The Conversation

If there is a valid question (and I believe there is) about whether American films with or about blacks merely reflected the culture rather than impacting it, Ralph Ellison situated  himself squarely with those who believe, as he phrased it: “In the beginning was not the shadow, but the act” (305). Films dealing with race were seen as reinforcing existing prejudices without altering them. I think this was largely true in 1949 when Ellison wrote his critique, but in the same essay he described four films that in their deeply flawed ways tried to get out ahead of the prevailing ethos in black–white relations of that era.[1] In his closing paragraphs he wrote of “the deep centers of American emotion that they [the four films] touch, and then went on to write that “they all display a vitality which escapes their slickest devices. . . . It is as though there were some deep relief to be gained merely from seeing these subjects projected upon the screen” (308). Here he strongly implies that the films were having an effect on white (and perhaps black) audiences, a conclusion I endorse. In this paper I will argue, based on an analysis of some 16 relevant films released in the decade from 1949 to 1959, that Hollywood was no passive mirror of opinion but a powerful force for change. The motion-picture industry helped create a matrix for the legal opinions and legislation regarding civil rights that spurred revolutionary positive change in this country.

The time was right. Millions of returning black veterans were demanding new ways of relating to the nation they had fought to defend.  In 1948 Harry Truman issued  executive orders desegregating the armed forces and the federal bureaucracy [2] and the Supreme Court had recently outlawed restrictive covenants. Neither of these actions had an immediate impact on the masses of black people, but something was in the air. Nineteen-forty-nine saw the release of Ellison’s quartet of ground-breaking movies, which, he writes, made “explicit the nature of Hollywood’s changed attitudes towards Negroes” (305). They were ground-breaking because for almost the first time Negro actors were liberated from the humiliating straitjacket of ugly stereotypes, and Negro characters were portrayed in a favorable way in leading roles. These motion pictures were the precursors of a large number of films dealing with race that appeared in the ’50s, all of which took, in varying degrees, a progressive stance. (There were ten Tarzan films in this period which continued to feature primitive “natives,” but they were the exception.) These four pictures were created in response to changes in post-war America. Stanley Kramer rushed to come out with the first of the “Negro tolerance” pictures, Home of the Brave, because he knew other filmmakers were in the race. Kramer and his contemporaries  Darryl Zanuck (Pinky),  Louis DeRochemont (Lost Boundaries) and the nearly forgotten Clarence Brown (Intruder in the Dust) were pioneers who gambled their careers in raising issues that had never been addressed in film. Their courage and their success changed the landscape not only of motion pictures but of race relations in America.

Background

Blackface apart, Negro actors in the ’30s and ’40s were forced to be complicit in their own dehumanization as they were repeatedly compelled to don a nightmarish jester’s cap and literally make fools of themselves. Here is the short (and I believe complete) list of roles they were allowed to play:

“Native” in jungle picture after jungle picture

Brute—as in Emperor Jones and Birth of a Nation

Waiter

Doorman

Elevator man

Sleeping-car porter

Maid

Cook

Chauffeur

Entertainer

Nursemaid

Preacher and, especially sadly,

Pickaninny

A select few blacks were permitted to retain some small shred of dignity playing the abjectly faithful servant of some white person. They were among the very few exceptions who were not depicted as lazy, stupid and cowardly. The word for this stock character was “coon.”  Often they were described as “shiftless” or “no account,” adjectives that happily seem to have disappeared from our 21^st-century lexicon, since they were almost exclusively used to describe Negroes.  I have a vivid 65-year-old memory of Willie Best, playing Bob Hope’s servant in the haunted house setting of  Ghostbreakers, rolling his eyes, displaying a full set of extremely white teeth, shouting “FEETS, DO YO DUTY!” and running out of the frame full tilt at the sight of something he took to be a ghoulish apparition.

There were some exceptions to this pattern, the most notable that I have encountered being Canada Lee’s role and performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in 1944, and his portrayal of Ben, the former lightweight champion boxer in Body and Soul three years later. In Lifeboat he is the ship’s steward Joe, hauled into a lifeboat with eight whites after their ship has been sunk by a German submarine. He keeps himself apart, and refuses to give his opinion when his shipmates are trying to decide on a course of action. There is a strong hint that before he went to sea he was a pickpocket, but he puts this background to productive use when he finds and takes a compass from the scheming Nazi sub commander who has been rescued along with the others. And at the end of the film he displays great courage in taking a knife away from another Nazi sailor who threatens his group. Here at last is a black man in film who is both resourceful and courageous.

