Black Star

An Impossible Task

The actors who paved the way for black movie stars are now blamed for perpetuating racism. “The very best black performers played their types but played against them,” says historian Donald Bogle (37). This paper will examine black characters of early film, primarily from the 1930s, and their connections to contemporary media. The lineage of racial misrepresentation is difficult to face, and all kinds of people wish to simply forget it ever happened. But ignoring history for the sake of comfort is a lie. 

The most notorious actor is Stepin Fetchit, who played a lazy, incompetent, uncivilized, cartoonish, “coon” caricature. To ease the American mind of guilt and shame, attempts have been made to erase Stepin Fetchit from history. Fetchit’s female counterparts are “mammies,” big, black, matronly maids. In Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniel serves as an embodiment of the mammy, while her talent as an actress infuses the stereotype with as much nuance and empowerment as she was able to at the time. As recently as 2011, mammies have reappeared in the film The Help, but their evolution through seven decades has been disturbingly limited. Despite some back steps, cinema has progressed away from stereotypes since the 1930s, as films of 2013 such as 12 Years a Slave demonstrate. It is popular to blame black actors like Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel for their degrading depictions, but in truth they are not responsible for racial stereotypes or the negative effects that pervade. Investigating American film of the 1930s in juxtaposition with contemporary media exposes how some black stereotypes have ceased to exist and others have transformed, appearing in unexpected places.

Attempting to encompass black film history in a single academic paper is a ludicrous task. The bigger problem is my inadequacy as a curator or judge over which actors and characters to discuss, and moreover, which parallels to draw between them and present culture. Who am I to act as editor of this or any particular strand of black history? Instead I hope to discuss what I have learned in my research, and insights I have gained while I avoid making self-assured conjectures. I am motivated to explore this particular history because it has been suppressed and disfigured due to its ugly reflection on America. The narrow filmic roles expressed the overarching idea of the social role of black people. Let me put it this way, from early film through 1940 blacks were represented as slaves or servants by and large (Bogle 18). For centuries prior the prevailing theory was that people of African descent were naturally inferior and primitive. How else could people claim to be morally righteous, and yet uphold the institution of slavery? By springing forward through time and viewing present-day media portrayals of black performers and characters one occasionally feels a nebulous sense of injustice, tremendously hard to pin down and name, that harkens back to a long and tainted history.

Black actors of early film through to the 1940s were forced to play into stereotypes so they could be successful entertainers for white people. The consequence, of course, was that the movies held sway over the public, and to many people the narrow depictions of unrealistic black characters represented the entire group. Black actors had a job far tougher than their white counterparts, for they were also held responsible for diversifying the characters to advance the social standing of blacks. Donald Bogle expounds, “It seemed as if the mark of the actor was in the manner in which he individualized the mythic type or towered above it. But try as an actor might to forget the typecasting, the familiar types have almost always been present in American black movies,” (4).

There are four filmic black typecasts, the tom, the coon, the mammy, and the buck. This essay will discuss the history and evolution of these types, and will also append one more, the “black harlot,” (Bogle 9). I will consider performances in hip hop to contrast between the characters of 1930s. Hip hop, as an uninterrupted contemporary flow of black history, is important to discuss. Meanwhile The Help will serve as a thread through history as it links current actors to their portrayals of 1960s characters, who at times harken back to tired typecasts of 1930s film. The Help deals with servants, but in 2013 a procession of films depicting slavery have marched one after the other through packed theaters, expressing a greatly diversified vision of America's most atrocious institution. Most prominent among these films is 12 Years a Slave, which manages to avoid stereotypes, including among its white characters.

