Every Step a Struggle

Interviews with Seven Who Shaped the African-American Image in Movies

Frank Manchel

• Editore: New Academia
• Anno: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781955835053
• Argomento: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoria: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

"This fascinating collection of interviews is 'must reading' for anyone interested in the cultural politics of race in America. A unique historical resource." —Denise Youngblood, author of Cinematic Cold War This book pays tribute to the sacrifices and achievements of seven individuals who made difficult and controversial choices to ensure that black Americans shared in the evolution of the nation's cultural heritage. Transcriptions and analyses of never-before-published uncensored conversations with Lorenzo Tucker, Lillian Gish, King Vidor, Clarence Muse, Woody Strode, Charles Gordone, and Frederick Douglass O'Neal reveal many of the reasons and rationalizations behind a racist screen imagery in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. This primary source, replete with pictures, documentation, and extensive annotations, recounts through the words of important participants what happened to many film pioneers when a new generation of African-Americans rebelled against the nation's stereotyped film imagery. "The author has taken a unique approach and may have even created a new genre of writing: the interview embellished with scholarly commentary. It is a fascinating experiment... This book belongs in every research library and in all public libraries from mid-size to large cities. It fills in lacunae between existing studies." —Peter C. Rollins, Emeritus Editor-in-Chief of Film & History

1

Heroes and Villains: Lorenzo Tucker

“It is one of the bitter ironies of American history, … that motion picture technology, with its singular potential for good or evil, grew during the same time period (1890-1915) that saw the systematic, determined, and almost hysterical persecution and defamation of blacks and other minority groups.”1

James Snead

Lorenzo Tucker prided himself on being a light-skinned Negro who refused to remain quiet about the black power movement. At the time, the ex-stage and screen actor was in his mid-sixties; I was a very impressionable thirty-six. His story jump-started my odyssey into black film history, showing me the complexity of the subject and teaching just how superficial judging the past by the values of the present can be. Tucker and I were separated by more than profession, race, and age. Yet those differences demonstrate not only the sticky situations that a researcher faces doing oral history, but also the dramatic changes taking place in American society during the early seventies. My background did not prepare me adequately for what was to come. You may face the same dilemma. Therefore, before we consider Tucker’s narrative, a few caveats might help.

At the outset, the reader needs to know something about Tucker’s “agenda,” as well as our struggle defining terms and concepts. For example, when these interviews occurred (November 6 and December 4, 1971), the actor was enraged by the use of terms like “black” and “African-American” in place of the then more traditional labels “Negro” and “Colored.” A major reason for his agitation was that the language shift further marginalized light-skin blacks like Tucker. He also viewed those African-Americans who represented this cultural shift as opportunists who misled the uninformed white community about the complexity of black life. Thus, modern sensibilities may be jarred encountering the performer’s resentful outbursts about the changes taking place in American race relations during this period from the late sixties to the early seventies. How the black power movement defined African-Americans and viewed black film history directly challenged Tucker’s outlook of himself and his professional life.

I had another perspective. Having studied with Robert A. Bone, I believed it was important to understand what made African-Americans a distinctive group in our culture. To quote Bone directly, the differences between blacks and others “stem from a group past, with its bitter heritage of slavery, and from the group present [1965], with its bitter knowledge of caste. They stem from contact, either immediate or historical, with the folk culture of the Southern Negro, which has left its clear stamp on Negro life in the North. They stem from long experience with separate institutions: with a Negro press, Negro church, Negro hospitals, and Negro colleges. They stem from the fact that most Negroes still spend most of their lives within the geographical and cultural confines of a Negro community.”2 After nearly a quarter of a century exploring this phenomenon, I find it useful to balance Bone’s perspective with Valarie Smith’s observation, “More recently, this conception of the authentic black subject has undergone dramatic transformation in response to the changing demographics of African American communities. While early in the twentieth century the majority of African Americans were located in the rural South, waves of migration to the North and West led to concentrations of blacks in urban communities in these other regions. The subsequent industrialization and underdevelopment of urban centers, and the decline in steady, decent-paying jobs for semi- and unskilled laborers, thus erected black communities disproportionately. As a result, the idea of the urban has become virtually synonymous with notions of blackness blight in public discourse; markers of drug and gang culture, rather than those of indigenous vernacular black culture, have circulated and been read increasingly as signs of racial (and geographical) authenticity.”3 Equipped with these two insights, we can better grasp what troubled the individuals not only here, but throughout the book.

