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Censorship In Black And White: The Burning Cross (1947), Band Of Angels (1957) And The Politics Of Film Censorship In The American South After World War II

2013; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439685.2013.764719

1465-3451

Melissa Ooten,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Motion Pictures Producers and Distribution Association (MPPDA) instituted the Production Code Administration (PCA), commonly referred to as the Hays Code after its creator Will Hays, in 1930. The film industry began effectively enforcing the code, which was essentially industry censorship regulations, in 1934. 2. Jordan Bauer, Equality or bust!: The 1947 journey of reconciliation and the effort to desegregate the Jim Crow transit. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, NA, Atlanta, GA, September 26, 2006. 3. These caricatures included the portrayal of American Americans as coons, uncle Toms, jezebels, and mammies. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: an interpretive history of Blacks in American film. 4. The State Board of Censors actively operated from 1922 to 1965. 5. Virginia’s leaders passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which narrowed the definition of who could be ‘white’ in Virginia to those without ‘one drop’ of African blood. Richard Sherman, ‘The last stand’: the fight for racial integrity in Virginia in the 1920s, The Journal of Southern History 54 (1) (February 1988), 79. In that same year, legislators passed the Virginia Sterilization Statute, which allowed for the sterilization of any resident of the state’s four mental institutions and the Lynchburg State Colony who was ‘affected with hereditary forms of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness, or epilepsy.’ Pippa Holloway, Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 29. 6. The censorship law stood as a stark exception to the other legislation. Unlike the laws affecting the ‘marginal’ populace—most often the poor of all races and all people of color—movie censorship affected all moviegoers, regardless of class. 7. Micheaux artfully deceived the Board by continuing to exhibit his banned films, despite risks that included the possibility of having his films banned from the entirety of the state. Virginia Board of Motion Pictures, Library of Virginia, State Records, Box 52 (hereafter VBMP). 8. While D.W. Griffith first released Birth of a Nation in 1915, the film enjoyed continuous revival status. It played to sold-out audiences in Virginia in the 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1960s, despite calls for the film’s censorship. 9. The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 originally only applied to marriage. In 1930, the General Assembly voted to apply this measure to all facets of racial segregation, including education and public accommodation. Holloway, 41. Also, in 1926, the legislature passed the Public Assemblages Act, which made integration in any public setting illegal, even if such integration was voluntary. 10. Birth of a Nation was never censored in Virginia. 11. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 October 1947. 12. VBMP. State Records Collection. The Library of Virginia. Box 53. The Burning Cross (1947) file. 13. VBMP. Box 53. The Burning Cross (1947) file. 14. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 18 October 1947. 15. Ebony was a mass-marketed African American monthly glossy magazine. 16. Peter Noble, The Negro in Films (Port Washington, NY, 1969), 49. 17. Margaret Herrick Library. Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California. Production Code Administration Files. File: The Burning Cross, Somerset, 1947. While the PCA declared the basic story line acceptable, it issued pages of mandated changes, including many dialogue changes and repeated warnings about taking the ‘greatest possible care’ concerning the portrayal and dressing of female characters. 18. New York Times, 1 June 1947. 19. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: a cultural history of American movies (New York, 1994), 329; Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: the Hollywood message movie from World War II to the Civil Rights era (New York, 1993), 19. 20. The South had censorship boards, including the cities of Memphis and Atlanta and the state of Virginia. However, the five other state censorship boards existed outside of the South in Ohio, Kansas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland during this same time period. 21. The Burning Cross, Ebony, September 1947. Ebony’s editors did not list a writer or writers for the article on The Burning Cross, which was entitled The Burning Cross. At the time, John H. Johnson both published and edited the magazine, and Robert Ellis worked as its Hollywood editor. 22. The Burning Cross, Ebony, 38. 23. Ebony, 38. 24. Ebony, 36. 25. Ebony, 38. 26. Between 1908 and 1965, Virginia officials executed 54 men convicted of rape or attempted rape, all of whom were African Americans. By the post-World War II era, however, such executions were increasingly rare due to the successful use of statistics to show the high execution rate of Black men convicted of rape compared to no execution of White men convicted of the same crime, Black press coverage of such cases, and the mobilization of Black communities and civil rights organizations. Lisa Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 125. 