In Body and Soul, as the ex-champ, he becomes the trainer of the man who took his title from him in a fixed fight, Charlie, played by John Garfield. When too rapid success and a trampy girlfriend lead him from his family roots and values, he is about to throw a fight at the behest of a gangster. Doing this will make Charlie a wealthy man. Ben, however, is a decent person, and Charlie has grown to love him, so Ben becomes Charlie’s conscience and persuades him not to throw the fight. Once again, Hollywood allowed Lee to portray a normal human being, and he did so with great dignity.

Lee was a marvelous stage actor and his skills carried over beautifully into film. (After Body and Soul he made only two more pictures: a small part in Lost Boundaries and the lead in the superb Cry, the Beloved Country. Ultimately he got caught up in the McCarthy purge and his film career ended.) As I have indicated, his first two performances on celluloid were anomalies, and the “coon” era dragged on and on.

Although the offensive portrayal of African-Americans certainly caused no great protest marches or boycotts, and it seemed that most white Americans were perfectly comfortable with the existing state of affairs, there were some ripples of dissent. In 1942, the controversial but powerful head of the NAACP, Walter White, convoked a luncheon meeting of studio heads and prominent producers at which he declared that his organization didn’t ask that the Negro be depicted as a superhuman hero, but rather as “a normal human being and integral part of human life.”[4] White had long recognized the enormous power of film to shape events. In 1939 he had written, “Whatever sentiment there was in the South for federal anti-lynch law evaporated with the Gone with the Wind vogue.”[5] But even his modest request that blacks be viewed as normal seems to have invoked a veritable epiphany in some of his luncheon guests. Darryl Zanuck remarked: “I make one sixth of the movies made in Hollywood and I never thought of this until you presented the facts.”[6]  The revelation seems to have had a delayed impact on Zanuck’s career, since it was another three years before he produced Pinky, which, like his subsequent films No Way Out and Island in the Sun, was a well-intentioned entry in the cascade of “New Negro” films that began in 1949.

  Walter White’s early efforts met with strong resistance from the African-American players who had worked steadily and, in some cases, for very decent wages. They considered him an intrusive outsider and pointedly told him to keep his nose out of Hollywood.[7]  They saw quite accurately that as White succeeded their chances of making a living in Hollywood would diminish or disappear. Willie Best, for example, appeared in over 120 films prior to 1949 and only two after 1949.[8] The attitude of these performers created a rift in the black community, with one letter writer to the black press declaring: “If Clarence Muse, Hattie McDaniel and others can’t make a living any other way than accepting roles reflecting adversely on the race, then let them get on relief!”[9] McDaniel answered back that she had “seen great strides made.” Clarence Muse compared himself to the much maligned Booker T. Washington when he said: “Those whom the race would destroy, they first call Tom.”[10] With this allusion to Euripides he revealed a degree of sophistication that had never been displayed in his onscreen persona. Muse in the 1940s alone had played a Pullman porter no fewer than 17 times.[11] Rex Ingram was another fine actor underestimated by those who may reasonably be presumed to have been his intellectual inferiors—the white men who controlled his destiny. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Northwestern and was a 1919 graduate of its medical school. Nevertheless, his first screen roles were crude jungle natives. Writing of his bit part in King Kong, James Snead points out: “This is the kind of work available to one of the finest black actors of his generation in 1933.”[12]

The studios predictably professed to see nothing wrong with their product and made common cause with the protesting actors. One member of the Production Code office shamelessly argued that “Producers have exercised extreme care as to the proper showing of racial groups.”[13] A spokesman for Columbia pictures blamed the problem on the blacks. The Los Angeles Tribune quoted him as saying “So long as there are colored persons . . . willing to play Uncle Tom roles, or through buffoonery . . . to barter the dignity of their race, it seems likely that Uncle Toms and buffoonery will continue.”[14]

This was the beginning of a tendency among many individuals in both racial groups to condemn unjustly these hapless performers as Toms, coons and mammies, as Donald Bogle points out. He writes, “The history of blacks in American films is one in which actors have elevated kitsch or trash and brought to it arty qualities if not pure art itself” (xxii).  Bogle’s comment surely applies to some performances, such as Ingram’s De Lawd in Green Pastures and Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as  Paul Robeson’s (Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia Law School) in almost all his films, but it seems to me overly enthusiastic when applied as an all-embracing generality. Nevertheless, Bogle’s defense of the early film actors—who have been condemned by so many to a purgatory reserved for those who don’t meet the judges’ own standard of moral purity—is eminently reasonable. They did not choose their roles, but once assigned them they did their best to elevate them. In the depression years of the ’30s, they knew they were lucky to be working at all and were not about to starve to establish some abstract principle.

