Feb. 18 Big Screen & TV & Radio
The history of African Americans in film
Movies
In 1903, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, starred the first Black actor to ever appear on screen. During that era African American roles were very limited to playing the Tom, coon, buck, mammie, or mulatto. After that came the great producer Bill Foster. Bill Foster was the first African American who took the first steps toward production in African American cinema. One of Foster’s most famous films was, The Railroad Porter, which was a comedy set in 1912. Sadly, most of Bill Foster’s work has been lost or destroyed. Another great pioneer in film was George P. Johnson. Most of Mr. Johnson’s inspiration came from Bill Foster. With the help of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Circle, George Johnson founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. Although this was a brilliant idea, Johnson never witnessed his idea being a success due to an influenza epidemic which forced theaters to close.
After the Second World War, African American filmmakers began to have a stronger voice in films. Movies began to start addressing racial tensions. One documentary that was very famous for pointing out the country’s attitude on racism at the time was Ralph Cooper’s, “Am I Guilty” in 1940. Also during this time, some African American filmmakers turned to their white counterparts and used them to help voice African American Concerns. During the 1950’s Black actors started becoming household names. Actors such as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte became familiar faces in film just to name a few. Once the 1970’s began African Americans were appearing on the big screen left and right. The 1970s' films were called the Blaxploitation films. These films depicted the feelings that African Americans felt after years of fighting racism and inequality. Some famous films that were produced during this era was “Shaft”, “Blacula” and “Cool Breeze”, just to name a few.
Although there is not much information in the history books on African Americans and film, one must try to preserve African history. There were so many great African American filmmakers who paved the way for filmmakers like Spike Lee, Tyler Perry and others. From the late 1970s, African American actors and filmmakers made movies on their own terms. African American actors continue to evolve as well with current blockbuster actors like Will Smith and Halle Berry commanding large salaries and ticket sales. Clearly, African Americans are here to stay on the big screen and it all started from Uncle’s Tom Cabin.
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The first movie I saw, as a child, was Gone with the wind. I had to read the book first. I was 9 years old. Let's start there.
Hattie McDaniel
Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1893 – October 26, 1952) was an American actress, singer-songwriter, and comedian. For her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939), she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the first African American to win an Oscar. She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975, and in 2006 she became the first Black Oscar winner honored with a U.S. postage stamp.[3] In 2010, she was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame.[4] In addition to acting, McDaniel recorded 16 blues sides between 1926 and 1929 and was a radio performer and television personality; she was the first Black woman to sing on radio in the United States.[5][6] Although she appeared in more than 300 films, she received on-screen credits for only 83.[7] Her best known other major films are Alice Adams, In This Our Life and Since You Went Away.
McDaniel experienced racism and racial segregation throughout her career, and was unable to attend the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta because it was held at a whites-only theater. At the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles, she sat at a segregated table at the side of the room. In 1952, McDaniel died due to breast cancer. Her final wish to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery was denied due to the graveyard being restricted to whites-only at the time.
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McDaniel fought racism and discrimination to change people's opinions of African American actors. Hattie McDaniel worked hard to change things for other African American actors who would follow her. She became the star of a radio show, The Beulah Show. She was the first African American to win an Oscar, for her supporting role as Mammy in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.
Sidney Poitier
The 2nd movie I saw, [I was 10 years old] care of my aunt, who like Oprah, adored Sidney Poitier, was To sir with love. If any man, who walked this earth, having style, swagger, grace, looks, & talent beyond recognition it was Mr. Poitier.
Sidney Poitier KBE (/ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ PWAH-tyay; February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian and American actor, film director, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first Black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a competitive British Academy of Film and Television Arts award (BAFTA), and a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. Poitier was one of the last major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Poitier's family lived in the Bahamas, then still a Crown colony, but he was born unexpectedly in Miami, Florida, while they were visiting, which automatically granted him U.S. citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved to Miami at age 15, and to New York City when he was 16. He joined the American Negro Theatre, landing his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955). In 1958, Poitier starred with Tony Curtis as chained-together escaped convicts in The Defiant Ones, which received nine Academy Award nominations; both actors received nominations for Best Actor, with Poitier's being the first for a Black actor. They both also had Best Actor nominations for the BAFTAs, with Poitier winning. Additionally Poitier won the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his performance in the film. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), playing an itinerant handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel.