Traditionally there have been three prominent stereotypes relegated to black men: the genial and obedient tom, the ridiculous and dim coon, and the fearsome buck. Each revealed the expectations and apprehensions of whites toward black men. The tom was the first black typecast to appear in early film in a 1903 version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (3). In the 1930s the tom character was portrayed and evolved by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In The Littlest Rebel of 1935 Robinson plays Uncle Billy who is sweet, compliant, and expresses no discontent or anger about his social class (48). The tom fit into the “natural order” that was the justification for slavery. In this theory, people of African ancestry are inherently savage but become civilized under the rule of white people and therefore such an institution is righteous (13). The tom expressed a character who was happy and compliant, but naïve to his own supposedly savage roots that his white masters elevated him from. Such an idea reassured whites, insecure of their obvious social dominance, that they were rightfully in power and that there was no threat of losing authority. In the '30s, rigid, one-dimensional typecasts were just beginning to develop complexity thanks to the actors who performed them. Bill Robinson “was congenial, confident, and very very cool. Unlike Stepin Fetchit, he was articulate and reliable,” says Bogle. Because of his positive character attributes, there were far less complaints against Bill Robinson from civil rights groups than there were against actors like Stepin Fetchit (50).

Black entertainers were often used for comic relief through the patronizing caricature of the foolish coon, and the most well-known example of this is Stepin Fetchit. Though he is now considered so offensive that most people would rather simply forget him, it is incorrect to call his roles subversive in their own context. Yes, he avoids work at all costs and is a lazy rebel by contrast to the stoically subservient tom, but he was often treated and punished as a sub-human character (42). A glaring question arises with discussion of Fetchit; is a performer responsible only for himself and his characters, or must he be an example for the entire group he is a part of? Fetchit's was a degrading character born of the limitations of the time, filled by a man who took the opportunity to monopolize on the hard lot he had been handed. In doing so he became the first black movie star, and an entertainment on and off screen. “Stories circulated of his flamboyant high style of life: his six houses, his sixteen Chinese servants, his two-thousand dollar cashmere suits, his lavish parties, his twelve cars. (One was a champagne pink Cadillac with his name emblazoned on the side in neon lights,)” (39). When being reprimanded by Fox Pictures executives for poor behavior, Fetchit responded “I've been reading history, and I've noticed that they all became big guys after they were 32. Napoleon, Washington, and Abe Lincoln. You don't have to worry about me anymore. I'm 32 today,” (39). Fetchit is elevating himself to the ranks of white men in roles of great power. This reminiscent of a defining element of rap music – braggadocio. In his lifestyle Fetchit basked in luxury, another key subject in popular rap music. Still, “Stepin Fetchit shrewdly perceived that his coons, although extravagant and outlandish, must never be a threat to the white master,” says Bogle (42).

More than fifty years later in 1989, now on the cusp of contemporary culture, hip hop songs like “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy expressed a starkly different intention from the harmless idiocy of Stepin Fetchit. It was a righteous anthem of frustration within a system that had kept black people among its lowest ranks for centuries. But the “fight” described was not as much a threat of violence as it was a threat of expression, and the video depicted a passionate protest filled with music, dance, and art (Lee, Fight the Power). A very brief history of hip hop goes like this, it began in the 1970s as merely social gatherings and parties, evolved into a progressive creative outlet for ghetto frustration, and eventually became an angry militant outcry at racial and economic injustice, such as with “Fight the Power.” However, come the mid 1990s the celebrity of militant rappers like Public Enemy faded away when gangsta rap rose to enormous fame.

Gangsta rap described a gritty reality for a large disenfranchised population. It was an aggressive response to the unbearable weight of communities “replete with poverty, police brutality, drug abuse, educational inequity, and violence... Rap music became a cathartic outlet,” (Richardson and Scott 175). When looking at or listening to certain gangsta rap, I begin to feel a particular creeping unease that there, entwined in the genuine voice of disenfranchised people, is a revival of archaic stereotypes. The discomfort is difficult to call out by name, but not unfounded. In it's genesis, hip hop was an art form created by black artists for their communities. Now, nearly 75% of rap record sales are fueled by suburban white people, and it is no secret that the continued success of any genre of music, film, or art is ensured by meeting the standards of its audience (Campbell 327). Without baldly pointing fingers I suggest the possibility of stereotypes being reinforced in hip hop by the demands of a largely white audience seeking entertainment.

