Additional Race Films/Race Matters Resources

Explore further films and reading materials.

Suggested Viewing

Race Films: The Popular Art of the 1920s (app. 19 minutes)

Midnight Ramble: The Story of Race Movies, a 1994 documentary film (app. 55 minutes)

Now Showing: Posters from African American Movies, a temporary exhibition at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. D.C., exploring the art of movie posters, specifically examining films by black filmmakers or works featuring black performers. Showing through April 18, 2021.

Talking About Race, a recently-launched interactive, web-based initiative at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with resources to help explore race and identity, and foster healthy and constructive dialogues.

Pioneers of African-American Cinema, an introductory booklet and companion to the Kino-Lorber DVD set, Pioneers of African-American Cinema (in five discs), originally released in 2016.

Selected Contents:

  • Disc One: Two Knights of Vaudeville (1915), Within Our Gates (1920), The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), Body and Soul (1925)

  • Disc Two: Rev. S.S. Jones Home Movies (1924-1928), The Flying Ace (1926), Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926), The Scar of Shame (1929)

  • Disc Three: Eleven P.M. (1928), Hell-Bound Train (1930), The Darktown Revue (1931), The Exile (1931), Hot Biskits (1931)

  • Disc Four: The Girl from Chicago (1932), Ten Minutes to Live (1932), Veiled Aristocrats (1932), Birthright (1938)

  • Disc Five: The Bronze Buckaroo (1939), Commandment Keeper Church (1940), The Blood of Jesus (1941), Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. (1946)

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (4 hours). In four one-hour parts. A joint production of Inkwell Films and McGee Media. Executive-produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Dyllan McGee. Available on DVD and streaming on PBS.

Richard E. Norman and His Contemporaries. A permanent on-line digital exhibit, Norman Studios Silent Film Museum.

Early African American Film: Reconstructing the History of Silent Race Films, 1909-1930. UCLA Film Project.

 
 

Suggested Reading

Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film. New 3rd ed. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Bowser, Pearl, and Louise Spence. Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Bowser, Pearl, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds. Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Butters, Gerald R., Jr. Black Manhood on the Silver Screen. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002.

Caddoo, Cara. Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Cripps, Thomas. Black Film as Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

-----. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Everett, Anna. Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

Field, Allyson Nadia. Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Friedman, Ryan Jay. Hollywood’s African American Films: The Transition to Sound. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Gaines, Jane. Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Green, J. Ronald. Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

-----. With a Crooked Stick—The Films of Oscar Micheaux. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

Kisch, John Duke, and Edward Mapp, eds. A Separate Cinema: Fifty Years of Black-Cast Posters. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.

Kisch, John Duke, and Tony Noumand, eds. Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art. London: Reel Art Press, 2014.

Leab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Lott, Eric. Love & Theft: Black Minstrelsy & the America Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: From Micheaux to Morrison. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002; revised and expanded ed., 2010.

-----. Richard E. Norman and Early Race Filmmaking. Bloomington Indiana University Press, 2013.

-----, ed. Early Race Filmmaking in America. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Massood, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

McGilligan, Patrick. Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Null, Gary. Black Hollywood: The Black Performer in Motion Pictures. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1990.

-----. Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975.

Pines, Jim. Blacks in Films: A Survey of Racial Themes and Images in the American Film. London: Studio Vista/Cassell & Collier Macmillan, 1975.

Regester, Charlene B. African Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900–1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Reid, Mark A. Redefining Black Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Richards, Larry. African American Films Through 1959: A Comprehensive Illustrated Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.

Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995.

Sheppard, Samantha N. Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.

Smith, Valerie. Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, 1893-1920. Berkeley: University of California, 2005.

Taylor, Betti VanEpps. Oscar Micheaux, A Biography: Dakota Homesteader, Author, Pioneer Film Maker. Rapid City, SD: Dakota West Books, 1999.

Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Weisenfeld, Judith. Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Yearwood, Gladstone. Black Film as Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration, and the African American Aesthetic Tradition. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999.

 

—Barbara Tepa Lupack