Black Male Frames: African Americans in a Century of Hollywood Cinema, 1903-2003

By Roland Leander Williams Jr.

Black Male Frames charts the development and shifting popularity of two stereotypes of black masculinity in popular American film: "the shaman" or "the scoundrel." Starting with colonial times, Williams identifies the origins of these roles in an America where black men were forced either to defy or to defer to their white masters. These figures recur in the stories America tells about its black men, from the fictional Jim Crow and Zip Coon to historical figures such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Williams argues that these two extremes persist today in modern Hollywood, where actors such as Sam Lucas, Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman, among others, must cope with and work around such limited options. Williams situates these actors’ performances of one or the other stereotype within each man’s personal history and within the country’s historical moment, ultimately to argue that these men are rewarded for their portrayal of the stereotypes most needed to put America’s ongoing racial anxieties at ease. Reinvigorating the discussion that began with Donald Bogle’s seminal work, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, Black Male Frames illuminates the ways in which individuals and the media respond to the changing racial politics in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9780815652878

Book preview

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You Can’t Air That: Four Cases of Controversy and Censorship in American Television Programming

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Copyright © 2015 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2015

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014953951

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In memory of my sister Renee

Reawakening

Senses tell.

Dew drops.

Dark skies pass.

Tides rise.

A star dies.

Spells never last.

Light grows.

Dreamers stir.

A hungry soul aches.

Care builds.

Spirits gather.

Another day breaks.

—Roland Leander Williams Jr.

Roland Leander Williams Jr. is an associate professor in the English Department at Temple University. He is the author of African American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom (2000) in addition to works of fiction and criticism.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Original Frames

2. New Negro

3. Renaissance Man

4. Civil Servant

5. Soul Brother

6. Good Buddy

7. Curtain Call

Works Cited and Suggested Reading

Index

Illustrations

1. Official medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society

2. Picture from 1832 playbill

3. Sheet music cover for the song Zip Coon

4. Still from Uncle Tom’s Cabin

5. Still from The Birth of a Nation

6. Paul Robeson at Russian war anniversary benefit, 1942

7. Poitier, Belafonte, and Heston at the March on Washington

8. Billy Van, the monologue comedian

9. Barack Obama speaks to Congress

Acknowledgments

I am pleased to have this chance to acknowledge the help that made this book possible. Invaluable material came from the Free Library of Philadelphia, Samuel L. Paley Library, and Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library as well as from the Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. For the images that support the text, I am grateful to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The assistance of Temple University faculty and staff was also constructive.

For professional support, I am grateful to Lena Ampadu, David Bradley, Wayne Glasker, Carolyn Karcher, and Horace Ike New-sum. And I am forever indebted to my editor at Syracuse University Press, Jennika Baines, for her interest, encouragement, and patience. Without her, the project would be a dream deferred. I also thank Annie Barva for her great work as copy editor.

I am likewise thankful to many friends, especially Ronald Boyd and Jerry Clark, for their humor. I thank my father and twin brothers, along with my nephews Kairi, Kahlil, Russell, Rashan, and Roland (32), for helping me frame the subject. Finally, I thank my lovely wife, Andrea, for her faith in me through the years.

Introduction

A fateful turn in the national development during the third generation of the Jamestown Colony opened the door to the peculiar institution—slavery, black bondage—in a land sold on liberty. It imposed on Africans in America a choice between deference and defiance. The situation conjured up stereotypes that painted black men as either respectful or rebellious figures. Before the Civil War, blackface minstrel acts such as Jim Crow and Zip Coon paraded these stereotypes on stage. Without the comic threads, Harriet Beecher Stowe wove them in her profiles of Uncle Tom and George Harris. Sterling Brown (1933) later labeled them the contented slave and the wretched freeman. Their presence in a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin known as the Tom Show helped the drama to pack theaters until 1903, when Edwin Porter converted the play into the original feature film.

Tracking the passage of these stereotypes from the stage to the screen, this book works like an African griot. It is a social history, a story that recounts the experience of a folk. The narrative unfolds with a bit on the birth of black bondage and how the scheme set color to signify character. In addition, it indicates how the system bound black men to manifest either an obliging or an obstinate manner. The heart of the matter demonstrates that the stereotypes at issue defined the limits of black manhood in the popular imagination through the initial century of Hollywood cinema from 1903 to 2003.

