The Department of Afro American Research, Arts and Culture

Vintage Black Hollywood

(1900 - 1954)

There is a fundamental difference between Vintage Black Hollywood films and Race films during the early years of Black Cinema. Vintage Black Hollywood films generally depicted African-Americans in very stereotypical roles such as servants, mammies, hustlers, lazy, and in blackface. White directors/writers produced these films for major motion picture companies such as Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, and MGM. These films had bigger budgets and very talented African-American actors, musicians, singers, and dancers. Race films were Black independent films, made mainly by Black writers/directors and produced/distributed by Black motion picture companies. African-Americans did not make all Race films, but in general, these films featured African-Americans in less stereotypical roles. When ciphering through Black cinema during its early years, it's easy to confuse Vintage Black Hollywood films with Race Films. Still, after reviewing many films from that period, it's relatively easy to separate Hollywood's idea of Black cinema from the movies that were considered Race films.

By the 1950s, Hollywood was shifting its idea of how African Americans were portrayed in films by eliminating some of the stereotypical roles and challenging racism within American society. This shift also marked the demise of Race films, following the infamous United States v. Paramount Pictures Supreme Court decision in 1948, which determined the fate of movie studios owning their own theaters and holding exclusivity rights over which theaters would show their films. Hollywood continued to produce very few Black films, and Black independent filmmakers were nonexistent during this period. The Vintage Black Hollywood era came to a subtle end, but the start of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954 ushered in a new way of thinking.