Jeff C. Young - Amazing African-American Actors

Lights, Camera, Action!

Early movie roles for African Americans were small. As roles got bigger and better, so did the salaries, awards, and fame. Today, famous movie stars star in big-budget movies, while being some of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood. Amazing African-American Actors profiles ten of the greatest, from Paul Robeson to Halle Berry. Learn about their early lives, and their road to fame.

This book contains ten excellent biographical snapshots of famous actors, each supplying important facts about their lives.

About the Author

Jeff C. Young has worked as a library media specialist and a reference librarian. His newest book for Enslow Publishers, Inc., is True Underground Rescue Stories.

In the early days of filmmaking, roles for African-American actors were very hard to come by. Even when the script called for an African American, the part would be played by a white actor. According to the book Black Firsts, the first appearance of blacks in films was in a 1902 French film entitled Off to Bloomingdale Asylum. Its believed that the black characters in that film were played by white actors.

In D. W. Griffiths controversial-but-epic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, the roles of sinister African-American characters were played by white actors wearing blackface makeup. When an African-American actor did get a role at that time, it was usually a demeaning one. In those days, the most common roles for African-American actors were servant, villain, or some sort of buffoon. That sort of typecasting and racial stereotyping would continue for many years.

But thanks to the efforts of some pioneering African-American and white filmmakers, there were a few movies produced in the early twentieth century that portrayed African Americans in a more favorable light.

Based in Jacksonville, Florida, Richard E. Norman was a white film producer who made a handful of films in the 1920s, including some that portrayed African Americans as cowboys, airplane pilots, and boat captains. The men he cast in those roles were depicted as brave and resourceful.

Norman was one of the few white filmmakers who did make these race films, and he did a good job of making movies that were of quality and had positive images of African-Americans in a period when the movie industry as a whole really was devoted to disseminating a very negative image of blacks, said University of North Florida history professor Carolyn Williams.

Norman is credited with producing six feature films between 1920 and 1928. In addition to providing positive role models for African Americans, Normans films gave stage-trained African-American actors a chance to act on film. But when silent movies were replaced by the talkies, Normans small studio was unable to survive the change. (An effort is currently under way to create a Jacksonville tourist attraction out of the five still-standing buildings of Norman Studios.)

Oscar Micheaux is regarded as the most prolific and successful of the early African-American filmmakers. After raising $15,000 from small investors, Micheaux produced his first film, The Homesteader, in 1919. He went on to make some forty-odd movies between 1919 and 1948. His 1924 film Body and Soul featured the screen debut of noted African-American actor Paul Robeson.

Micheauxs films didnt shy away from controversial topics and issues. They dealt with interracial marriages, racial prejudice, African Americans passing themselves off as white, hypocritical preachers, and the harassment of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan. Sometimes his films were censored, and he was forced to cut out certain scenes.

By the 1930s, Micheauxs films had fallen out of favor with most African-American filmgoers. The African-American press attacked him for his apparent preference for light-skinned black actors, whom he cast as middle-class professionals at a time when most African Americans lived in poverty.

Hollywood films in the 1930s were subject to a strict code of self-censorship. Because of that, African Americans were largely restricted to playing roles as servants to white employers. In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award. She won the award for playing a plantation slave in the Civil War drama Gone With the Wind.

Oscar Micheaux, one of the earliest African-American filmmakers, made more than forty films in less than three decades.

In the 1940s and 1950s the film industry showed a greater willingness to explore racial issues and to offer better and more varied parts to African-American actors. Pinky (1949) examined the problems of a light-skinned African-American woman passing herself off as white. Intruder in the Dust (1949) portrayed an elderly white woman teaming up with a young white boy to prevent an African American from being lynched for a crime that he didnt commit. No Way Out (1950) showed how an African-American family and neighborhood came together to defend themselves from the threat of racism.

The 1960s saw the emergence of Sidney Poitier as an Academy Awardwinning international film star. On television shows The Mod Squad, I Spy, Julia, and East Side/West Side, African Americans took on roles as regular cast members.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century the film industry offered more opportunities for African Americans not just as actors, but as camera operators, makeup artists, carpenters, and electricians.

Actress Hattie McDaniel (right, with Vivien Leigh) won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Gone With the Wind.

Bill Cosby (left) and Robert Culp starred in I Spy, an NBC television drama that aired from 1965 to 1968.

As roles for African-American actors have become more common, the number of African-American actors winning major acting awards has greatly increased. In the past quarter century, African-American actors Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Hudson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, and Forest Whitaker have all won Academy Awards. Many other African-American actors have won or been nominated for such major awards as the Golden Globes and the Emmys.

Today actors of their stature can command multimillion- dollar salaries for starring in big-budget productions. Theyve also made it easier for African-American directors, producers, and screenwriters to gain access to studio executives for pitching their projects and ideas.

There is no question that significant progress has been made, but its not something that can be taken for granted. As African-American author and film historian Donald Bogle noted, The old walls and barriers had beenat least partiallyknocked down.

Whether they stay down permanently remains to be seen.