Envisioning Freedom

Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life

Cara Caddoo

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674368057
• eBook ISBN: 9780674966864
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Viewing turn-of-the-century African American history through the lens of cinema, Envisioning Freedom examines the forgotten history of early black film exhibition during the era of mass migration and Jim Crow. By embracing the new medium of moving pictures at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans forged a collective—if fraught—culture of freedom.

In Cara Caddoo's perspective-changing study, African Americans emerge as pioneers of cinema from the 1890s to the 1920s. Across the South and Midwest, moving pictures presented in churches, lodges, and schools raised money and created shared social experiences for black urban communities. As migrants moved northward, bound for Chicago and New York, cinema moved with them. Along these routes, ministers and reformers, preaching messages of racial uplift, used moving pictures as an enticement to attract followers.

But as it gained popularity, black cinema also became controversial. Facing a losing competition with movie houses, once-supportive ministers denounced the evils of the "colored theater." Onscreen images sparked arguments over black identity and the meaning of freedom. In 1910, when boxing champion Jack Johnson became the world's first black movie star, representation in film vaulted to the center of black concerns about racial progress. Black leaders demanded self-representation and an end to cinematic mischaracterizations which, they charged, violated the civil rights of African Americans. In 1915, these ideas both led to the creation of an industry that produced "race films" by and for black audiences and sparked the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century.

1

Exhibitions of Faith and Fellowship

Black churches responded to the upswing in urban migration by using motion pictures to promote their ideas, raise money, and entice fellow members of the race to join their organizations. (Second Baptist Church, Kansas City, Missouri, circa 1913. From Asa E. Martin, Our Negro Population: A Sociological Study of the Negroes of Kansas City, Missouri [Kansas City, Mo., 1913], 187.)

On January 2, 1897, black residents of Kansas City, Missouri, gathered at the Second Baptist Church for an evening of entertainment. The edifice, located on Tenth and Charlotte streets, was only partially completed; the second floor was unfinished, and the roof just recently erected. As they entered the building, attendees likely crossed a sawdust-strewn floor or felt a draft of wintry air seeping in from the upper slats of the ceiling. But such trivialities could be easily overlooked, for it was the first Sunday of the new year, and the promised entertainment was unlike anything the church had seen before.¹

Once inside, the attendees may have noticed a large sheet of white canvas hanging in the front of the room and a curious contraption brought to the church especially for this day. Affixed with glass lenses, pulleys, and a ribbon of shiny material wrapped around a spool, the device was probably about the size of a sewing machine and mounted on top of a table. The room was dimmed, but even in the darkness, the growing excitement must have been palpable as the audience waited for the show to begin. Finally, the machine sprang into motion—a whirring sound emanated from its gears, then a rhythmic click, like the sound of a baseball card clipped to the spoke of a bicycle wheel. Light splashed across the canvas, and immense images moved as if they were alive. Each scene lasted for just a moment—perhaps a breathtaking view of Niagara Falls, a parade of bicyclists, then a ferryboat, a water chute, or fluttering white doves. As the films appeared, one after another, music or a narration might have accompanied the images on-screen, while members of the audience applauded, and awarded the most breathtaking scenes with shouts and cheers.²

When the Second Baptist Church announced that it would celebrate the new year by hosting a moving picture show, it must have been stunning news. Only a few months had passed since Thomas Edison unveiled the Vitascope, the nation’s first commercially successful device for projecting motion pictures, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City.³ Most Americans, especially those in the West, had yet to witness the sensational new technology.⁴ In 1897, news of a motion picture show could bring an entire town to a halt. When a traveling moving picture operator stopped by a local opera house in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, that year, writer Alan Bethel recalled the anticipation: “The courts adjourned, stores closed, the blacksmith dropped his tongs, and school ‘let out’ at noon.”⁵ Across the country, Americans rushed to witness for themselves the invention hailed as “one of the wonders of the age.”⁶

