The Portrayal of African-Americans in Hollywood Cinema Before 1940

Ever since its inception, the cinema has influenced the way moviegoers view life. This was an especially powerful reality in early Hollywood films, which depicted their own interpretation of social mores and moral proclivities to mesmerized, largely naive audiences who accepted what they saw on the screen as truth.

Hollywood began to become a force around or after 1910. During this era, racism and prejudicial concepts of African-Americans was the status quo in much of the United States. It was of no surprise, then, that these stilted viewpoints would be transferred over into the films produced by movie studios.

Three examples of how African-Americans were portrayed in early Hollywood cinema are:

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

D.W. Griffith was one of the most important filmmakers in early cinema. He was also an "old school" Southerner, who idealized the past history of the South, which inspired him to make a motion picture based on The Clansman, a book by Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr.. The "clansmen" in question happened to be the Ku Klux Klan, which was depicted as being heroic in Dixon's novel.

Griffith's 3 hour and 7 minute movie was called The Birth of a Nation. Its plot revolved around two families, the Stonemans from the North and the Camerons from the South, and what happens to them during the course of and after the Civil War.

African-Americans are portrayed miserably in this film, as docile, childlike domestics or brutal rapists or buffoonish politicians. The only way to "rescue" the South from the clutches of these despots, according to Griffith's film, was to have the white heroes form an organization to combat the spoiling of their beloved land. The Ku Klux Klan is then introduced as the answer, as the white-sheeted lads put everything and everyone back into their "rightful" place at the victorious conclusion of this movie. To add more insult to injury, the black characters were not even played by black actors, but by white actors in blackface, meaning that there was no possible way to attempt to humanize them.