Popularized gangsta rap, when transformed by and for people who had little inkling of the harsh reality of ghetto life, became the sum of its most superficial qualities. The violence, lust, materialistic greed, and hyper-masculinity became dominant subject matter as messages of social, political, and economic injustice dwindled (though certainly did not disappear altogether). A synthetic and dangerous idea of black masculinity gained clarity because its popularity sold albums and merchandise. But black masculinity as an artifice is by no means new, as a similar stereotype was defined in D.W. Griffith's 1914 epic Birth of a Nation. The black “buck” was so threatening to white audiences, and so upsetting to equal rights groups, that he rarely appeared for a long time after Birth of a Nation. While the tom and the coon were emasculated and non-threatening, the buck was a truly savage and backward vision of black men.

In his early form, the only function the buck truly served was to demonstrate the absurd fear of what would happen if black people were to rise above their oppression. While the tom typecast was genial because of his obedience to white power, the buck by contrast returned to an apparently innate “sadism and bestiality” because of his freedom (Bogle 12). In Emperor Jones of 1933 the incredible, legendary actor (dancer, singer, athlete, and academic) Paul Robeson picks up the buck archetype from where it left off in 1914, but he manages to evolve it through his talent and performance of Brutus Jones. Bogle describes, “despite the fact that Robeson was often a black brute figure, black audiences still saw a black male completely unlike the servile characters of most American movies (of the time)... yet it was tainted because it presented the Negro as a murderer and a rogue,” (98). In Birth of a Nation the buck was defined also by an extreme fear that a black man's lust is most strong for white women, who were depicted as “the ultimate in female desirability,” (14).

Because of their proximity to whiteness, light-skinned black women of early film could portray a slightly wider margin of roles than most blacks. They were still most often “black harlots,” because their lightness made them sexually viable, but their blackness made them exotic and volatile (15). The other black female typecast was the Mammy. Like the tom or the coon she was desexed for her blackness. Hattie McDaniel is the most memorable actress to fill, and at times exceed, the mammy role. She played, “A full-bosomed domestic who was capable of carrying the world on her shoulders,” states Bogle (63). She was ornery, bossy, big, and dark-skinned, as it was expected of the mammy. Sometimes mammies were presented as the “aunt jemima,” more affable and god-fearing like a female counterpart to the tom. But Hattie McDaniel's mammy character spoke her mind fully as a knowledgeable no-nonsense mother figure. Often this was in direct opposition to her white employers and sometimes even to belittle them, as if she was unable to contain a deep storm of resentment. It did not change the fact that she was still playing a servant. But Hattie's famous retort is, “Why should I complain about making seven thousand dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making seven dollars a week actually being one!” (82). Therein she underlines the same lapse of judgment I recognize in dissenters of Stepin Fetchit as a performer. Hattie McDaniel lead a successful life by working within the rigid limitations that bound her. If she was going to suffer under racist typecasts one way or another, why not earn a good living for her suffering? The difference between Hattie McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit is that while Fetchit compounded his coon, McDaniel added real spirit and complexity to her mammy.

Though McDaniel made her mammy characters more complex than previous mammies had been, she still followed a rule illuminated by Bogle, “Seldom did the black maids have lives of their own. Instead they were comments on their mistresses,” (45). In The Help from 2011, the cast of maids are certainly deeper characters than those in the 1930s, but they are still often used as tools against which the white female employers are measured. The film shows two separate social groups in Jackson, Mississippi of the early 1960s, the white women and their black maids. The maids are routinely used to underscore the personalities of the southern society girls, especially to distinguish whether the girls are evil or benevolent. When the horrible Hilly fires her loud-mouthed and willful maid Minny for using the whites-only bathroom, the main purpose of the scene is to confirm Hilly as a wicked racist woman. When the maids are used to explain something about their mistresses, that message is not exclusively to elevate the white woman in the same way that maids were used as props in the 1930s. Though Minny is the typical big, black, cantankerous mammy, she is also a key player in exposing the heinous reality of being black in 1960s Mississippi. Minny contributes her stories to the white main character, a girl named Skeeter, who is writing a book about the maids' experiences. Minny is drawn to help Skeeter because try as she might for her own survival, she cannot remain obedient in the face of inequity. Yet in her own home she is powerless under her abusive husband who ravages her family. Clearly, her character is not merely a one-dimensional comment on the white women (45).

