Delving into previously inaccessible records of major Hollywood studios, among them Warner Brothers, RKO, and Twentieth Century-Fox, as well as federalrecords of the Office of War Information, the N.A.A.C.P., and interviews with survivors of the era, Cripps reveals the struggle of black actors like Sidney Poitier, leading the way in liberal racial casting as cops and judges, fishermen,and wounded veterans, yet marginalized behind the scenes within the racial ferment of cultural politics.
Focusing on popular film culture-from classic Hollywood films and black musicals, like Gone with the Wind andCabin in the Sky, to war movies and government propaganda films, like Bataan and Wings for this Man, narrated by Ronald Reagan, to the first bold strides toward a humane portrayal of interracial comradeship in The Breaking Point-Cripps documents the ever fluctuating African-American presence in Hollywood. Cripps contends that founded in the liberal rhetoric of the war years-with the catchwords brotherhood and tolerance-camemovies which defined a new African-American presence both in film and in American society at large. Examining this period through the prism of popular culture, Making Movies Black shows how movies anticipated America's changing ideas about race. This is the second volume of Thomas Cripps's definitive history of African-Americans in Hollywood, covering the period from World War II through the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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