Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life by Cara Caddoo (review)

Both Film Studies and African American Studies are relatively new interdisciplinary fields, and scholarly advances are especially valuable as these areas of inquiry consolidate their stature within the academy and elsewhere. Cara Caddoo’s new book on cinema and the building of modern Black life, Envisioning Freedom, is a major contribution to both fields. It adds powerfully to our understanding of both US and African American film history, and it expands our vision of the civil rights movement and the long struggle of people of African descent to control their own imagery in the media and popular culture.

A key feature of the book reveals the crucial role of the Black church in generating audiences for the emerging Black film productions. This was part of the long process of how people of African origin, only recently liberated from enslavement, determining their identities as free people. African American clergymen, fully understanding the attraction of early motion pictures, began incorporating film viewing into their efforts to help their congregations move toward the goal of racial progress and uplift. Not coincidentally, this attractive feature of Black church life also increased church attendance and fundraising. Ministers realized that young people especially would often rather spend their Sundays in movie theaters rather than in churches. Understanding the tension between spiritual and secular pursuits gave them additional reason to promote Black films within churches themselves.

The films promoted positive Black images and became an integral feature of the self-help and self-respect movement that pervaded much of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American life. It likewise served as an early foundation for the pivotal role of the Black church in encouraging Black filmmaking and exhibition as part of a greater development of Black enterprise generally.

The most compelling parts of Envisioning Freedom involve conflicts over Black representation in film. A key struggle occurred when Black prizefighter Jack Johnson defeated the “Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries in 1910. Johnson, a bold, defiant Black man, evoked powerful fears in white America — the same apprehension that has existed against strong Black males from slave days that resulted in the persecution of leaders like Paul Robeson, Rob Williams, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and many others in later decades.

Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion and the first inadvertent Black film star when films of that fight were made and distributed throughout the United States. Immediately, white politicians made plans to ban the exhibitions through local film censorship boards. Films were regarded as commerce rather than art and in 1912, Congress passed the Sims Act, encouraging further censorship of Johnson’s historic victory. This legislation was explicitly aimed at Johnson and his legions of enthusiastic Black supporters. It continued the long and disgraceful history of racist law that began with the original US Constitution. It was only in 1952, in Burstyn v. Wilson, that the US Supreme Court finally provided films full First Amendment protection, rendering local censorship agencies unconstitutional.

Caddoo’s extensive account of Black protests against D.W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 racist classic The Birth of a Nation adds a powerful dimension to the growing body of civil rights literature. This film glorified the Ku Klux Klan and portrayed African Americans in egregiously stereotypical roles as childlike buffoons and as male sexual predators lusting after virginal white women. White actors in blackface played these sexually uncontrolled black men, signifying the racism of the era and adding further insult to millions of African Americans.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized its members nationally to boycott the film and protest its offensive representations. Marches, picketing, and civil disobedience led some cities to ban its showing. As the book reveals, the most enduring result of these protests was the growing power of mass Black action, a precursor of the events that in time became a hallmark of US social and political life.

Finally...