Only three decades earlier, the Second Baptist Church had been little more than a “stragglers camp,” a place where freedmen and refugees from the Civil War, dressed in rags and clutching their only possessions, gathered to pray together on the “sand, rock, and willow studded banks of the Missouri River.”⁷ During the war, Kansas City had been a dangerous and unknowable place. Kersey Coates’s half-built hotel on Tenth and Broadway, just a few blocks from the river’s edge, became a stable for the Union Army; the Longhorn Store and Tavern, once a prison for Confederate spies, had collapsed into a pile of rubble. From the Northland, across the banks of the Missouri, slaves fought pitched battles to reach the south side of the river, which functioned as a dividing line between slavery and freedom. But nowhere was entirely safe. Bounty hunters combed the city streets for black folk to confiscate, guerilla fighters terrorized the countryside, and in the fall of 1864, Confederate troops surged northward across the state.⁸ As the war raged on around the members of this humble congregation, they looked to one another and to their faith for guidance and consolation. From the shores of the river, their “melodious song service” and “emotional shouting” could be heard long into the night.⁹

If memories of the Second Baptist’s modest beginnings flickered through the minds of the congregants that evening, they may have also taken a moment to marvel at the accomplishments of their church, and the transformation of the bustling western city they called home. Kansas City was a rising star in the “black archipelago,” a handful of cities scattered across the Midwest whose black populations had flourished after the Civil War.¹⁰ Growing from fewer than 4,000 black residents in 1870 to nearly 17,000 by 1895, Kansas City vividly reflected the changes wrought by the war, the railroads, and the growing industrial economy during the Gilded Age.¹¹ The Second Baptist Church had grown in size with the city. After the war, the members constructed a simple frame building of unfinished wood, which by the 1870s was one of the largest black institutions in the city. Although not yet completed, their newest home, a three-story brick edifice, was a testament to their progress as an institution. And that evening in 1897, not only did the congregants witness one of the most exciting new inventions of the era, they were watching it within their own walls.¹²

Set against the long-prevailing narrative of early American cinema, the Second Baptist’s film exhibition is an anomaly. Scholars have long believed that African Americans first encountered the moving pictures in commercial venues owned and operated by whites. Black Americans eventually made the moving pictures their own, these studies have argued, but in the beginning, black filmgoers could only attend segregated venues, where they were forced to enter through separate doorways, sit in the worst sections in the house (the “buzzard’s roost”), and attend late-night screenings. Even as managers of commercial venues attempted to render black people invisible within the exhibition space, visual depictions of blackness became wildly popular on-screen. Audiences in commercial venues, film scholars have rightly explained, viewed films produced by white companies that profited from fantastical and racist stereotypes of chicken thieves, mammies, Uncle Toms, and violent, city-dwelling “zip coons.”¹³ While a few film historians have studied colored theaters in the South and the production of a handful of black films before 1910, scholars largely associate black film authorship and the formation of a black cinema culture with the commercial sites that emerged during the northward settlement of the Great Migration.¹⁴ A closer examination of the urban South and West, however, presents a different story—one that complicates our understanding not only of early American cinema but also of migration and black institutional life.

Between 1897 and 1910, hundreds of black film showmen and -women exhibited motion pictures in black lodges, schools, and, most frequently, churches. Early black film exhibition developed in response to the dramatic changes African Americans faced at the turn of the century—migration, hardening Jim Crow segregation, and the growing demand for urban amusements. In new cities of settlement, black religious and club leaders, especially those connected to mainline black Protestant churches, responded to the upswing in black urban migration by using the moving pictures to promote their ideas, raise money, and entice fellow members of the race to join their organizations. These plans were guided by the philosophy of racial uplift—the belief that self-help initiatives were the key to collective racial progress—and the assumption that stronger black institutions were necessary to achieving these goals.¹⁵ The practices of black film exhibition that developed across the urban South and West were not simply borrowed from a world of white producers and showmen. The leaders of the Second Baptist and others like them were at the vanguard of the new motion picture phenomenon. African Americans embraced the moving image before many of their white counterparts because it was suited to the needs and public spaces of modern black life.

