Word: fetchit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Juice was no hero to African Americans. His postfootball success was largely due to his ability to make whites comfortable as he played golf with ceos at country clubs from which other blacks were excluded or shucked and jived his way through goofy movies like some modern Stepin Fetchit. Never one to speak out about civil rights, he seemed to shed his racial identity, crossing over into a sort of colorless minor celebrity as easily as he escaped from tacklers--or from the black wife he traded in for a white teenager. By trial time Simpson wasn't exactly white...
From the '50s onward, then, Hollywood began to move away from the bug-eyed, watermelon-eating portrayals of African-Americans that abounded in the '30s, introducing a wider variety of characters. As Stepin Fetchit became a phenomenon of the past, stars like Lena Horne and Sidney Poitier were born. Nevertheless, the roles available to Blacks were still basically tame--musicians, functionaries, and other characters that did little to challenge the status quo. The few movies that did have an edge to them were poorly distributed or received criticism for being too incendiary. For example, 20th Century Fox's controversial...