Rufus Jones for President. (Back to the White House!) In the short, which also featured Ethel Waters, the little child dreams of being president. The dreamscape unfolds and the cinemagoer sees it all: The cute child is seen prancing about, a chorus of singers and dancers around him, uttering jokes about watermelons and pork chops being given away freely. There is a sign near a doorway in the dream: “ VOTE HERE FOR RUFUSJONES —Two Pork Chops Every Time You Vote.” When the child Rufus walks by a Senate door, he sees another sign: CHECK YOUR RAZORS. In the dream the child becomes the president. Of course, in the dream, he has a vice president. As the movie shows, the vice president is his “mammy”! In real life, removed from a dream, stage appearances could be just as wicked for little Sammy Davis Jr. Sometimes, on stage, he wore blackface. Thus he was a black child, in whiteface, pretending to be a white man in blackface—all for the laughter of white film audiences.
Even the grown-up black actors who found occasional film work in the 1940s—Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson—had to endure humiliating slights from which some never recovered. Though lighter-skinned black women such as Horne appeared more palatable to white film audiences, they had no easy time of it. In 1954 Dorothy Dandridge, for her performance in Carmen Jones, became the first black woman to garner a best actress Oscar nomination. But the acclaim seemed just a torturous tease: despite the recognition, the studios did not send her challenging scripts, nor did white male actors lobby for her to appear alongside them. She eventually vanished from the movie screen, suffering from depression and an overdependence on pills. She died broke in 1965. Lena Horne seemed to weather her relationship with Hollywood better than Dandridge simply because, for a while, she was nowhere in Hollywood to be found (though she did return to the big screen in 1969). She was blacklistedfrom both movies and television work during the fifties. Not a soul in Hollywood challenged Horne’s banishment, though there were those who pointed to her friendship with activist Paul Robeson as the reason she was shunned.
In a child’s mind, the movies do not easily take on deep social significance. The child goes to the movies to be transported and to look for heroes. Writer James Baldwin was no different from any other child who was growing up, watching tall figures on the wide movie screen. “I did not yet know,” the great writer would recall about being a twelve-year-old, “that virtually every black community in America contains a movie house, or, sometimes, in those days, an actual theater, called the Lincoln, or the Booker T. Washington, nor did I know why; any more than I knew why The Cotton Club was called The Cotton Club.”
Movies are wedded to the American psyche, Baldwin eventually figured out. They are weekly destinations; they are a belief system at work. As an American populace, we go to the movies because they feed our collective imagination. (In my Columbus, Ohio, hometown, the Lincoln Theatre—now wondrously restored—sat right there on Long Street.)
And yet if there was no equality on the streets—as the foot soldiers in the marches and protests of the next decade, those in Birmingham and Selma, the night riders, and the vanguard students sent in to integrate schools illustrated—how could there have been equality in theselection of movies that got made? Positions both in front of and behind the camera seemed closed to blacks, with the exception of movies that starred Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier. When the sixties were rounding the corner into view, the whole time line of that epoch, with all its leading men—Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Belafonte, Poitier (both of whom were delivering bail money to the protesters across the South), J. Edgar Hoover—something happened up in the Hollywood Hills: the men
Even the grown-up black actors who found occasional film work in the 1940s—Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson—had to endure humiliating slights from which some never recovered. Though lighter-skinned black women such as Horne appeared more palatable to white film audiences, they had no easy time of it. In 1954 Dorothy Dandridge, for her performance in Carmen Jones, became the first black woman to garner a best actress Oscar nomination. But the acclaim seemed just a torturous tease: despite the recognition, the studios did not send her challenging scripts, nor did white male actors lobby for her to appear alongside them. She eventually vanished from the movie screen, suffering from depression and an overdependence on pills. She died broke in 1965. Lena Horne seemed to weather her relationship with Hollywood better than Dandridge simply because, for a while, she was nowhere in Hollywood to be found (though she did return to the big screen in 1969). She was blacklistedfrom both movies and television work during the fifties. Not a soul in Hollywood challenged Horne’s banishment, though there were those who pointed to her friendship with activist Paul Robeson as the reason she was shunned.
In a child’s mind, the movies do not easily take on deep social significance. The child goes to the movies to be transported and to look for heroes. Writer James Baldwin was no different from any other child who was growing up, watching tall figures on the wide movie screen. “I did not yet know,” the great writer would recall about being a twelve-year-old, “that virtually every black community in America contains a movie house, or, sometimes, in those days, an actual theater, called the Lincoln, or the Booker T. Washington, nor did I know why; any more than I knew why The Cotton Club was called The Cotton Club.”
Movies are wedded to the American psyche, Baldwin eventually figured out. They are weekly destinations; they are a belief system at work. As an American populace, we go to the movies because they feed our collective imagination. (In my Columbus, Ohio, hometown, the Lincoln Theatre—now wondrously restored—sat right there on Long Street.)
And yet if there was no equality on the streets—as the foot soldiers in the marches and protests of the next decade, those in Birmingham and Selma, the night riders, and the vanguard students sent in to integrate schools illustrated—how could there have been equality in theselection of movies that got made? Positions both in front of and behind the camera seemed closed to blacks, with the exception of movies that starred Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier. When the sixties were rounding the corner into view, the whole time line of that epoch, with all its leading men—Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Belafonte, Poitier (both of whom were delivering bail money to the protesters across the South), J. Edgar Hoover—something happened up in the Hollywood Hills: the men
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