In the decades after the Thirteenth Amendment made slavery illegal in the United States, African Americans created the organizations that became the backbone of postemancipation black life: secret societies, mutual aid associations, neighborhood unions, sororities and fraternities, labor unions, pleasure clubs, churches, and professional associations.¹⁶ These agencies grew even more vital when the federal government ended its commitment to Radical Reconstruction and the biracial political coalitions of the following years failed to overturn the wealthy southern white oligarchy. Alienated by the social and economic discrimination of the post-Reconstruction era, black folk turned their conception of racial destiny inward. They embraced a strategy of self-help and came to rely more than ever before on the institutions that stood at the center of black public life: the church, the lodge, and the school.¹⁷

Yet even as African Americans turned toward one another, their neighbors, and their communities, the distance between them was growing ever greater. Hundreds of thousands of black migrants were leaving the rural hinterland for small towns and cities across the South and West. As W. E. B. Du Bois observed at the turn of the century, “Negroes come from country districts to small towns, then go to larger towns; eventually they drift to Norfolk, Va., or to Richmond. Next they come to Washington, and finally settle in Baltimore or Philadelphia.”¹⁸ For these migrants, the urban South and West were stepping-stones on a longer, uncharted journey that led north, farther west, and sometimes in winding circles across the black archipelago. Not all migrants moved directly from the agricultural South to the city. Some returned to the countryside or participated in a “rotational” pattern of migration, while others gradually transitioned into city life. Others stayed in their new urban homes in the South but watched their children and grandchildren venture farther along the pathways of black settlement.¹⁹ America’s black population had begun its journey to becoming an urban people. By 1910, 22 percent of the black residents of the South lived in cities.²⁰

It was at this crossroads of dispersal and desire for collective social and economic advancement that an enterprising generation of black cinema pioneers first introduced the moving pictures into black churches, halls, and schools. Black leaders such as Samuel Bacote, minister of the Kansas City Second Baptist, realized that his church required new solutions for organizing its members’ cooperative efforts and drawing in new congregants. Twenty-nine years old at the time of his appointment to the church, Bacote was as industrious as he was ambitious. His stern countenance and lean frame conveyed his ascetic values; drinking and the pleasure clubs of Kansas City would become a special target of his ire.²¹ Hard work and self-discipline, he believed, were the keys to racial uplift, and the values to which he attributed his own success. The son of former South Carolina slaves, he left for college as a teenager with seventeen dollars in his pocket, one pair of clothes, and no socks, and he was “easily recognized as the poorest boy on campus.” Nonetheless, he pressed “forward with courage and tireless zeal” to rise to the top of his class.²² When he arrived in Kansas, he continued to study, eventually earning his master’s degree and a doctorate from Kansas City University even as he carried out his pastoral duties.

Bacote’s aspirations for the Second Baptist Church were equally ambitious. In 1895, when he arrived at the church, the congregation was in crisis. Its members had planned to construct a new church building on Tenth and Charlotte streets, but could not afford to complete the project. Unable to keep up with the mounting bills, the congregants were forced to worship in the unfinished basement of the structure they had hoped to erect.²³ As minister of the church, Bacote’s first mission was to guide the church building project to completion. He quickly resolved to construct a large brick church, one that would enable the Second Baptist to grow in size and that would be magnificent enough to serve as a “monument for the Negro Baptists” and “an ornament and a blessing for the race.”²⁴

Black properties, such as that planned by the Second Baptist, were among the era’s most pronounced expressions of the mission for collective racial progress. The construction of cooperatively owned structures was of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Picturing Freedom
• 1. Exhibitions of Faith and Fellowship
• 2. Cinema and the God-Given Right to Play
• 3. Colored Theaters in the Jim Crow City
• 4. Monuments of Progress
• 5. The Fight over Fight Pictures
• 6. Mobilizing an Envisioned Community
• 7. Race Films and the Transnational Frontier
• Conclusion: Picturing the Future
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index