Poitier also received acclaim for Porgy and Bess (1959), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965), because of his strong roles as epic African American male characters. He continued to break ground in three successful 1967 films which dealt with issues of race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture for that year. He received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for his performance in the last film, and in a poll the next year he was voted the US's top box-office star. Beginning in the 1970s, Poitier also directed various comedy films, including Stir Crazy (1980), starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, among other films. After nearly a decade away from acting, he returned to television and film starring in Shoot to Kill (1988) and Sneakers (1992).
Poitier was granted a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. In 1982, he received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award. In 1995, he received the Kennedy Center Honor. From 1997 to 2007, he was the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. In 1999, he ranked 22nd among male actors on the "100 Years...100 Stars" list by the American Film Institute and received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. In 2002, he was given an Honorary Academy Award, in recognition of his "remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being". In 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, by President Barack Obama. In 2016, he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding lifetime achievement in film.
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Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry [Stepin Fetchit]
Although he never won an Oscar, Lincoln Perry was America's first Black movie star. But for that distinction, Perry paid a heavy price -- he is best known as the character of Stepin Fetchit, a befuddled, mumbling, shiftless fool.
Seen through a modern lens, Perry's "laziest man in the world" character can be painfully racist. Perry, a veteran of the vaudeville "Chitlin Circuit," got his break in Hollywood in 1927 when he was cast in the silent film In Old Kentucky. According to film historian Mel Watkins, Perry created the character to make himself stand out from other actors vying for the role.
"He acted as though he didn't know where he was, and he immediately got the attention of the producers and the director of the film," says Watkins, author of the biography Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry. "He was chosen for the part on that basis -- they didn't know what to think of him. They were astounded by him."
Watkins says that like most Americans, he thought of Stepin Fetchit as a symbol of the negative side of the African-American experience. But in his research, he discovered Perry to be very different from his Fetchit character. "This is an amazingly complex man. Intelligent -- and he was anything but what people take him to be."
By the mid-1930s, Perry was at his peak -- and Black leaders were putting pressure on Hollywood to rid the screen of the stereotype he was responsible for creating. They believed the Stepin Fetchit character was keeping white America from viewing Blacks as capable of joining the mainstream.
Comedian Jimmy Walker knows something about being accused of perpetuating a negative stereotype. His portrayal of J.J. Evans in the sitcom Good Times was criticized as a return of the minstrel show.
"The way they make it sound, it's like Black people are permanently harmed by Stepin Fetchit," Walker says. "And I don't agree with that -- I don't think it's a bad character. I think it's a funny character." Walker points out that the Fetchit character is actually a subversive trickster -- he never got around to fetching anything.
"The lazy man character that [Perry] played was based on something that had come from slavery," Watkins says. "It was called 'putting on old massa' -- break the tools, break the hoe, do anything to postpone the work that was to be done."
Finally, the white characters would become exasperated and do the work themselves. "And Blacks understood it perfectly, and laughed heartily at it," Watkins says. For his part, Perry was laughing all the way to the bank. By the mid-1930s, he was a millionaire with a fleet of luxury cars and expensive suits.
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Nina Mae McKinney
Hollywood's First Black Movie Star opens with the premiere of a 35mm restoration print of King Vidor's all-Black musical Hallelujah!, her feature debut from 1929, in which she starred as a wisecracking Jazz Age flapper who gets caught in a deadly love triangle.
Nina Mae McKinney (June 12, 1912 – May 3, 1967) was an American actress who worked internationally during the 1930s and in the postwar period in theatre, film and television, after beginning her career on Broadway and in Hollywood. Dubbed "The Black Garbo" in Europe because of her striking beauty, McKinney was both one of the first African-American film stars in the United States and one of the first African-Americans to appear on British television.
