A SHAMEFUL LEGACY
Book probes Hollywood's abuse of Black performers
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World Wil Haygood Knopf
Award-winning historian Wil Haygood had reached his late 60s before he forced himself to watch The Birth of a Nation in its entirety. He had previously seen snippets of D.W. Griffith's notorious 1915 film — a work as groundbreaking in its cinematic technique as it was revolting in its racism. But now he needed to go further.
As painful as the film's celebration of the racist Ku Klux Klan was to watch, he saw his ordeal as essential to the book he was writing — Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World.
Haygood remembers sitting in his study in 2017, trying to process a movie that had sparked race riots a century before. Those hateful images that The Birth of a Nation gloried in so shamelessly kept churning in his mind — “and then all of a sudden Charlottesville and the KKK Nazi march happened.”
To Haygood, the white supremacists who descended on this Virginia community in their bloody “Unite the Right” rally four years ago were modern-day equivalents of the Klan.
“It struck me at this moment that this book was very important to do,” Haygood says from his Washington, D.C., home. “You had a movie made in 1915 that savaged African Americans — a movie that played on screens around the country for four straight years. And here I was writing this book in 2017, 102 years removed from its release, and this country erupts again with a KKK march.”
Charlottesville brought tears to his eyes: “My God,” he told himself, “it's happening again.” Then Donald Trump made things worse.
“In the White House there was a figure who had taken the side of the KKK, who said there were nice people on both sides. No there were not. The KKK and the neo-nazis have murdered people in this country based on their racial heritage.”
The canker runs deep. A century before Trump, the much-revered Woodrow Wilson actually hosted a White House screening of The Birth of a Nation, a pre-sound film garnished by subtitles lifted from the president's own writings.
“Woodrow Wilson had no affection for Black people,” Haygood says bluntly. “The fact that he could host such a movie at the White House proved which side of the civil rights battle he was on. And he made valiant efforts to resegregate the federal workforce.”
Yet, despite Hollywood's many decades of misrepresenting and marginalizing America's Black community and, in particular, its Black artists, this veteran writer ends up striking a positive note.
When he was a Black kid growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Wil Haygood loved going to the movies. “I would see the big stars like Jimmy Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson,” he says. “But they had one thing in common — they were all white. As a kid, I never saw a Black actor.” But then when he returned home from college one summer, there was a new cinema in town dedicated to showing movies with Black actors. By this time, Sidney Poitier was making his mark, but so were the so-called “Blaxpoitation” thrillers of the 1970s — items like Shaft starring Richard Roundtree and Superfly with Ron O'neal, movies clearly targeted at a mainstream Black audience. “It seemed to me then that there were two Hollywoods — one for the whites and one for Black people,” Haygood says now. “Very rarely were you seeing white movies with Black people — not even walking in the background.”
But the barriers were slowly dissolving, and Haygood devotes valuable chapters to the slow but sure validation of Black crossover stars like Poitier, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Sammy Davis Jr. and Halle Berry, the emergence of groundbreaking directors like Spike Lee and Melvin Van Peebles, the success of Black-themed hits like 2018's Black Panther and the controversies over white-dominated Oscar rosters. These were hard-won battles, and Haygood's book pays eloquent homage to earlier generations of Black artists who struggled and suffered.
Haygood still chokes up over people like Canada Lee, James Edwards and Dorothy Dandridge, the sizzling Carmen Jones star who had only $2 in her bank account at the time of her death. “They made me sad when I was writing about them because Hollywood had broken their hearts. Yet there were so many actors and actresses who came along later who stood on their shoulders. Dorothy Dandridge showed that someone like Halle Berry could make it.” (Fittingly, Berry portrayed the singer in the 1999 biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.)
And what of Hattie Mcdaniel, the first African-american to win an Oscar for her performance as Mammy in 1939's Gone with the Wind? It's a cruel story. Unlike Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and other cast members, she was not invited to the film's gala premières in Atlanta and Hollywood. And despite her Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, she was unable to sit with other nominees at the lavish awards ceremony and instead was relegated to an isolated table at the back.
“It really hurts that Hattie Mcdaniel, the Black lady in the film, had no name,” he says. “She was just `Mammy.' It was a painful role for her to play, but she did it very well. She was often quoted that she would rather play a maid than be a maid, but even after her Oscar she had nowhere to go. Roles of a broader nature were not being offered to her, so to put food on the table she had to continue playing a maid.”
Such were the limited opportunities allowed Black performers over decades of filmmaking. Most often they were allowed only to be stereotypes — chauffeurs, butlers, handymen, sharecroppers, maidservants.
And if they had the chance to do something more substantial, there was a good chance that the film would never be seen in a Southern theatre — unless their scenes could be chopped.
Legendary vocalist Lena Horne was a typical victim and before her death she openly spoke about MGM'S dexterity in ensuring that her appearances in its musicals could easily be deleted.
Horne is the central figure in one of the many anecdotes that enliven this book. In 1960, with two new movies coming out, she was in a fashionable Los Angeles restaurant giving her dinner order when a nearby drunk began noisily demanding service. The waiter tried to soothe him by saying he would be right back after completing an order for Lena Horne. This only caused a further eruption from the drunk: “Where is Lena Horne anyway? She's just another —”
Out came the inflammatory N-word, at which point “Horne popped up from her seat, grabbed an ashtray and cracked the man over the head. Blood spurted. Diners shrieked and gasped ... the bleeding man was rushed out of the restaurant (but) Horne escaped any charges.”
It was essential that Haygood tell his story of the Black experience in Hollywood against the wider tapestry of an ongoing struggle for civil rights. Horne was affirming her rights that night in Los Angeles. So was Richard Roundtree when he was persuaded not to shave off his moustache when filming Shaft.
In so doing, he would be breaking what the film's Black director, Gordon Parks, described as “one of those unwritten laws lurking in the minds of Hollywood's film barons. A moustache on a Black leading man was just too macho.”
Haygood is quick to stress that there are also white heroes in the book — filmmakers like Ralph Nelson, Stanley Kramer and Canada's Norman Jewison — who “wanted to challenge the old system and put Black performers in their movies.”
But, he says, “Hollywood is a strange place and many people lose their way.”
It really hurts that Hattie Mcdaniel, the Black lady in the film, had no name. She was just ‘Mammy.’ It was a painful role for her to play, but she did it very well. Wil Haygood