery with nods, winks and lewd
suggestions" (Peter Noble, The Negro in Films London, p. 37), this picture set
the style for all future slanders of the Negro people and distortions of the
Reconstruction period. The film, concretely, aimed to "justify" the denial of
civil rights and equal opportunities to Negroes, and to rationalize frame-ups, terror, and
lynchings, as both "necessary" and "romantic"!
A storm of protest arose when the film was released. Many theatres exhibiting it were
picketed. Foremost in this campaign against the picture were the Negro people themselves.
The protest actions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
encouraged other sections of the population, including prominent individuals, to engage in
the fight. As a result, the film was banned for a time in a number of states.
The picture has been revived repeatedly since then, even during World War II, at which
time vigorous protest from the Negro newspapers, as well as from the Communist press,
particularly the Daily Worker, forced its withdrawal. The pledge of the Chief of
the Bureau of Motion Pictures of the Office of War Information that the film would not be
shown again has, like many such bourgeois promises, been broken. Today this foul and
vicious spectacle is again on display in various parts of the country.
No doubt, The Birth of a Nation contributed to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan,
which it glorified–an organization which by 1924 counted five million members.
From that time on, all Hollywood pictures dealing with the south or the Civil War have
had a pro-Confederate bias. In not one is the North shown to have waged the just side of
the war, or to have legitimately won the war against the slaveowners. Such pictures have
proved an ideological support for the alliance of Wall Street and the Southern plantation
system in all its racist, pro-fascist, imperialist policies.
In the thirty-five years of capitalist film-making since The Birth of a
Nation, that picture stands out as the classic example of Hollywood’s ruthless basic
strategy with regard to the Negro people, not yet masked by such tactical adjustments and
maneuvers as became unavoidable in after times.
It is unnecessary to detail the course of those minor changes in the intermediate
period, from film to film and from type to type. The operation of a constant strategy,
despite variations of tactic, that we have traced in the course of the first seventeen
years of commercial film-making in the United States, could be shown as equally dominant
through the subsequent period–from the "prosperity decade" following the First
World War, through the "depression years" and the "New Deal era," to
the Second World War and the "peace" years since.
The "Negro Interest" Films
It is against this historical background that we must examine the new series of
Hollywood "Negro interest" films so far represented by Home of the Brave,
Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust. (Hollywood has since added The
Jackie Robinson Story and No Way Out. These films continue the pattern analyzed
in this study.)
One key question can lead us to a keener understanding of these films, and their role
in monopoly capital’s blueprint for dividing and conquering. It demands the fullest
analysis and the clearest answer. For with these films Hollywood has forged a new
ideological weapon. It now assumes the appearance of a crusading sword, raised in defense
of the Negro people. But what hand holds the hilt? Is it aimed accurately at the deep
roots of oppression–or is it aimed and wielded, after all, against the Negro people? Let
us watch the sword in action.
Our key question, then, is: Does this new film cycle signify a real advance in
Hollywood’s treatment of the Negro?
It cannot be disputed that, in a formal sense, these films seem to leave behind the
traditional Hollywood clich? Negro. Their central themes and characters do not seem to
bear the mark of the Uncle Tom stereotype; or the viciously libellous sub-human brute
type; or the "comic relief" calumny ? la Stepin Fetchit; or the bucolic myth of
laughing, singing, romping, happy-all-the-day field hands possessed of the mentality of
children and blessed with a natural contentment that makes the idea of freedom a rude,
Northern interference.
In each of the four motion pictures, we get the formal, outward aspect of a serious and
dignified presentation of the Negro, in a full-drawn, central role. The hero or heroine
moves through unfolding dramatic situations that are calculated to evoke (within the
limitations of the film’s ideology) the sympathetic response of the audience for the Negro
protagonist. The composite Negro protagonist emerges from this film series with qualities
of moral courage, devotion and principled conduct. Not all of these qualities apply
equally to each of the Negro central characters in the films. Nevertheless, we have in
these films what would seem at very long last the Negro come into his own in the screen
drama.
So obviously does this represent a sharp departure from Hollywood’s past patterns that,
to those who are content with first impressions, these films constitute nothing short of a
revolutionary change. Regardless of what must be said in criticism–and what must be said
here is fundamental criticism–it would be anything but realistic not to see in this new
screen depiction of the Negro the fact that the advancing movement of the Negro people,
together with their white labor and progressive allies, has forced a new tactical
concession from the enemy. At the same time, it would be even more unrealistic not to see
in this very concession a new mode–more dangerous because more subtle–through which the
racist ruling class of our country is today re-asserting its strategic ideology of
"white supremacy" on the Hollywood screen.