Understandably, no topic was more central to the Tucker interviews than the construct of the “mulatto.” How well one recalls the observations on that issue made earlier may determine how the actor’s tale is received.

Tucker, the embodiment of the light-skinned performer during the first half of this century, was like many African-American bourgeois entertainers in this book – a hardworking individualist who participated in almost every significant phase of black, or “race,” films and theater up to the 1960s. He was proud of his independence and his ability to overcome racial and personal handicaps. What he says later in the interviews stems from the assumption that his professional life offered a paradigm for anyone interested in a career in show business, an assumption often ignored by even the best of the modern commentators.

One should also bear in mind Alex Albright’s reflections on the patterns that black entertainers followed throughout most of the early twentieth century and the perceived threat it posed to white artists, as well as Renee A. Simons’ counter-arguments concerning the valuable role African-Americans played in the entertainment world. In Tucker’s case, he had a choice. He could have “passed,” but decided not to. Accordingly, his recollections disclose a compelling facet about the complex history of black show business.

Even so, sections in the Tucker interviews may offend the reader’s modern receptivity. For example, the middle-class performer makes provocative assertions about the manner in which a skin-color caste system operated in black vaudeville and the changes that people like Tucker achieved. Those declarations about race, representation, and black progressives remain as debatable today as they were then. Yet, Tucker’s reflections on the period under discussion – the late 1920s – are central to our apprehension of black film history. According to Richard Grupenhoff, “The late 1920s were the high point of black vaudeville. Numerous touring companies criss-crossed the country in automobiles, busses and trains, through the often hostile country of the white society, in order to play to the isolated communities of blacks outside New York.”4 William Dillard, a black trumpet player who did the criss-crossing, observes that the reason black vaudeville theaters were so important was that “we only had church and ballrooms and the vaudeville theaters. You wouldn’t be allowed in the opera house. But you could go to see vaudeville.”5 Imagine how satisfying it must have been to local black audiences to see representatives of their own race performing on stage and bringing to the isolated communities a sense of black culture. But the pressures these entertainers faced from segregationists, municipal Jim Crow regulations, and exploitive business executives, made such touring hazardous. Yet, Tucker never calls attention to the dangers of performing for hostile audiences. Instead, he takes a very positive view of race relations during those years. His comments, therefore, offer an attitude that can broaden and enhance the revisionist conclusions of modern film scholarship.

James Snead also cautions us on the term, “independent film.” His feeling is that the concept is used frequently to contrast shoestring budget movies with lavish Hollywood productions. That superficial contrast could ignore the benefits derived from being outside the restraints found in carefully supervised formula filmmaking and industry dependence on major profits.6 As we will discover, Tucker’s stock is tied to how working as an “independent” made use of the freedoms such as free-lance productions provided. A major question that I pursue here is: Are the films he appears in concerned with developing a positive black aesthetic, or do they seek to provide a black clone of mainstream movies?

Tucker’s livelihood in show business depended in large measure on how his work was received by black and white audiences; and his recollections of the theaters, segregation practices, and the personalities often conflict with current assessments of independent black films and their aesthetic merits. His attitudes, therefore, add another dimension to the historical discussions about race relations in show business. In 1971, for example, Tucker professed astonishment at the interpretations given his films; as well as outrage at the direction contemporary “black” films had taken. As far as he was concerned, the policy back then was to play the film, not to analyze its subject matter.

Thus, the black films Tucker discusses provide unexpected information about the cultural wars evolving during the early 1900s. Since these alternative movies were culturally constructed and targeted for a specific audience, they reveal not only the filmmakers’ perceptions about race, gender, and American society, but also the social and political attitudes about black choices and desires at the time. Since these movies were usually shot on locations inescapably linked to the story, the films offer snapshots of the marginalized material and physical world in which the personalities lived. For example, Tucker’s attitudes about the civil rights movement, as well as his recollections of the “race” movies he...