African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900−1960 by Charlene Regester (review)

One of the goals of Charlene Regester’s book is to make visible the contributions of those pioneering Black actresses from the start of the twentieth century through the 1960s. It is an effort to redress the balance toward those who were all too frequently represented as merely shadows and/or Other to their white female counterparts. In doing so, she examines the intersections between the on-screen depictions of these actresses with their personal lives offscreen as they attempted to position themselves as professionals in an industry that regularly dismissed them. Regester chose the subjects of her study—Madam Sul-Te-Wan, Nina Mae McKinney, Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Ethel Waters, and Dorothy Dandridge—based on the resources available regarding both their on-and offscreen presence, as well as their “representativeness” of the time frame when they enjoyed significant press coverage (with the Black press typically providing more information.) Regester further situates the subjects of her analysis in two broad categories as determined by the ways in which Hollywood read their bodies: though all these women were Othered in some way because of their race and sexuality, the larger framed and often darker-skinned women were typically portrayed as mammies while their lighter-skinned counterparts were often sexualized in their roles.

Most likely the least well-known of Regester’s subjects is Madam Sul-Te-Wan, whose career spanned from 1915 to 1959. In light of the refusal of many Hollywood studios to employ Black actors and actresses in the early silent era, and the limited roles offered once films added sound, the length of her career is all the more remarkable. Though Sul-Te-Wan’s first role was in The Birth of a Nation (1915), where she portrayed an educated African American riding a coach and wearing a gown, her part was cut from the final version of the film. D. W. Griffith’s unsubstantiated accusations that she stirred up Black people to protest against the film were later rescinded and it seems that her presence in “one of the most racially inflammatory films in American cinema history” went largely unremarked by the African American press (26). The remainder of the chapter delineates Sul-Te-Wan’s other roles and how the industry consistently attempted to frame her in contrast to her European-American female costars. In spite of these attempts to limit Sul-Te-Wan, Regester also notes that the actress, whose father was a Hindu minister and mother African American, used her diverse ethnic heritage to make herself more visible in Hollywood.

Nina Mae McKinney had immediate visibility from the start of her career. Being cast as Chick in the second Hollywood Black-cast film Hallelujah! (1929) made McKinney an African American star. Unfortunately she faced the same challenges that Black actresses before and after her would face. There were not many roles for these women, and in the few opportunities they were offered to perform their characters were often crude stereotypes. Regester examines the difficulty McKinney faced in trying to achieve stardom under continued racial bias and argues that in spite of having performed in only a few roles, McKinney was a trailblazer for future African American actresses.

Louise Beavers was the opposite physically of McKinney. The latter was petite in frame and light in complexion whereas Beavers was large framed and dark-skinned. This physicality lent itself to the roles Beavers usually played—the mammy, maid, or matriarch. Regester argues that by embodying these different roles throughout most of her career, Beavers was multiply positioned as a subservient racial Other. Regester then goes onto read these various roles in different films like Coquette (1929), She Done Him Wrong (1933), and Forty-Second Street (1933). Regester also provides an unusual reading of Beavers’s most popular film, Imitation of Life (1934), in which Beavers plays Delilah. Regester argues that Delilah’s exaggerated subservience actually masks her desire to “escape...