In his comprehensive history of Blacks in American film, “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks,” Donald Bogle talks about the portrayal of Blacks in early silent films. In 1903, a 12-minute film by Edwin S. Porter showed the first Black character in silent films. The picture was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the actor was white in blackface.

According to Bogle, “After the Tom’s debut, there appeared a variety of black presences bearing the fanciful names of the coon, the tragic mulatto, the mammy, and the brutal black buck. All were character types used for the same effect: to entertain by stressing Negro inferiority. Fun was poked at the American Negro by presenting him as either a nitwit or a childlike lackey. None of the types was meant to do great harm, although at various times individual ones did. All were merely filmic reproductions of black stereotypes that had existed since the days of slavery and were already popularized in American life and arts.”

When Black actors were eventually cast, they were backed into these categories as well and struggled against the stereotypes as best they could – actors like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Stepin Fetchit, Nina Mae McKinney, and Hattie McDaniel.

There were many filmed versions of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the silent era, the most popular book of the 19^th century, and thus audiences were familiar with the stereotype of the ‘happy darky.’ The films ranged from a 1910 three-reeler put out by the Vitagraph Company of America to a full-length two-hour adaptation directed by Harry A. Pollard costing $1.8 million. Except for the Tom character played by James B. Lowe, all the other Black characters were played by white actors. Universal Pictures put out press releases lauding its star as having made history: “A history that reflects only credit to the Negro race, not only because he has given the “Uncle Tom” character a new slant, but because of his exemplary conduct with the Universal company … Those who are religious say that a heavenly power brought him to Universal and all predict a most marvelous future and a worldwide reputation for James B. Lowe.”

After the “Tom” character came the “coon” character, per Bogle, “representing the Negro as amusement object and black buffoon … There were the pure coon and two variants of his type: the pickaninny and the uncle remus.” The pickaninny was a Black child, whose diverting antics included popping eyes and hair standing on end. The Uncle Remus character is the philosopher, comic and naïve, content with his place in the system. Coons were depicted in shorts such as The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1907) about a nursemaid being wooed by a devoted admirer who turns into a layabout gambler after the wedding while his wife takes in washing to pay the bills. Coons were thus portrayed as lazy and unreliable, eating watermelons, stealing chickens and talking pidgin English. A series about such a character named Rastus included shorts named How Rastus Got His Turkey, Rastus and the Chicken, Pickaninnies and Watermelon and Chicken Thief, all made in 1910 and 1911.

Lincoln Theodore Perry, better known as his persona of Stepin Fetchit and “the laziest man in the world,” was the best exemplar of the type. He was a Black actor of Bahamian descent who eventually earned $1 million, but his career was in talkies starting in the 1930s.

The ‘tragic mulatto’ character was portrayed as the offspring of a white slaveholder and his black slave, passing as white, ignorant of her heritage, then discovering it and being shunned and cast aside (usually by a white lover), enslaved and dying in slavery, subject to depression, self-loathing and alcoholism. Most of these characters were women, though some were men, especially in the literature of the day. The Debt, a 1912 two-reeler is thought to be the first film of the type. Others include In Humanity’s Cause, In Slavery Days and The Octoroon, all from 1913.

The “mammy” is another version of the coon, a fat black cranky woman, according to Bogle. Coon Town Suffragettes about bossy washerwomen who organize to keep their good-for-nothing husbands at home is a 1914 version of the Lysistrata myth. An alternate version is ‘Aunt Jemima,’ the jolly ‘handkerchief head’ who usually plays servants in white films.

Bogle describes the “brutal black bucks” that were portrayed in D.W. Griffiths’ 1915 The Birth of a Nation as “ . . . subhuman and feral . . . the nameless characters setting out on a rampage full of black rage. They flog the Cameron’s [the heroes of the film] faithful servant. They shove and assault white men of the town. They flaunt placards demanding ‘equal marriage.’” Griffiths was playing into white fears that oversexed animalistic Black men panted for white women, inflaming tensions and inciting hatred.

The backlash to this film and others like it spurred the rise of “race films,” those that were made for segregated Black audiences between 1910 and 1950, starting in the silent era which ended in the 1920s. These films featured Black performers, Black directors, and dealt with Black life, though many of the companies that financed them were run by white men. But not all of them broke the existing stereotypes.

One company that existed even before Birth was made was The Foster Photoplay Company established by William D. Foster in 1910, best known for what is supposed to be the first Black silent film – 1913’s The Railroad Porter with Black vaudeville stars and a Black director. Other films from the company were The Fall Guy, The Butler and The Girl and the Grafter, all made in 1913, and Mother, Brother, Birthmark, Fool and Fire (their release dates are unclear, and most are lost), and The Barber in 1916. All were slapstick comedies and enjoyed successful runs.

