Oscars' lack of diversity contributes to wider racial bias, experts say.His 1920 silent film Within Our Gates, the oldest-known surviving feature film made by an African-American director, told the story of a sharecropper and his wife being cheated out of pay by their white boss. Instead of presenting typical Hollywood images of Black people as slaves, maids and butlers, Micheaux told stories that featured Black teachers, ministers and lawyers. The son of former slaves, Micheaux made 45 movies over his career and was called the Jackie Robinson of the film world.
Meanwhile, Black cinema was being advanced by directors like Oscar Micheaux. Civil rights groups like the National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were gaining prominence.
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In the 1920s, the influential revival of Black arts and culture later known as the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. The Harlem Renaissanceĭuring the 1920s and '30s, the Cotton Club, located in New York City, featured many of the most popular Black entertainers of the era. Rebellion, to present Black people as real, nuanced human beings with stories worth telling on film. But over the last century, there have also been movements, from the Harlem Renaissance to the L.A. But sometimes that resistance was forgotten or just disappeared or was erased over time."įrom Hollywood's beginnings, Black people were mostly given roles as subservient maids, butlers, slaves and sharecroppers in movies with regressive, racist messages. "It's not that people were different or more ignorant or less progressive 30, 40, 80 years ago.… Those acts of resistance happened at the time…. "One of the illuminating things about studying Hollywood history … is that you realize that representations that seem problematic now … were not fully accepted at the time," Cameron Bailey, artistic director and co-head of the Toronto International Film Festival, told CBC's Ideas. Actors portraying the Ku Klux Klan ride on horses in a still from the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.
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