In the preceding paragraphs I have tried to provide the background for my characterization of the four films Ellison singled out for special notice as ground-breaking. For the first time, black actors in leading roles in mainstream films with integrated casts were permitted their human dignity. Almost all of these films and those that appeared in the following decade which dealt with racial themes suffered from a failure of nerve at their center, but they nonetheless were notable for eliminating permanently the Tom and coon roles. (Mulattoes figured prominently in at least three of them, and the mammy character clung stubbornly to life until 1959 when Ethel Waters, in The Sound and the Fury, and Juanita Moore, in Imitation of Life, gave it a long overdue defenestration.)

Problem Films of 1949 through 1959

In Home of the Brave, the protagonist Peter Moss is a black soldier who volunteers to go on a dangerous secret mission with four white soldiers. He is the object of many cruel racial taunts, which he bears with seeming equanimity, but when his one good friend on the team, in an uncharacteristic moment of anger, calls him a “yellow-bellied nigger,” Moss wishes for his death, and a moment later a Japanese sniper grants his wish. Almost immediately Moss is incapacitated by hysterical paralysis. To those of us with a college sophomore’s knowledge of psychiatry, Carl Foreman’s script clearly indicated that the paralysis was a direct result of his guilt over his friend’s death. Not merely survivor’s guilt, because in the classic formulation, he has subconsciously made himself powerful enough so that his wish can kill. The psychiatrist who treats Moss comes to an entirely different conclusion. His patient’s guilt is just like that of every other soldier in combat who lives while his buddies are dying. Incredibly the racial component is completely bleached out in the diagnosis and cure—even though Moss is allowed to say: “I learned that if you’re colored you stink. You’re not like other people. You’re alone. You’re something . . . different. Well, you make us different, you rats.” No Negro in films had ever spoken to a white man that way. But with the help of the psychiatrist, he learns that blacks and whites are brothers under the skin, and he walks off into the sunset to open a bar with a white soldier whom he had never met before the mission. This, of course, was incredible on the face of it. A black–white business partnership was not something in those days that would be entered into so lightly. More unbelievable still was the idea of one black soldier being infiltrated onto a Japanese-held island with four white soldiers. There were no integrated units in the Pacific theater, and Negroes were not trained to fight but were confined to quartermaster and engineering (road-building) battalions. Some idea of the atmosphere in our World War II army can be gleaned from an official communiqué written by General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Army commander in Alaska. Blacks were working on the roads there, but he demanded their speedy removal lest they “interbreed with the Indians and Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels.” Because of his good work, Buckner was promoted to command the 10^th Army in the Pacific. Peter Moss would have served under him.[15]   Some of these problems relate to the fact that the Broadway play on which the film was based concerned a Jewish soldier, and it was Kramer’s inspired idea to change the protagonist to a black man. Moss, very well acted by James Edwards, was dependent on a white doctor to make him whole, but he didn’t shuffle, didn’t roll his eyes, stood up straight and spoke unaccented American English. (Only a year later, Sidney Poitier played a physician who healed a white bigot in No Way Out.) Moss even expressed anger at his treatment by white racists. From a distance of so many years, it’s hard to remember that such things were noteworthy—even shocking—in 1949. Home of the Brave was a great financial success, drawing crowds even in the South, made Kramer’s reputation and opened the door to a whole new way of portraying blacks in film. This appears to have been the forerunner of many other films of the era that used a therapeutic professional to socialize the outsider.