For proof of its findings, this volume explores the life and times of five black actors whose signature roles made a big splash at particular junctures in the stream of consciousness set in motion by the peculiar institution. The survey begins with a record of Sam Lucas, who charmed moviegoers in the wake of the Niagara Movement through a turn on screen as Uncle Tom. Next, an account of Paul Robeson discloses that in the whirl of the Harlem Renaissance Hollywood repeatedly typecast this performer as a character akin to George Harris. An ensuing chapter on Sidney Poitier demonstrates that the image of the shaman, a form of Uncle Tom, won him an Oscar at the crest of the civil rights era. Then, a chapter on Denzel Washington shares why moviegoers at the ebb of the Black Power movement celebrated the performer for a turn as a rebel. The penultimate chapter covers how stardom eluded Morgan Freeman until the age of multiculturalism arrived, and he took on a role that once again raised the ghost of Uncle Tom.

By evoking either a contented slave or a wretched freeman according to the fancy of each generation, Lucas in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Robeson in The Emperor Jones, Poitier in Lilies of the Field, Washington in Glory, and Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy justified a wish to include black men in the mainstream or intern them at the margins. The fortunes of these five actors register the cost of a tax on the wealth of the nation levied by order of a code that put a ceiling on black enterprise from the moment of the incorporation of slavery.

By implication, the book calls attention to the movie business for confining dark-skinned men and women of every complexion to supporting roles. It notes that a classic feature film until the end of the past millennium was a melodrama that featured a white male lead. It reveals that the usual movie hero through five generations bore a striking resemblance to the Jamestown pioneer John Smith. As a rule, the lead brought to mind the legend of Smith as a swashbuckling romantic who saves the day for underdogs and ends up with his heart’s desire. It was a role for which dark men were counted as unqualified.

Like Smith in character as well as in color, the classic movie hero in the twentieth century was a white man who was full of pluck and ingenuity. He was swift to save a damsel of any shade from distress. Although an evil rival aimed to shoot him down, he was too quick on the draw to bite the dust in a showdown. A sidekick as loyal as Uncle Tom roved with him, ever ready to lend a helping hand. The hero exhibited spunk and smarts that earned him a happy ending.

When major studios looked to cast leads, they overlooked African American actors. The movie companies saw the dark faces of such performers as the brand of a figure that was picture perfect for a minor role, naturals to portray a servant or a subversive. Directors employed them as props arranged to deflect the spotlight onto the customary hero. Alas, for a century Hollywood stuck African Americans with parts salvaged from a pair of stereotypes generated by black bondage. So the story goes.

1

Original Frames

Back Story

In 1619, when Dutch buccaneers traded twenty Angolan captives to the Jamestown Colony in exchange for needed provisions, the settlers believed that a chance to improve their lot was everyone’s due. To the colonists, it did not matter that the newcomers were Africans who were darker in color than they were, the majority of whom were Europeans from Great Britain. The Angolans were seen as separate in creed and culture, yet they were regarded as being the same as the British in conception. Each and all were counted as the offspring of a parent who gave birth to the whole world and endowed everyone with the power to make strides toward a happy ending. The deal remained in effect for a couple generations. A twist of fate, however, turned the tables on Africans and cast them in a light that rendered them figures destined for a lowly lot.

John Smith inspired the regard that welcomed the Angolans into Jamestown. Born the son of an English yeoman farmer in 1580, the Briton led a life of varied fortune. He was apprenticed to a merchant before he turned to mercenary work. Smith battled the Spanish for the Dutch and the Turks for the Austrians. Taken captive in Turkey and sold into slavery, he won the heart of a Turkish princess before he hatched a daring escape that took him back to Great Britain by way of Russia, Poland, Germany, Spain, and Morocco. He returned home in time to join the Virginia Company, commissioned by King James I to set up an English colony as a commercial enterprise along the Chesapeake Bay. He reached Jamestown with the first settlers in 1607.

