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...actors from all over the world, but for decades they couldn't confront the perceived American prejudice against a people who had been in this country for centuries. It's not that blacks, when given the rare and fleeting chance, had proved themselves incompetent performers. They lit up the screen - only to be consigned to oblivion. I smile in recollection of the pretty passion that Nina Mae McKinney poured into "Hallelujah," the agitated grace Fredi Washington invested in "Imitation of Life," the power and subtlety of Paul Robeson in "The Emperor Jones." And I curse the absence...
...Hollywood, they created or inhabited their own demimonde - black-cast films, more than 500 of them between 1916 and 1950, most of them made independent of the studio system, some of them directed by blacks. They gave African-American audiences a chance to see themselves, on the big screen, in roles other than predators, cartoon buffoons and domestic servants - or, to quote (uncomfortably) the title of Donald Bogle's synoptic history of blacks in movies, "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks...
...Internet Movie Database identifies Herb Jeffries as being of "Ethiopian-French Canadian-Italian & Irish descent," and notes that one of his five wives was the stripper Tempest Storm. Jeffries was a mellow baritone; he had sung with Cab Calloway. On screen, as Herbert Jeffrey, he became the smoothest cowboy west of Sugar Hill in four sagebrush sing-a-longs made in the late 30s at a black-owned California ranch. As Bogle observes, Jeffries and his light-skinned leading ladies were the "whites" in these films; the supporting roles were taken by dark-skinned comics like Mantan Moreland...
...black-directed films are even more provocative, as we'll see in the next That Old Feeling, when we consider the careers of Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, Jr. But while you're waiting for the shipment of videos you've ordered from the Black Artists of the Silver Screen section of Hollywood's Attic, consider the careers of four outstanding African-American actors...
...Variety, reviewing her film debut, called her "the Clara Bow of her race." When she toured Europe in the 30s she was billed as "the black Garbo." But based on her one starring role in a Hollywood film, McKinney was more the black Jean Harlow - pure impurity on screen. Even that's not quite fair to Nina (rhymes with Dinah), for Harlow's was essentially a comic persona, lacing fake baby talk into the braying of the gold digger who's already a little tired of the priapic effect she has on men. McKinney, though her signature character is frequently...