Another picture that appeared in that annus mirabilis of 1949 was Intruder in the Dust. Ellison singled it out for special praise for two reasons: a white attorney tells his nephew that Lucas Beauchamp, the black protagonist, is “the keeper of my conscience,” and his nephew replies, “Our conscience, Uncle John.” Ellison didn’t remember this bit of dialogue quite precisely, but he wrote that it was “viewed historically, about the most remarkable film concerning a Negro ever to come out of Hollywood” (303). And then, comparing it to the three other films he had singled out for comment, he wrote that Intruder “is the only film that could be shown in Harlem without arousing unintended laughter, for it is the only one of the four in which Negroes can make complete identification with their screen image” (308). In a beautifully modulated performance by Juan Hernandez, we are introduced to Lucas, whose stiff-necked pride verges on arrogance. He is the kind of black man who will tip his hat to no man, won’t move aside for whites on the sidewalk and refuses to call the white man “sir.”  This was the kind of behavior that could get a black man killed in small-town Mississippi in those days, but under Clarence Brown’s direction Lucas projects such inner strength that only the most rabid racists in the film dare to challenge him. At the start of the film, Lucas saves a young white boy, Chick, from drowning, and this is the beginning of a curious relationship between the two. Initially Chick is angered and puzzled by Lucas’s refusal to show him any deference, but as he gets to know Lucas, he tells his uncle, “I reckon you can be sad or proud or even lonely inside a black skin too.” Lucas is framed for murder, and a lynch mob forms outside the jail. Other black prisoners are terrified that when the mob comes to get Lucas they will die with him—but Lucas is calmly sleeping when Chick and his Uncle John come to see him. John believes he’s guilty but tells Lucas he wouldn’t be sitting in jail if only he called white men “Mister.” Lucas is stoic and remains silent. John nevertheless agrees to represent him. When Chick returns alone to talk to him, he orders rather than asks the boy to dig up the murder victim’s corpse that had been buried earlier in the day and retrieve the bullet that will prove his innocence. Chick enlists the aid of a feisty old white lady and his young black friend to exhume the body. This scene is the only one in which there is a reversion to stereotype. Chick’s black friend acts out a grossly exaggerated fear of the graveyard. He doesn’t quite say “Feets, do yo duty” but he comes close. This was the only jarring note I found in a quite wonderful film, whose director was obviously respectful both of his actors and of the characters they play. Chick finds the exculpatory bullet, and the real killer—a bigoted white man who is the brother of the victim—is identified. The film ends as Lucas comes to John’s office and insists on paying him a fee for defending him and getting a receipt. He doesn’t want any favors, at least from grownup white men. John tells Chick that Lucas is “proud, stubborn, insufferable . . . but he is the keeper of my conscience.”   

Pinky and Lost Boundaries (both from 1949) and Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) all use white actors playing black people passing as white. Just as we can learn something about male attitudes toward women in Shakespeare’s time when characters like Viola/Cesario were played by boys, so there are layers of meaning to be decoded in these passing films. Just as issues of woman love between Viola and Olivia in Twelfth Night are skirted by the fact that the actor playing Viola is not really a woman, so the extremely touchy subject of interracial sex is largely evaded by using Jeanne Crain to play the eponymous role of Pinky.

Although Pinky is clearly intended to convey a message of tolerance, it actually gives us a mixed message about the possibilities for racial amity. Pinky is a Negro so light skinned and so obviously clueless (both her character and Crain the actress) about even the simplest and most obvious elements of black life that Ellison disdainfully remarks that “No one is apt to mistake her for a Negro, not even a white one” (308). She has come to her grandmother’s home where she was raised, somewhere in the deep South, and is having trouble readjusting to the local folkways because she has spent some years up north passing for white. She has come home because she can’t go through with her impending marriage to a white doctor who is unaware of her racial identity. At the end of the picture, she rejects interracial marriage (then called miscegenation) for explicit reasons that must have been seen as acceptable to white southerners. She has listened to the strictures of the patrician white lady, Miss Em, who used to be Granny’s employer, who tells her, “Be yourself!” (meaning “Don’t deny your blackness”). And Granny (Ethel Waters) has shamed her into believing that she would be disloyal to her race if she went back north and resumed passing. But at this early stage of the film, Pinky has not yet absorbed these lessons and she seems to consider leaving home every time she encounters problems with local bigots. As a result, it’s not at all clear why she objects to marrying a white man. This is just one of several lacunae in the script, which, if filled, might push it into dangerous territory. Another is the question of her parents—who are they and where are they? Nobody even mentions them. Pinky has a grandmother and no other relatives, but only miscegenation could produce someone who looks like Pinky, so it’s not discussed.