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A Fool and his money
A Fool and His Money is an American silent comedy film from 1912. It is either the first film[1] or one of the early films with an all-African American cast. It was directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, who is widely considered the first female film director. The plot involves people becoming wealthy and taking on an aristocratic lifestyle.
The film was rediscovered by California engineer David Navone, who found four reels of early 1910s films in a trunk he purchased at an estate sale. He gave them to the American Film Institute (AFI). It was preserved by the AFI's National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center. It was shown publicly on July 29, 2018 at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles.
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Television
Nat King Cole
Who was the 1st Black man on TV?
Nat King Cole was the first African American entertainer with a network television series (1956–57), but, despite the singer's great talent, his variety show had trouble attracting sponsors.
Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965), known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole's career as a jazz and pop vocalist started in the late 1930s and spanned almost three decades where he found success and recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts. He received numerous accolades including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1960) and a Special Achievement Golden Globe Award. Posthumously, Cole has received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1990), along with the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award (1992) and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2000), and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame (2020).
Cole started his career as a jazz pianist in the late 1930s, where he formed The King Cole Trio which became the top-selling group (and the only Black act) on Capitol Records in the 1940s. His trio was the model for small jazz ensembles that followed. Starting in 1950 he transitioned to become a solo singer billed as Nat King Cole. Despite achieving mainstream success, during his career he faced intense racial discrimination. While not a major vocal public figure in the civil rights movement, Cole was a member of his local NAACP branch and participated in the 1963 March on Washington. He regularly performed for civil rights organizations. From 1956 to 1957, he hosted the NBC variety series The Nat King Cole Show, which became the first nationally broadcast television show hosted by an African American.
Some of his most notable singles include "Unforgettable", "Smile", "L-O-V-E", "Let There Be Love", "Mona Lisa", "Autumn Leaves", "Stardust", "Straighten Up and Fly Right", "The Very Thought of You", "For Sentimental Reasons", "Embraceable You" and "Almost Like Being in Love". He is known for his Christmas album The Magic of Christmas (1960) which included "The Christmas Song"; in 1999 it was named by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest Christmas albums of all time. He was the father of singer Natalie Cole (1950–2015), who covered her father's songs in the 1991 album Unforgettable... with Love.
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Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American singer and actress. Waters frequently performed jazz, swing, and pop music on the Broadway stage and in concerts. She began her career in the 1920s singing blues. Her notable recordings include "Dinah", "Stormy Weather", "Taking a Chance on Love", "Heat Wave", "Supper Time", "Am I Blue?", "Cabin in the Sky", "I'm Coming Virginia", and her version of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow". Waters was the second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award, the first African American to star on her own television show, and the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.
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Roots
Roots is an American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The series first aired on ABC in January 1977. Roots received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won nine. It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which holds the record as the third-highest-rated episode for any type of television series, and the second-most-watched overall series finale in U.S. television history. It was produced on a budget of $6.6 million.
A sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, first aired in 1979, and a second sequel, Roots: The Gift, a Christmas television film, starring Burton and Louis Gossett Jr., first aired in 1988. A related film, Alex Haley's Queen, is based on the life of Queen Jackson Haley, who was Alex Haley's paternal grandmother.
In 2016, a remake of the original miniseries, with the same name, was commissioned by the History channel and screened by the channel on Memorial Day.
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Television Commercials
Tom Burrell
Thomas J. "Tom" Burrell (born March 18, 1939) founder and chairman emeritus of Burrell Communications, became one of the first African Americans in the field of advertising.
Early years
Burrell was born in Chicago, where his father owned a tavern and his mother worked for a beauty parlor. He switched high schools to avoid being near "the wrong crowd" and it was in the second one that a teacher encouraged him to look into the field of advertising. He then went to Roosevelt University, majoring in English and with a minor in advertising.
Career
Burrell was "the first Black person to work in a Chicago advertising agency." After ten years of advancing, he and Emmett McBain opened their own agency, Burrell McBain Advertising. Part of Burrell's pitch was that "Black people are not dark-skinned white people," referring to differences in music preferences and other cultural differences. Burrell bought out his partner in 1974 and renamed the agency Burrell Communications Group. McDonald's and Coca Cola were early clients.