Let us examine the films themselves, matching reality against appearance, in theme and
content, and in mode of presentation; comparing total impression with presumed intent, in
the messages these films convey to the millions.
The New Stereotype
We begin with Pinky. The film deals with a Southern Negro young woman, named
Pinky (a slang term for a light-complexioned Negro who can pass for white). While studying
in Boston to become a registered nurse, Pinky (Jeanne Crain) falls in love with a white
doctor. Unable to tell her suitor of her Negro origin, Pinky runs away from what has
become for her an impossible situation. She returns to the South, home to her washerwoman
grandmother, Aunt Dicey (Ethel Waters). Here, she again encounters the real life of her
people at first hand. The young Northern doctor, who follows her to the South, where he
learns from her that she is a Negro, urges her to marry him, on condition however that she
return North with him, "come away from all this," and keep from the world her
Negro identity. She spurns his request. He leaves. At the insistence of her grandmother,
much against her will, Pinky consents to nurse an aristocratic, cantankerous, old
woman–Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore)–who is dying in her decaying plantation mansion.
From an early revulsion, there comes about a mutual attraction between Pinky and this
hard-shelled woman with the "heart of gold." The change is not too clearly
motivated, although an indicated factor is Miss Em’s detestation of her designing
relatives. The old woman dies and–has bequeathed her estate to Pinky! Pinky, however,
does not find it easy to inherit "white" property. Miss Em’s relatives challenge
the will. Pinky fights courageously for her rights. And–God’s in his heaven: All’s right
with the South–Pinky is awarded the estate! Her new property is converted into a
combination nursery-clinic-training school for Negroes, over which she presides, to five
happily ever after, as the fairy tale ends.
That is the bare narrative. What are this picture’s positive values–values that the
people have forced upon Hollywood? First among this film’s positive aspects, then, are the
indicting scenes of exposure. The wretched facts of discrimination in the South are
memorably etched in several scenes, perhaps the sharpest of this kind in the entire film
series.
There is the scene in which the police arrest two Negroes, a man and a woman. Pinky,
who is with them, is at first mistaken for white. She is gallantly deferred to by the
policemen, who "protect" her from the Negroes at her side. But Pinky defiantly
declares herself to be a Negro. Instantly, there is a change in the conduct of the police
toward her. We see white ruling-class justice, the only Southern justice, suddenly rip off
its mask of chivalry to reveal itself as the racism we know it to be. This is a great,
overpowering moment of film realism.
Later, two joy-riding white youths attempt to rape Pinky in a scene of terrifying,
dramatic impact. White rapists in a Hollywood film! A rare flash of truth on the American
screen. which has the effect of exposing the "rape" libel used to frame-up
Negroes as a bestial falsehood, devised to conceal the notorious actuality of legally
protected white ruling-class rapism.
The indictment of Bourbon bigotry is documented once again in the scene of the town
store, where we are shown dramatically the cruel anti-Negro differential in the upward
pricing of commodities to the customer Pinky, when the white merchant discovers that she
is a Negro. This is reality caught cold–a piercing comment on the "American
way of life."
Finally, on the credit side of the film, there are the positive elements of Pinky’s
character. Let us examine these in relation to a total realistic view of the film.
In the unfolding struggle for Miss Em’s property, there takes place a heavy veiling of
true conditions in the South and a busy sowing of illusions in Bourbon justice. In
Hollywood’s "typical" Southern town, the judge is on the side of justice for the
Negro! The court rules in favor of the Negro, and against the rich white plaintiff. What
is more, no mass pressure is brought to bear on the court. In fact, the masses are shown
as the counter-pressure. The only ones in the entire drama who are really against Pinky
and the Negroes are the poor whites; the class struggle between them and the rich whites
seemingly rages over the issue of justice for Pinky: the poor whites are against her; the
well-to-do whites are for her. Where but on the Hollywood screen can we get such
"insight" into the class alignments of social conflict!
The rose-tinting of bigotry and discrimination, of violence and oppression; the toning
down of everything that might be a little "too stark"; the deliberate evasion of
the fact of existing mounting legal and extra-legal brutality–these emerge as underlying
purposes of the film. In this picture, so high with pretensions of "fairness" to
the Negro, the shame of all this is not only ignored; it is sedulously denied by the
substitution of happenings no Southland ever saw.