Her grandmother is afraid that Pinky will return north and repudiate her heritage. Aunt Dicey, as she is called, still does Miss Em’s laundry but refuses to charge for the service because Em has very little money, just the huge plantation house. Dicey loves Em, as any self-respecting mammy would, but there’s a new twist in the relationship. When Dicey was ill and bedridden, she tells Pinky, Em moved into the broken down shack with her, looked after her, spoon fed her and emptied the bed pan. Although these actions are narrated and not shown, the scene had a shock value in 1949. Hearing of this episode derails (literally) Pinky’s intention to take the train back north, as Dicey convinces her to move to the big house, don a white uniform and make use of her northern training as a graduate nurse to look after Miss Em. Miss Em is played by Ethel Barrymore as a kind of white female Lucas Beauchamp—proud, inflexible, imperious—but, underneath the abrasive exterior, kind and wise. Pinky initially resents taking orders from her and remarks that Miss Em lives in a home built by slaves, but gradually a bond is forged between the women, and when Em dies she leaves the big house to Pinky in her will. (This may not be a completely credible development, but in the movie it happens.) Soon afterwards Pinky’s fiancé comes back, shrugs off the fact she’s black and urges her to accompany him back north as his wife. Obviously if she agrees she will be passing again, because what her fiancé did not say is: “Come back with me, marry me and live proudly as a black woman in my white world.” But he does tell her that as a scientist he knows that doctrines of racial superiority have no basis in fact. This certainly had never before been said on screen.

But as noted earlier, Pinky rejects him, and this time she has an ideology to support her decision. It is her duty to herself and to her race to embrace her blackness and not despoil both races by having sex with a white man. She opens a rigidly segregated school for black nurses in Miss Em’s house and opts for a life of celibacy. She has rejected sex with a white man and it is very clear that no black man will ever touch that unblemished white skin.

Before the saccharine ending, which shows Pinky glowing with happiness as she gives orders to her all-black student body, the film veers off into a courtroom drama involving an obnoxious cousin of Em’s who challenges the validity of her will. Most of the whites in town turn out to support the obnoxious cousin. A disreputable Negro neighbor of Dicey’s (played by the excellent Frederick O’Neal) tells Pinky that if she defends the lawsuit, it will stir up the whites to make trouble for the blacks. While this makes the neighbor look cowardly, it also depicts the white community as irrationally malicious. In the end, however, Pinky gets justice from a fair-minded white judge.

Lost Boundaries featured Mel Ferrer and Beatrice Pearson, both white, portraying a black couple in a story based loosely on actual occurrences. I write “loosely” because I have read the book that formed the basis of the film, and at a later point it will be instructive to review how the producer, Louis DeRochemont, changed the facts to make the story more acceptable to white audiences.

The film starts in 1924, and a couple, Scott and Marsha Carter, who are white in appearance, are celebrating with an all-black group Scott’s graduation from medical school. Conversation makes it clear that the Carters are black, since Scott, knowing that he can never get an internship at a white hospital, is concerned that there are so few black hospitals. For a time it appears that he is one of the lucky ones, for he is offered a job at a Georgia hospital. After he and Marsha have found an apartment, he presents himself to the dark-skinned president of the hospital, who takes one look at him and tells him the job is already taken. Scott is seen as the victim of black bigotry. With no other place to live, they move in with Marsha’s parents in Boston. Scott is reluctant to pass but realizes that’s the only way he can get a job, and he soon becomes an intern in New Hampshire. In an incident that is completely fictional, he saves the life of a white doctor who tells him of a practice that’s available for purchase in a small New Hampshire town. He advises Scott to buy it while continuing to pass, and so Scott and Marsha move to a small town, where they are made welcome and over the years become leading citizens. They have two children who have no idea they’re black. One day a week, Scott secretly drives to Boston and volunteers his services at a ghetto clinic. In 1942, Scott applies for a Navy commission, but Naval Intelligence does a background check on him, discovers he’s a Negro and revokes his commission. Now he has been outed. His son, Howard, is devastated, refuses to speak to his father, spends hours staring at his skin and eventually runs off to Harlem, which is depicted as a filthy, dangerous place without any redeeming features. He is briefly arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and the always admirable Canada Lee plays a black detective at the Harlem precinct who sends him home with the admonition not to blame his father. He was only trying to protect you and your sister from fear and hate and violence by not telling you, he says. Both children soon adjust, and the townspeople who had been hostile initially, generously find it in their hearts to forgive Scott and Marsha for being black—but only after hearing a sermon on tolerance from the pastor of what appears to be the only church in town. One writer pointed out that the real heroes of this movie are the white people who accept the Carters even after learning of their bad blood.[16] The book, written by William L. White, narrates a somewhat different story. Whereas in the film Scott decides to pass only after a Negro hospital administrator has denied him employment, in reality Albert Johnston, the real-life Scott Carter, embraced the strategy of passing without any added motivation from black bigots. The film tells of Scott’s volunteer work in the ghetto, but Albert did nothing of the sort. This was just a strategy to make him more sympathetic. The most interesting change involves the reaction of Albert Jr. when at the age of 17 he learned he was a Negro. He told the author that for a time it turned his world upside down and he traveled the country meeting with the relatives he had never known he had. At no time, he said, was he embarrassed or angry at his father and he was always proud of his race.

