The Simple Joys of 'The Pursuit of Happyness'

Christopher Bracey, an associate professor of law and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, says the film appears to have struck a chord, prompting numerous Internet discussions about stereotypes, fatherhood and black male experiences.

What the film does, Bracey said, is cinematically demonstrate black men's "capacity to be fully human -- having caring, loving qualities most people take for granted. That's been the struggle from the beginning, to be accepted as fully human."

Experts say films have generally shown black characters serving as fathers to varying degrees, but around the time of the blaxploitation films in the early '70s, and later in the 1980s, there seemed to be many more negative roles.

"You began to see the black man who is irresponsible and who was coolly indifferent to fatherhood or outright hostile to the idea of fatherhood," said Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University assistant professor of urban education.

"Alternately, what you'll see is a string of single mothers. It's a broader understanding of black men as oversexed, lazy, immoral. When you add this up, the group doesn't equal good fatherhood and it allows us to condemn them."

And so, many black fathers are saying, "Pursuit," with its big star and acknowledgment of the quiet majority of hardworking family men, comes at a good time.

Eric Stephens, 49, liked the film's exploration of "corporate culture" as a window into how some African Americans exist as minorities in a demanding workplace, while maintaining a family structure at home.

Smith "didn't take his personal things to work, he was able to separate them out and get the job done," Stephens said. "And often you have to be three times as good, and he proved that he was."

Mel Carpenter said the film showed "how important education was." He added: "I'd like to see more of that."

Carpenter watched the movie with his son, Craig, 35, who called "Pursuit" a "rarity."

"There are plenty of black men that struggle, constant struggle, but there are many black men that contribute to their families, to their communities," Craig Carpenter said. "But that's not a story that's ever told."

That may be changing, some experts say. As a rebuttal to negative impressions of African American men (in news coverage of urban violence and in popular street-lit "baby daddy done me wrong" books), other recent publications and films have celebrated black fathers.

Though fatherhood may not be the central theme, many films, whether "Love Jones" or the 'hood flicks of the 1990s, have "redemptive representations of black fathers and black people in general," says Hill.

When lawyers Stephana I. Colbert and Valerie I. Harrison solicited submissions for their book "Color Him Father: Stories of Love and Rediscovery of Black Men," they were inundated with positive stories.

"The hard part was in paring them down to 35," Colbert said of the book, which was published in May. "All of us took away positive experiences from our fathers. The important piece was we didn't believe this was the exception."

A similar idea was behind the June launch of Proud Poppa, a New Jersey-based magazine with a mission to "celebrate, elevate and replicate fatherhood success principles in the black community."

"The Chris Gardner story is really a dramatic one, but there are countless stories about black men like Gardner that run under the radar," said Poppa publisher Shawn Dove, 44. "They may not go on to become millionaire stockbrokers, but they are at home being responsible fathers."