In 1999 he sold 49% of his firm to fund expansion, and subsequently stepped aside, becoming chairman emeritus of the agency; Burrell was later inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. He also authored two books, Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority and Brainwashed: Erasing the Myth of Black Inferiority.
One post-retirement recognition of his professional accomplishments came in 2017 from The One Club.
Personal
He and his wife Madeleine Moore Burrell live in Chicago. Their daughter's name is Bonita Burrell. Burrell has donated to and benefitted from Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind since being diagnosed with macular degeneration.
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Gail Fisher
Gail Fisher (August 18, 1935 – December 2, 2000) was an American actress who was one of the first Black women to play substantive roles in American television. She was best known for playing the role of secretary Peggy Fair on the television detective series Mannix from 1968 through 1975, a role for which she won two Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy Award; she was the first African-American woman to win those prestigious awards. She also won an NAACP Image Award in 1969.
Early years
The youngest of five children, Fisher was born in Orange, New Jersey.[3] Her father died when she was two years old, and she was raised by her mother, Ona Fisher, who supported her family with a home-operated hair-styling business while living in the Potter's Crossing neighborhood of Edison, New Jersey. She graduated from Metuchen High School in Metuchen, New Jersey. During her teenage years, she was a cheerleader and entered several beauty contests, winning the titles of Miss Transit, Miss Black New Jersey, and Miss Press Photographer.
In a contest sponsored by Coca-Cola, Fisher won the opportunity to spend two years studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. As a student of acting in New York City, she worked with Lee Strasberg and became a member of the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center, where she worked with Elia Kazan and Herbert Blau. As a young woman, she also worked as a model.
Career
Fisher made her first television appearance in 1960 at age 25, appearing in the NTA Film Network program The Play of the Week. Also during the early 1960s, she appeared in a television commercial for All laundry detergent, which she said made her "the first Black female—no, make that Black, period—to make a national TV commercial, on camera, with lines." In 1965, Herbert Blau cast her in a theatrical production of Danton's Death.
She first appeared in Mannix during the second season, when Mannix leaves a detective firm and sets up shop as a private investigator. She became the second African American woman after Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek to show prominently on weekly television. In 1968, she made guest appearances on the TV series My Three Sons; Love, American Style; and Room 222. In 1970, her work on Mannix was honored when she received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, becoming the first African-American woman to do so. In 1971, Fisher became the first African-American woman to win a Golden Globe, and won her second in 1973. After Mannix was cancelled in 1975, she appeared on television about once a year, guest starring on popular shows such as Fantasy Island, Knight Rider, General Hospital, and The White Shadow.
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Radio
Jack Leroy Cooper
Jack Leroy Cooper (September 18, 1888 – January 12, 1970) was the first African-American radio disc jockey, described as "the undisputed patriarch of Black radio in the United States." In 2012, he was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
Biography
He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, one of ten children of William and Lavina Cooper. He left home at the age of ten to work in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in his teens was a successful boxer and semi-professional baseball player. By 1905, he was working in vaudeville on the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit as a singer and dancer, and started writing and producing sketches and stage shows, soon running his own touring troupe with his first wife. He managed at least two theaters for TOBA, and began writing for newspapers in Memphis and Indianapolis.
After moving to Chicago around 1920, he began writing theater reviews for the Chicago Defender, while attempting to break into the new radio industry as a performer. While working for the Defender in Washington, D.C. he first appeared on radio, writing and performing comic sketches on station WCAP. He returned to Chicago in 1926 and developed a proposal for a new show, The All-Negro Hour, which premiered on WSBC on November 3, 1929. The show was initially broadcast on a weekly basis, and contained live music and comedy sketches, but Cooper gradually modified and expanded its content. It became successful with both listeners and commercial sponsors and continued until 1936. By the mid-1930s, Cooper presented 91⁄2 hours each week on WCAP. He was one of the first, if not the first, to broadcast gramophone records, including gospel music and jazz, using his own phonograph. In 1938, he created a new show, Search for Missing Persons, designed to reunite listeners with family members who they had lost contact with. He also pioneered a mobile news team to cover items of interest to Chicago's Black community.