Having seen that humans are alike in general though unalike in habits and hues, Smith was ready to manage a motley crew of British roustabouts and craftsmen with talk of a fair chance to make a dream come true through industry and ingenuity. The swashbuckling pioneer rose in the company from quartermaster to council president and chief promoter of the Jamestown settlement. He kept the group’s attention on its raison d’être. As reported by Edmund Morgan, the Virginia Company’s original mission was to send settlers who would pool their labors for a fruitful harvest that would attract shiploads of England’s unemployed laborers as well as skilled specialists. Part of the plan involved an agreement that successive waves of settlers would come as indentured servants to attend the stakeholders for a fixed term of service but then eventually be rewarded sufficient capital to go into business for themselves (1975, 45–46).

In A Description of New-England, printed three years before the Angolans stepped ashore, Smith conveyed the stock reason for coming to the New World. He offered everyone of small meanes, willing to work hard with generosity and integrity, a chance to pursue a private enterprise and find a happy ending. Such individuals were, he insisted, bound to plant and build a foundation for their posterity. He frowned on prejudice, counting it pointless save in an endeavor to convert infidels to his creed (1616, 42–43). In any event, Smith promised, all sorts of worthie, honest, and industrious spirits eventually by their labor may live exceeding well (49) in the world that he witnessed. New England was a land of opportunity, he intimated, where any number may quicklie do well and do good (49).

Smith was long gone from Jamestown by the time the Angolans arrived on the scene. Burns from a gunpowder accident forced him back to England for medical care in 1609. He left in his wake a dedication to the Virginia Company’s original mission: a broad commitment to equal opportunity for all comers prevailed. This disposition made it uneventful to grant the twenty Africans a shot at a stake in the settlement. In effect, the new arrivals were welcome to follow the trail blazed by Smith.

The Africans were accepted in a system based on indentured servitude. It obliged them to spend a term of four to seven years as a hand on a plantation. In exchange for their service, they were slated to receive the usual compensation for indentured servitude—designated freedom dues (K. Morgan 2000, 9), constituting a grant of property somewhere in the vicinity of forty acres and a mule. The situation encouraged the Africans to feed on bushels of hope. It prompted them to dream of rising in society through industry and ingenuity.

The Angolans started their American odyssey on equal footing with indentured servants from England, Wales, and Scotland. Settlers from the latter backgrounds emulated Smith, taking on the persona of a rugged individual with a practical zeal. Every group produced stories of fellows who took the bull by the horns and hit it big in the land. The Angolans were set for the same results.

Daniel Clocker was an excellent example of an English success story. Kenneth Morgan comments, The life history of [this Englishman] indicates how an indentured servant could graduate, as it were, to successful life in the New World. From humble origins, Clocker emigrated from England at seventeen to take up an indenture. After he fulfilled his contract in 1640, he married a widow with a young son and invested his freedom dues in a tobacco farm, which he eventually developed into an estate of more than two hundred acres. Clocker became the toast of the town. He participated in community affairs, becoming a justice of the peace. For a brief period, Clocker served as an officer in the military. He took on voluntary positions in county and provincial affairs afterward and won a city council seat (2000, 22).

Lerone Bennett Jr. records the African success stories of this period in Before the Mayflower. The log begins with the romance of Antoney and Isabella. Given Spanish names by their original captors, they were two of the twenty Angolans who entered Jamestown in 1619. Antoney fell in love with Isabella and married her. They gave birth to William, the first known African born of Africans in America. Bennett indicates that they fell into a well-established socio-economic groove, where they accumulated land, voted, testified in court, and mixed with their British counterparts on a basis of equality (1993, 29–35).

Bennett also lists the story of Anthony Johnson as an excellent example of a successful African. Johnson hailed from England, but he was African in descent. Arriving in Virginia a few years after the Angolans, he worked out his term of indenture and began to accumulate property. He built up an estate of 250 acres. Johnson contracted British laborers to work on his land. Behind him, he left a happy family with a sizable fortune (1993, 37–38).

The African as well as European success stories planted in the culture an image of a hero that matched the picture Smith painted of himself in A True Relation of Occurrences and Accidents, Etc. (1608). Smith tells how he saved the day for Jamestown when the settlement’s survival hung in the balance. Shirkers and squabblers rent the community. Many, scheming to get rich quick, flouted the need for fortifications and food in favor of a search for gold. In the absence of effective leadership by the elected president, Captain Edward Wingfield, the bulk of the settlers died from strife and starvation during Jamestown’s first winter. Then Smith rose to the occasion and rescued the community from extinction.