In the film, the fictional son Howard’s desperate trip to Harlem serves only as a contrast to the calm pleasant life available to him in New Hampshire as opposed to the raucous, violent lifestyle he observes in New York, symbolized, as Walter White complained, by a “zoot-suited shifty-looking character paring his fingernails in front of the boarding house.”[17] That sequence, distorted as it is, symbolizes the most egregious failure of the film. It is the only attempt to connect with the reality of black life apart from Scott and Marsha, whom Cripps dismisses as “hothouse plants living in isolated splendor at the pleasure of whites” (230).

Conclusion

In my discussion of these four films, I have not shown them the forbearance they deserve. It is true that they all suffered from the failure of nerve that I alluded to earlier. All of them compromised their own ideals to one degree or another. Not one of them ever attempted to grapple with the reality of black lives without the benefit of a white skin, a medical degree, a large inheritance, the fictitious support of a benevolent army or the ability to form a friendship with powerful whites like Attorney Stevens and Miss Fabersham. Later films in the cycle of pictures dealing with racial issues, such as Odds Against Tomorrow and Something of Value, had the strength to show the tragic consequences of racism, but not these four, which all ended on a not always credible upbeat note. But it is perhaps too easy to find fault with their cowardice, their evasions, their omissions. They deserve better than that. Here are some of the things they did show:

A black soldier is brave, talks back to white bigots and will become the business partner of a white man.

A black man in a small town in Mississippi refuses to say “sir” to white men and through his unbending pride and the force of his character earns the respect of many in the white community.

An elderly white woman moves in with her black former servant, nurses her through an illness and empties her bed pan.

A white doctor tells a black woman that doctrines of racial superiority are fictional.

A black woman fights a white woman in a civil action in a southern court and wins.

And all of these films graphically depicted the mindless cruelty that white people so often inflicted on African-Americans.

I think until these films and others like them that came after appeared, a huge proportion of white America had never thought about such things or begun to imagine their own complicity in the horror of Jim Crow.

The people who created these films made them with sincere good intentions and the courage to tell at least a part of the truth. They knew and feared that damage to their careers might result, but they were undeterred and did what no one in the Hollywood community had done before, and for this they deserve our thanks. Without the context they provided, many white people might not have known how to interpret the 1963 images of Bull Connor turning his dogs, his fire hoses and his storm troopers loose on high school children in Birmingham.

The Civil Rights movement that employed the talents of thousands of brave volunteers could not have succeeded if the climate of opinion in America had not changed radically. Many factors obviously contributed to that change, but I believe that without these pioneering films, the changes might have taken years longer to occur. Hollywood, which for so many years had been a large part of the problem, at last became part of the solution.

1.      The four films are Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky and Intruder in the Dust.

2.      Truman signed executive orders 9980 and 9981 in 1948, but, as Michael Rogin writes, the army dragged its feet implementing Truman’s directives so that “it did not place black and white troops together until the Korean War” (232). My own experience indicates that the foot-dragging went on somewhat longer. While posted to Korea in 1952, I stayed for a time with a road-building company. At that encampment, every enlisted man was white and every officer was black.

3.      Cripps, p. 46.

4.      Ibid., p. 50.

5.      Noble, p. 79.

6.      Cripps, p. 4.

7.      Leab, p. 130.

8.      IMDB.com name search for Willie Best.

9.      Leab, p. 134.

10.  Ibid., p. 131.

11.  IMDB.com name search for Clarence Muse.

12.  Snead, p. 137.

13.  Leab, p. 133.

14.  Ibid., p. 130.

15.  Buckner quoted in Moore, p. 75.

16.  Cripps, p. 229.

17.  Cripps, p. 228.

Works Cited

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black. New York: Oxford U P, 1993.

Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Leab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade. Boston: Houghton, 1976.

Moore, Christopher Paul. Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—The Unsung Heroes of World War II. New York: Ballantine, 2005.

Noble, Peter. The Negro in Films. New York: Arno Press, 1970.

Rogin, Michael. Black Face White Noise. Berkeley: U California P, 1996.

Snead, James. White Screens, Black Images. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Tags: black actors, civil rights, Robert Wechsler