I do believe the movie attempts to be a progressive depiction of racial injustice. It fails to do so in a few respects, such as when the grizzly reality of murder, sub-human treatment, and economic disparity between blacks and whites is treated light-heartedly, as if to relieve some tension. Sometimes it is even turned into the butt of a joke. That is effective only when the joke is an empowering reversal of roles, like when Minny returns to her ex-employer Hilly with a pie, as if she is begging for her job back. Actually, Minny is back for retaliation, and the secret ingredient is her own feces which she bakes into the pie. Hilly pompously condescends Minny, while enjoying not one, but two slices of pie, before Minny reveals her horrible and hilarious secret.

Like The Help, early Hollywood movies were orchestrated by white directors and white screenwriters. The Help is based on a book by Kathryn Stockett, a pretty blonde Southern woman who was raised in a house that employed black maids (James). The screenplay was then developed by Tate Taylor, a white former male model for J. Crew who also directed the picture (Ryzik). Both Stockett and Taylor are from Mississippi, and they have been friends since they went to kindergarten together near Jackson. While it is far too simple to state that white people should never attempt honest and progressive depictions of racial tension, it is indeed a hot subject that garners no mild judgment. It is a very difficult task and wrought with potential for misrepresentation (the very thing this paper seeks to address). Here lies the reason I felt trepidation in writing this essay. It is one thing to research the subject and educate oneself, it is another to assume a position of authority on the matter. That is what Kathryn Stockett and Tate Taylor have done with naïvety. However, controversy is good publicity, and Stockett's book has sold at least ten million copies. Stockett herself says, “Its a nice outcome. And yet... cringeworthy,” (Galehouse). The film played in theaters for seven months and grossed $170 million in the U.S. (2011 DOMESTIC GROSSES). In this instance it seems absurd to blame the actresses who played maids in The Help, for which they received critical acclaim and hearty paychecks. Viola Davis, who played the leading maid role, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The award reinforces the connection between the film and its mammy ancestors, for Hattie McDaniel received the first Academy Award ever given to an African-American as a Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind (Bogle 89).

In the 1930s critics and audiences were openly skeptical of the narrow portrayal of black characters, yet they continued to return to screen as toms, coons, mammies, harlots, and bucks. There is a cultural pattern that as people progress and harmful beliefs are revealed as deceptive fictions, mass media is slow on the uptake. “The increase in ghetto theaters and the success of a number of independently produced all-Negro features had revealed that there was a growing Negro audience eager for any product even remotely touching on their own experiences,” (Bogle 67). Perhaps the film 12 Years a Slave is so resoundingly successful because it is a story dealing with a distinctly black American experience, the writer and director are of African descent, and it is based closely on a story written by an actual slave.

In the same way that an editor joins separate pictures and imbues them with new meaning, juxtaposing current movies with the aforementioned films of antiquity achieves a deeper awareness of our development as a nation. 1930s film presents its best known black characters through the lens of servitude and slavery, characters always inferior and eager to please lest they should be free and seen as dangerous bucks or harlots. Nearly eighty years into the future, cinematic slavery has made a great revival in 2013 with a whopping seven major motion pictures about slavery in theaters this year alone. Among 2013 releases like Tarantino's Django Unchained and Spielberg's Lincoln, is a solid and grim film about a free black man kidnapped into slavery: the gorgeous and heart wrenching 12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen (Samuels).