Smith’s portrait of himself represents him as a contradictory character. He is a romantic pragmatist brimming with determination, daring, and foresight. Disposed to think outside the box, he conceives ways to solve the problems that beset Jamestown and in due course puts the strategies into effect. Although he seeks bargains rather than battles, he stands ready to take up arms in defense of the colony. Smith manages to ease hostilities with the native Algonquian tribe and, moreover, is able to secure a stock of corn from them in order to keep the settlers fed while they build shelters and plant crops. Smith charms the Algonquian chief Powhatan, turning the native into a virtual sidekick. It seems, too, that the chief’s daughter has eyes for Smith. Providence takes the pioneer’s side and protects him from hostile natives who wish to destroy him.

Before his death in London in 1631, Smith credited his success in part to his creed. Yet he gave thanks to neither kith nor kin for his achievement. His color also did not matter. In the main, he chalked up his accomplishment to a visionary practicality. He made his success appear to be within the grasp of anyone who adopted his style. For two generations, settlers of every stripe were free to copy Smith and rise in society through the system of indentured servitude whose development he facilitated.

In truth, however, from day one of Jamestown, Old World habits of thought checked some colonists’ opportunities to act like Smith. Women in particular faced little chance to perform a man’s heroics. Contemporary views of women reflected the thinking of ancients such as Aristotle, who in his Politics declares them inferior to men for want of foresight. In A True Relation (1608), Smith represents women as valuables in need of protection. The ones who receive his full attention are budding beauties, especially Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan. His treatment of women betrays an attachment to the Old World way of seeing them, sanctioned by Aristotle. It reflects and reinforces a code that limited women in Jamestown affairs to living for leading men.

Like gender, differences in creed also restricted social mobility. The British majority counted an embrace of their faith as the lynchpin of success in the land. Africans were pressed to convert to receive full acceptance in the group. Winthrop Jordan observes that to share the creed of the British was in their eyes to be civilized rather than barbarous (1968, 51). Infidels were destined to go astray because one needed to believe what the British believed to win the favor of Providence. The Africans were nevertheless able to shake off the stigma of not originally following that faith and to enjoy full participation in the colony by adapting the majority’s creed.

More problematic than belief, however, was English language and lore, which together conspired to make restricted opportunity for Africans look right. This perspective was instigated by the original classification of the Angolans in Jamestown. They were designated negars, the English pronunciation of the plural term negros, a Portuguese and Spanish term derived from niger, the Latin word for black. In English, the color signifies darkness, dirt, disease, and death. As a rule, when black is used as an adjective, it attributes a negative quality to an entity or condition. Macabre, malignant, and morbid are synonyms for black. So being identified by the term negar, connoting black, subjected the Angolans to being seen in an unfavorable light.

1. Am I not a man and a brother? The official medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society, designed by Josiah Wedgwood (1795). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The British also shared stories of Africans before they met them in the New World. Imperial Rome had gathered soldiers from all of its territory around the Mediterranean Sea, so it is probable that African warriors accompanied Julius Caesar when he invaded Britain in 55 BCE. Frank Snowden speculates that an image on a third-century sarcophagus shows that prior to the decline of the Roman Empire, African soldiers occupied Britain with Septimus Severus (1983, 33, 92). A portrait that hung in the court of Henry VIII illustrates that a trumpeter of African descent named John Blanke entertained the monarch around 1511. English accounts of Africans mushroomed in the Elizabethan Age when British mariners such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh began to venture beyond their isles.

The proliferation of Elizabethan stories about Africans started with reports from British explorers. An exceptionally influential collection of accounts was The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, published in 1598. He filled the volume with reports of Englishmen’s travels around the world. Emily Bartels observes that the work conveys unease with an impression of undifferentiated otherness about Africans in relation to the English (1992, 534). She demonstrates that the selection of stories in the Hakluyt publication reflects Elizabethan uncertainty concerning how to judge Africans. For the most part, the reports in The Principal Navigations ([1598] 2004) on the people of Africa moved the British to picture these Others as formidable yet friendly and passionate to a fault.

In 1600, urged by Hakluyt, John Pory translated and published a book from fifty years earlier written in Arabic and Italian by a Spanish Muslim convert to Christianity, Leo Africanus. The History and Description of Africa relates memories