Although negative images of black people pervaded the early New York and Hollywood motion picture industry, blacks contested racism in film. Silent movies invariably depicted a dumb, silly, and subservient Negro. Depicting that character was The Birth of a Nation (1915); a three-hour melodrama of the Civil War and Reconstruction, it glorified slavery and the Ku Klux Klan and set box office records. Race caricatures infused sound pictures such as The Jazz Singer (1927). Gone with the Wind (1939) featured plantations with “crooning darkies and mint juleps.” Television followed suit in the late 1940s. Amos’ n’ Andy (1950), a popular black comedy on CBS, presented lowbrow characters. Black newspapers and civil rights organizations, led by the NAACP, had begun protesting antiblack films in 1915.

Their struggle against “unfair representation” continued. Editorializing, picketing, and creating black cinema, they prodded Hollywood toward fairness. Caught in the crossfire of protests were actors such as Lincoln Perry, who played the minstrel Stepin Fetchit, and Hattie McDaniel, the first black Academy Award winner. She won Best Supporting Actress “as a strong and resolute Mammy” in Gone with the Wind. Also, from 1915 to 1945, blacks produced more than 200 “race movies,” featuring doctors, lawyers, ministers, soldiers, cowboys, or gangsters. Oscar Micheaux made more than thirty, including The Symbol of the Unconquered (1921), which condemned lynching, and Birthright (1939), starring a northern college graduate who confronted southern Jim Crow.

Black casting changed. In 1942 Lena Horne signed a long-term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Unprecedented, it stipulated “that she would not be cast in stereotypical black roles.” Horne appeared in Stormy Weather (1943), singing her hit song of the same name. A speaking role in Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) raised her profile and helped dignify the black female image. Between The Negro Soldier (1943), a government-backed documentary, and Lilies of the Field (1963), featuring Sidney Poitier and a racially mixed cast, blacks began appearing in dignified roles. Poitier received the 1963 Academy Award for Best Actor, the first for a black actor.

Change persisted. Films such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1968), which starred Poitier as a highly accomplished doctor and showed “blacks as working and middle-class people in normal, loving relationships,” saw a growing audience.