By 1947, his production company Jack L. Cooper Presentations controlled about 40 hours per week on four different stations in Chicago. He promoted African Americans as presenters, and was among the first to broadcast commentaries on Negro league baseball games and news targeted at the Black community. He also actively supported African-American youth organizations including the South Side Boy's Club. In contrast with later DJs like Al Benson, Cooper scrupulously avoided using slang expressions or broadcasting vaudeville or urban blues recordings:
"His announcing privileged standard American English over the Black vernacular, a preference he shared with the most affluent and educated African Americans. In effect, Cooper and his team became the voice of the urban Black bourgeoisie and a symbol of racial uplift."
Cooper retired from broadcasting in 1959, and died in Chicago in 1970 at the age of 81. In 1975, a park in the West Pullman neighborhood was officially named Cooper Park in his honor.
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WERD Radio Station
WERD was the first radio station owned and programmed by African Americans. The station was established in Atlanta, Georgia on October 3, 1949, broadcasting on 860 AM (now used by WAEC). The National Black Radio Hall of Fame Atlanta Chapter is reopening WERD which still exists at its birth location and will also include a historical museum with it after renovations of the facility are completed.
WERD in Atlanta was the first radio station owned and operated by African-Americans. (WDIA in Memphis was on the air in 1948 doing Black—or Negro as it was then called—programming, but the owners were not African American). Jesse B. Blayton Sr., an accountant, bank president, and Atlanta University professor, purchased WERD in 1949 for $50,000. He changed the station format to "Black appeal" and hired his son Jesse Jr. as station manager. "Jockey" Jack Gibson was hired and by 1951 he was the most popular DJ in Atlanta. Ken Knight from Daytona Beach, Florida was also hired to come in as the stations first Program Director when the station opened.
The station is still housed in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple building on Auburn Avenue, then one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the United States. Located in that same building was the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957, led by Martin Luther King Jr., and staffed by Ella Baker.[4][5] According to Gibson, King would tap the ceiling of SCLC office (just below WERD) with a broomstick to signal he had an announcement to make. Gibson would then lower a microphone from the studio window to King at the window below.
WDIA, in Memphis, Tennessee, though white owned, had Nat D. Williams as part of the first radio station programmed entirely for African Americans, WERD had "Jockey Jack" Gibson, a friend of Blayton from Chicago. Blayton sold the station in 1968. Ken Knight purchased the callsign and took WERD to Jacksonville, Florida. He changed WRHC to WERD; until his passing in 1973. For many years it was a gospel station there and the station decided to name the street WERD Radio Drive; as it is still named today.
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Plays / Stage / Black Theatre
William A. Brown
The last record performance of the African Theatre was on Mercer and Houston Street in January 1824. It was not until after the American Civil War that all-Black theatre companies began to emerge again. William Brown, considered the first known Black playwright in America, died in 1884.
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Shotaway
The first known play by a Black American was James Brown's King Shotaway (1823).
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown's The Escape; o r A Leap for Freedom (1858), was the first Black play published, but the first real success of an African American dramatist was Angelina W. Grimké's Rachel (1916).
George Faison
George Faison, Broadway's First African American to win a Tony Award for Best Choreography, to appear at Hillside's Opening Night Gala of THE WIZ.
African American first-time Tony Award winners included:
Joaquina Kalukango
Joaquina Kalukango, Best Actress in a musical, Paradise Square
Michael R. Jackson
Michael R. Jackson, Best Book for a musical and Best Musical, A Strange Loop .
Myles Frost
Myles Frost, Best Actor in a musical, MJ
Diahann Carroll
Carroll made history in 1962, becoming the first Black woman to win the Best Actress in a Musical Tony Award for her performance in No Strings.
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* During this blog post [and I'm struggling physically], I noticed that "Black" is not being capitalized in the articles that I am finding. I will go back in the previous day's posts and edit for this.
Just another way to slight the Black community.
Please people, if you come across something in print or online, where Black [pertaining to the race] is not capitalized notify the source and have it changed.
I have never seen this happen with any other race or ethnicity.
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