 

Foster put two years of his life into producing The Birth of a Race, his answer to The Birth of a Nation. His intention was to reverse the negative stereotypes of the Griffiths’ film and celebrate the achievements of Black people in history. But what started out as a short film ended up a two-hour feature, with all its attendant financial problems. It was released in 1918 and was a financial and critical failure and contributed to the demise of his company.

The Ebony Film Corporation was set up in Chicago in 1915 to distribute films made with white backing, but the Black films it produced did no credit to the Black community, and its logo was a monkey in blackface. Its short films like A Reckless Rover perpetuated Black stereotypes. In Rover, Sam Robinson, an actor who played in several Ebony shorts, plays a man who is chased by a cop out of his house. He runs into a Chinese laundry and is employed by the Chinese owner, but mayhem ensues as the cops follow him there. Another film was Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled about a guy who persuades his friend to pretend to be a mummy so he could sell him to an Egyptologist for $1,000 and marry his girlfriend with the money. Both films still exist and can be seen online at blackarchive.com.

 

About 20 Ebony films are known to have been made (some are lost; some, including Rover, are preserved by the Library of Congress) before the company folded in 1919. An advertisement in the Exhibitor’s Herald of June 29, 1918, describes the company’s films this way: “EBONY COMEDIES – Screen interpretations of quaint Negro humor that whet the public’s jaded appetite. Like the black-faced act, Ebony comedies meet with popular approval – satisfy any audience all of the time.”

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, founded in 1916 by two brothers in Nebraska, Noble and George Johnson, is considered the first all-Black production company. It was incorporated the following year when it moved operations to Los Angeles and remained in business till 1921 though only five films were made under its banner. (Noble was an actor who played Native Americans, Egyptians and other exotic races in white Hollywood films but was never cast as an African American.)

 

The first film from Lincoln was the two-reeler The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition in 1916, directed by Harry A. Gant, with ‘an all-star Negro cast” and was the story of a Black man (played by Noble) who rescues the daughter of a wealthy white oilman and becomes successful in the oil business.

The film was advertised this way at a Kansas City screening: “The Negro Businessmen’s League has gone to a big expense to secure these educational pictures … Your first opportunity to see a picture owned, written, acted and produced entirely by Negroes. Don’t fail to see it.” Admission was 10¢.

Race films did not cross over to white audiences. Mostly, churches, “colored-only” cinemas and schools had screenings for them.

A valuable chronicle of Black life in the 1920s was shown by the documentary-style films shot by Solomon Sir Jones in Oklahoma. Jones was a minister who filmed 29 silent films from 1924 to 1928 in 16 mm, showing funerals, weddings, baptisms, parades, football games, barber shops, colleges, — ordinary community life — and are considered by the Library of Congress to be “the most extensive film records we have of Southern and urban black life and culture at the time of rapid social and cultural change for African-Americans during the 1920s.”

The first full-length Black feature film is credited to Oscar Micheaux who directed the film from his own novel, The Homesteader. His script was bought by the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, but when Micheaux insisted that he wanted to direct it, negotiations fell through, and he decided to make the film himself. The success of the film created a career for him for the next 30 years when he made 43 more films, of which barely a dozen survive. The savvy Micheaux was also a successful marketer, promoting his actors as ‘the Black Valentino’ and ‘the sepia Mae West.’

His second film, Within Our Gates (1920) was Micheaux’s answer to The Birth of a Nation and depicts lynching, mixed-race ancestry, the Klan, the Jim Crow years and the rise of the ‘new Negro,’ the one who would not submit to racial segregation laws.

Micheaux’s films dealt with Black middle-class professionals like lawyers and doctors and even royalty, so the public found themselves reflected in the movies they saw. No longer were Blacks caricatured and humiliated but portrayed with dignity in authentic circumstances. One exception, though, gave rise to much controversy when actor Paul Robeson performed the dual role of two brothers, a preacher and a rapist, in Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1925). Accused of being immoral and sacrilegious, Micheaux was forced to edit his film down from nine to five reels before he could release it.

Another all-Black independent film company of the silent era was The Colored Players Film Corporation set up in Philadelphia in 1926. It was the collaboration of a Black vaudevillian, Sherman Dudley, and a white theater owner, David Starkman. Dudley was the face of the company; the funding was all-white. However, the company only made three race films, the most prominent being The Scar of Shame, released in 1929. It dealt with the inter-race tensions created by a man marrying a woman not of his social class, though both are Black. The themes of a personal conflict reflecting a larger societal ill resonated with Black audiences and the film made money. Ten Nights in a Barroom and A Prince of His Race also dealt with prevailing social attitudes. However, in an attempt to improve production values and hire professional talent to better compete in the market, the company quickly went bankrupt.

Of the nearly 500 race films that were made, 80% are lost.