Word: fetchit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there were people -- not just in Congress, but developers and builders and so forth -- who wanted to keep programs that I wanted to get rid of because I thought they were wasteful. I think about the names I've been called in this town. I've been called Stepin Fetchit, I've been called Silent Sam, Mr. Mayor.* I've been called Svengali. It shows what people will do. To be popular, you must have a lot of programs, a lot of money for everybody, including the builders and developers and consultants...
...history indicates, it could be worse, and it has been. In D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), the major Negro roles were played by whites in blackface. Hollywood's first black star, Stepin Fetchit, fitted the stereotype of the slow, sly, shuffling Negro. Meanwhile, the industry mostly ignored Paul Robeson (too strong, too smart, too sexy, too damned uppity) and denied Lena Horne her best potential movie roles, as the mulatto heroines of Pinky and Show Boat, handing the parts instead to Jeanne Crain and Ava Gardner. It was not until the rise to stardom...
...1940s. "All the blacks would sit in the movie theater balcony," he says. "Nigger heaven, they used to call it. Then one night we saw Stanley Kramer's Home of the Brave, the first picture we'd seen in which a black was not a Stepin Fetchit, and we resolved never to sit in the balcony again...
...white America, a black man's otherness is stamped indelibly on his face. Whether he runs the 100-meter dash or runs for President, whether he orates like Martin Luther King Jr. or drawls like Stepin Fetchit, his color sets him apart. For him the American melting pot can sear faster than it assimilates. And so he looks to his roots, finding solace in soul, while fixing an eye on the main chance of upward mobility. His tragedy is that, in both worlds, he may end up a stranger...
...brief as one might expect, given the salaries in the business they have left behind. Mary Astor is here. Donald Crisp died here. Norma Shearer is here. Eddie ("Rochester") Anderson died here. Regis Toomey is here. Ellen Corby, the grandmother on The Waltons, just moved in. Stepin Fetchit is here. Bruce Cabot, Chester Conklin, Larry Fine (one of the Three Stooges), Edmund Lowe, Arthur O'Connell, Herbert Marshall and Mitchell Leisen (a director whose credits included Death Takes a Holiday) died here...