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- Title
FROM SAMBO TO SUPERSPADE : The Black in Film.
- Authors
Leab, Daniel J.
- Abstract
The article focuses on the discriminations faced by African American actors in motion pictures. Beginning in the 1890's when the first motion pictures were produced for exhibition in penny arcade peepshows and for decades thereafter, movie-makers either ignored Blacks or with rare exceptions presented them as stereotyped characters who were objects of ridicule and condescension. Invariably, blacks were presented as subhuman, simpleminded, superstitious, and submissive. Among social scientists and others concerned with the impact of movies on society there have been strong divisions of opinion about whether movies influence an audience or whether they mirror its ideas, but there is in the American Dream. Almost from the American film industry's beginnings, the black on screen was left out of that dream, either by being ignored or by being presented as an object incapable of partaking by reason of a not quite human nature. This treatment of the Negro had caused the respected black journalist Lester Walton to denounce the movies as early as 1914, when they were still in their infancy.
- Subjects
UNITED States; AFRICAN American artists; FILMMAKERS; PEEP shows; MOTION picture industry; MOTION pictures
- Publication
Film & History (03603695), 1972, Vol 2, Issue 3, p1
- ISSN
0360-3695
- Publication type
Article