The visually awesome, sonically stirring, and unrelentingly honest 12 Years leaves its audience shaken to the core. The violence is unforgiving but realistic, as the film's historical accuracy was validated by Henry Louis Gates, director of African American Research at Harvard University. Gates also worked on Django Unchained, though Tarantino's take is highly stylized and of course at times more vividly entertaining than it is a disturbing likeness of truth. 12 Years unquestionably trumps Django because it depicts the brutality of slavery sincerely, but also layers gorgeous cinematography, a jarring and nuanced soundtrack, and startlingly excellent performances. The only character who was unimpressive was brought to us by Brad Pitt, who also happens to be 12 Years' producer. He plays a noble, Christ-like white savior to whom Solomon Northup (the slave) owes his ultimate return to freedom. Regardless of his unsavory self-placement in this role, Brad Pitt's performance simply does not captivate. Meanwhile Michael Fassbender gives us a monstrous villain who's absolute corruption is almost psychologically understandable, without inspiring a single drop of sympathy for him. And of course the two lead characters, slaves played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita N'yongo, express fear, sorrow, hatred, cautious hope, and rare faith beautifully. But in truth the only hope or faith for Lupita N'yongo's character is in death, the sole relief for her unyielding life of pain and punishment.

A New York Times review of the 1929 film Hearts in Dixie featuring Stepin Fetchit proclaims, “Throughout the picturesque episodes, the black (slaves) were mindlessly contented. Here were characters living in shacks and working from sunrise to sunset and always, instead of suffering or misery, they seemed to be floating on some euphoric high,”(Bogle 27). Is it a coincidence that the artists responsible for 12 Years a Slave, the starkest contrast to Hearts in Dixie, are black? Bogle illuminates, “The Negro actor, like the slaves he portrayed, aimed always to please the master figure. To do so, he gives not a performance of his own, not one in which he interprets black life, but one in which he presents for mass consumption black life as seen through the eyes of white artists,” (27). In 12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen as director, John Ridley as screenwriter, and Solomon Northup as original author impart a genuine vision of black American history, and in doing so shatter the fraudulent stereotypes ever-present in 1930s film.

The earliest black movie stars are remembered without much dignity. They are covered up instead of commemorated. Hattie McDaniel's legendary Oscar is missing from its home at Howard University and explanations for the disappearance vary. Some say its packed away in an unmarked box, some say that it was stolen during the civil rights movement, others hope that it was thrown into the Potomac River to swim with the fish (Carter). But McDaniel and other actors of her time cannot be blamed for their degrading treatment. Their attempts to shine despite the restrictions that bound them ought to be acknowledged. The tom, coon, mammy, buck, and harlot are stereotypes that sting the memory and recoil the tongue from discussion, but their existence is tangible evidence of inequity that cannot and should not be wiped from American history. Though most traditional typecasts have ceased to exist, their mythical traits occasionally rear up in corners of media like mainstream hip hop, novels, and movies. Then artists come along like Steve McQueen, with the ingenuity and resources to give us an honest and beautiful portrayal in 12 Years a Slave, as a contrast to the ludicrous depictions of slavery in 1930s films. Despite its period setting, the film ushers our culture forward while acknowledging the past.

Bibliography:

"2011 DOMESTIC GROSSES." Box Office Mojo. IMDB.com, Inc., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks; an Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 4th ed. New York: Continuum International Group, 2011. Print.

Campbell, Kermit E. "There Goes the Neighborhood: Hip Hop Creepin' on a Come up at the U." College Composition and Communication 58.3 (2007): 325-44. Print.

Carter, W. Burlette. "The Case of the Missing Oscar." GW Law. The George Washington University Law School, 6 Jan. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Galehouse, Maggie. "A conversation with ‘The Help’ author, Kathryn Stockett." Houston Chronicle. Hearst Newspapers, 8 Oct. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

The Help. Dir. Tate Taylor. Perf. Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer. Dreamworks, 2011. DVD.

James, Susan D. "Black Maid Sues, Says 'The Help' Is Humiliating." ABC News. ABC News Network, 22 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Lee, Spike. "Public Enemy - Fight The Power." YouTube. YouTube, 09 Sept. 2008. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Richardson, Jeanita W., and Kim A. Scott. "Rap Music and Its Violent Progeny: America's Culture of Violence in Context." The Journal of Negro Education 71.3 (2002): 175-92. Print.

Ryzik, Melena. "A Director's Kinship with the Deep South." New York Times [New York] 11 Dec. 2011: n. pag. New York Times. New York Times, 11 Dec. 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Samuels, Allison. "How 2013 Became the Year of the Slavery Film." The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 15 Mar. 2013. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.