“Draggin’ the Chain”: Linking Civil Rights and African American Representation in The Defiant Ones and In the Heat of the Night

Discourse surrounding racial representation, particularly filmic representations of African Americans, has been overwhelmingly couched in terms of stereotype. For this reason, scholars have largely conceptualized African American representation as an example of ahistorical and detrimental continuity. The central black character in The Defiant Ones, Cullen, tells fellow white prison escapee Jackson when he trips that he is “draggin’ the chain” to their freedom, but to film and history scholars, the representation of African Americans is itself “draggin’ the chain,” presenting blacks only as signifiers whose meaning is largely homogenous and whose capacity to reflect the realities of black experiences is nonexistent. This paper aims to engage and explore this discourse of stereotype and the representation of race through a case study of two civil rights–era films starring Sidney Poitier: The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958) and In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967). In undertaking a comparative analysis of these two films it will be argued that these racialized representations evolved over time in a historically contingent manner that reflects directly upon, and is informed by, the changing nature of the civil rights movement. When stereotypes are utilized they are not necessarily ahistorical or of homogenized meaning; rather, a complex interplay of processes of subversion and containment of white patriarchal (stereotypical) values is presented that sits distinctly at odds with this notion. It is in examining this interplay, the process through which stereotype is used and given meaning, that we can begin to understand and deconstruct representations and construct new ones of greater meaning.