Poitier broke racial ground with his roles in movies such as “ A Raisin in the Sun” and “ Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” won a best-actor Oscar for “ Lilies of the Field” and by the early ’70s got to direct his own string of crowd-pleasing comedies.
and to fly a medicine bag full of money to young voting rights organizers in rural Mississippi. Brimming with self-confidence born of spending their youth among majority-Black populations in Jamaica and the Bahamas, Belafonte and Poitier shone in roles that exuded dignity and quiet sex appeal, and used their fame and wealth to link arms with Martin Luther King Jr. Things began to change in the late 1950s and 1960s with the rise of “two cool cats with Caribbean roots,” as Haygood calls Harry Belafonte, the male star of “Carmen Jones,” and his good friend Sidney Poitier.
Of the Black stars who gained any kind of success in the mainstream movie business before the 1950s, only Lena Horne seems to have emerged with her head held high, by maintaining her distinguished singing career and the steely pride that, as Haygood recalls, once led her to bash an ashtray over the head of drunken White diner who called her the n-word at a Polynesian restaurant in Beverly Hills. home, dead of a pill overdose at the age of 42.
Hattie McDaniel may have been the first Black performer to win a supporting actress Oscar, for her role as Scarlett O’Hara’s maid in the 1939 film version of “ Gone With the Wind.” But when McDaniel “played the role of Mammy to the hilt,” Haygood writes, she took “a vaunted position in extending a stereotypical and painful image of Blacks on-screen” - and ended her career playing the same tired maid role in the radio and TV series “Beulah.” Dorothy Dandridge, touted by the White film world as a stunning star in the making after her sultry turn in the 1954 film “ Carmen Jones,” 11 years later was found naked on the bathroom floor of her L.A. But mostly, this period of total White control of Hollywood is remembered for perpetuating ugly stereotypes and humiliating potential Black stars. Notable among those are the 19 film adaptations of the Fannie Hurst novel “ Imitation of Life,” a story about a light-skinned Black woman who “passes” for White. While the Oscars provide only one snapshot of progress, and a theater-emptying pandemic has further blurred the overall picture, it still seems like a timely moment for a book that puts this headline-making discussion into historical perspective, as the journalist turned popular historian and biographer Wil Haygood sets out to do in “ Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World.”įor anyone who isn’t steeped in film history, Haygood provides a valuable service by recalling the few movies made by White producers and directors in the pre-civil rights era that dealt seriously with race issues. Otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards.” Reforms in the demonstrably nondiverse and elderly Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were promised, but the results have been mixed, from the surprise best-picture triumph of “ Moonlight” in 2017 to the controversial losses of “ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” stars Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis this year. In 2016, Oscars host Chris Rock joked: “ I’m here at the Academy Awards.
Not so long ago, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite swept through social media when for two straight years not a single actor or actress of color was nominated for an Academy Award. Movie award season will soon be upon us, and with it more passionate debate over the status of Blacks in Hollywood.