And that, said one scholar, makes these films informative, too.
"They show what people were wearing, how they moved, how they talked," said Jacqueline Stewart, an associate professor of English and a member of the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. "It teaches us about black style at that time, and it's not just an imitation from Hollywood."
Tinsley Silcox, director of the Hamon Arts Library at SMU, peruses the features, shorts and newsreels from the 1930s, '40s and '50s, found in a Texas warehouse in 1983.
(Sylvia Moreno -- The Washington Post)
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That is not to say that some black stereotypes did not show up in the race films. But they are seen in the context of a diverse African American cast. Stepin Fetchit, the black actor who played characters who bowed and scraped to whites in Hollywood films, plays a somewhat slow delivery man in "Miracle in Harlem," one of the collection's films made in 1948. Here he comes off as a minor comedic character in a movie about black entrepreneurship and cutthroat competition. The cast includes businessmen, an executive secretary, a young educated couple, a minister, a righteous and religious elderly woman, candy factory workers, policemen, a gangster, and a choir -- all black.
Fetchit (born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry) "was seen in the context of a wider black environment . . . different levels of society," said William Greaves, who starred as the ambitious young businessman and romantic lead in "Miracle in Harlem." Greaves went on to a successful career in the United States and Canada as a maker of films, television programs and documentaries and has his own production company in New York.
"Once you contextualized Stepin Fetchit, it was no longer a stereotypical character, but just the comic relief in any society," Greaves said.
The race films, with their depiction of an all-black world, are viewed by some as unrealistic as the all-white world that Hollywood depicted for decades.
"How do you explain the black man's dilemma if you don't have white people to point to in the film? That's the flaw I find," said Phillip Collins, chief curator of the African American Museum in Dallas. "It parallels . . . how films were made in Hollywood for the main audience. There were no black people. We didn't exist."
Race films died out in the mid-1950s with the start of the civil rights movement and the integration of black actors in serious roles in mainstream movies. Although they suffered from low production values, uneven acting and simplistic story lines, the race movies did serve a purpose.
"These films reflect more the actuality of black America from the '20s to the '50s than you'll ever see in 'Gone With the Wind,' " said Pamela Elder, an associate professor of television studies at SMU. "These films tried to level out the playing field."
