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Chapter 6. African American Representation and Changing Race Relations
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87 SIX African American Representation and Changing Race Relations As World War II ended, the movie industry offered fewer roles for African Americans. The popularity of the all-black musical had waned. Because of mounting criticism from civil rights activists about servile characters played by blacks, roles for maid and butler characters in movies dried up. Meanwhile, leading roles for African Americans in dramatic films were few and far between. The animated theatrical cartoon was one of the few media that remained consistent in its African American imagery. Hollywood had not developed any new black comedy stars during the war. Therefore, animators continued to draw on older actors and characterizations for their cartoons. The studios had not received many complaints from exhibitors or viewers regarding the persistence of the hoary stereotypes. Moreover, the animated sambos, mammies, and other black figures provided steady work for a few black actors during these lean years for African Americans in Hollywood. The sambo figure was the first of the African American characterizations to become the focus of heavy criticism after the war. Jasper, the star of George Pal’s “Puppetoons” series for Paramount, came under attack by the black press in 1946. For all his visual creativity in the use of pixillation, Pal continued to base a significant portion of the humor in Jasper’s films on conversations in the dialect of blackface minstrels. People complained to the point where Ebony magazine reported that the episodes “have been criticized by Negro and white newspapers, organizations, and notables as perpetuating the myth of Negro shiftlessness, fear, and childishness.”1 Pal answered charges of racism by claiming that he was only replicating characterizations that had existed in American culture for years. He said that his enjoyment of American folklore naturally led him to adapt the sambo to animation. To be sure, Jasper’s episodes are on a par with 88 Chapter Six contemporary sambo films from other studios, such as Leon Schlesinger’s Flop Goes the Weasel and Angel Puss, which also feature rural settings and characters talking “in dialect.” Many of Pal’s films starring white characters , however, came not from folklore but rather from literary works. The same care he put into transforming these white characters from the printed page into strong animated figures did not extend to the stars of the “Jasper” cartoons.2 Stung by the criticism, Pal once again drew from African American folklore, this time for a film about a strong black adult male—the antithesis of the sambo. John Henry and the Inky-Poo (1946) brought to animation traditional work songs and ballads about a steel-driving man. As early as 1909 Louise Bascom published a song with a two-line refrain: “Johnie Henry was a hard-workin’ man,/He died with the hammer in his hand.” Pal remained relatively faithful to the songs, animating John Henry as a muscular blue-collar laborer with a booming voice. His outperforming of a steel-driving machine (the Inky-Poo) gives him a superhuman quality that distinguishes him from Jasper as well as the mumbling, scrawny Stepin’ Fetchit caricatures of black men that were standard at the time.3 In contrast to its condemnation of Jasper, Ebony romanticized Pal’s film about John Henry. The magazine declared that John Henry and the Inky-Poo contained “no Negro stereotypes”—a claim that ignores several examples of conventional (and stereotypical) black representation in the film. Stephen Foster’s minstrel song “De Camptown Ladies” plays while John prepares to compete against the Inky-Poo machine on the railroad, and the narrator refers to John’s mother as “his mammy.” In addition, Pal conformed to contemporary movie depictions of African American domestic life, which did not show intact African American families but rather portrayed households headed solely by mothers. Moreover, Pal’s depiction of John Henry contradicts various folk ballads, which give him a wife (identified variously as Polly Ann, Julie Ann, Mary Ann, or Lucy), a father, and/or a son.4 Pal’s blend of radical black heroic imagery with Hollywood racial conventions in John Henry and the Inky-Poo was successful. In addition to drawing favorable reviews from the press, the film received an Academy Award nomination for best cartoon short subject of 1946. In a sense, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was rewarding Pal’s attempt [3.88.114.76] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:35 GMT) African American Representation and Changing Race Relations 89 to...