27. Megan Shockley, We Too are Americans: African American women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–1954 (Urbana, IL, 2004), 177. 28. Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black, 51, 63. 29. When the Supreme Court moved away from an interpretation of movies as merely a business and toward a reconfiguration of the medium as constitutionally protected speech in 1952, some movies began to deal more critically with the social and political legacies of racism, although not without censors diluting the final product. Richard Randall, Censorship of the Movies: the social and political control of a mass medium (Madison, WI, 1970), 26. The PCA ordered scenes of the Klan beating an African American to be reduced. The film, according to the restrictions, could not show the Klan lashing someone with straps, and any lashing had to be limited to only one or two strokes. Margaret Herrick Library. Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California. Production Code Administration Files. File: The Burning Cross, Somerset, 1947. 30. Ebony, 38. 31. Richmond Afro-American, 8 November 1947. 32. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 October 1947. 33. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 October 1947. 34. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 October 1947. 35. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 October 1947. 36. Richmond Afro-American, 11 October 1947. 37. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 18 October 1947. 38. VBMP. Box 53. 39. VBMP. Box 53. 40. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 October 1947. 41. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 4 October 1947. 42. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 4 October 1947. 43. NAACP leaders had a long history of protesting unequal racial treatment in films and under censorship provisions. The organization criticized the depiction of African Americans on-screen as early as 1914 with the film The Nigger. Jesse Rhines, Black Film/White Money (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996), 15. 44. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 October 1947. 45. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 October 1947. 46. Richmond Afro-American, 11 October 1947. 47. Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black, 206. Historian Thomas Cripps argues that despite the poor quality of The Burning Cross, it ‘drew blacks into its orbit both to overpraise it and to defend it against censorship.’ Although he describes the film as an independent ‘B’ movie made by ‘a $100,000 nut team of underpaid actors [and] a kernel of an idea about a black man who infiltrates the KKK’ and that NAACP organizers called it a ‘not too good picture,’ black activist organizations nevertheless supported its exhibition. In these situations, obviously the political and social agenda of the film trumped its artistic qualities. 48. VBMP. Box 53. 49. Under prior censorship, Virginia’s censors privately viewed films before they could be released to the public. If the board chose to ban a film, that picture would never be shown in the state. Virginians, however, could gain access to movie reviews in national publications. 50. Edith Lindeman, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 September 1947. 51. Edith Lindeman, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 September 1947. 52. Edith Lindeman, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 September 1947. Lindeman, broadly speaking, is correct. After the institution of the PCA in the 1930s, the censors actually cut relatively few films each year. 53. Richmond Afro-American, 11 October 1947. 54. Richmond Afro-American, 11 October 1947. 55. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1 November 1947. 56. Richmond Afro-American, 11 October 1947. 57. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1 November 1947. 58. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 October 1947; Norfolk Journal and Guide, 18 October 1947. 59. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 October 1947. 60. Richmond Afro-American, 1 November 1947. 61. Richmond Afro-American, 1 November 1947. 62. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1 November 1947. 63. VBMP. Box 53. The Burning Cross (1947) file. 64. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 8 November 1947. 65. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1 November 1947. 66. Richmond Afro-American, 8 November 1947. Thus over 20 years after Oscar Micheaux had petitioned the board for an interracial group of leaders to view his film and been refused, the Board eventually invited leaders of both races to view The Burning Cross after being publicly chastised for not doing so initially. 67. Richmond News-Leader, 1 November 1947. 68. Richmond Afro-American, 8 November 1947. 69. Richmond Afro-American, 8 November 1947. 70. Richmond Afro-American, 8 November 1947. 71. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 8 November 1947 72. Richmond News-Leader, 5 November 1947. 73. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 8 November 1947. 74. New York Times, 1 June 1947. 75. Richmond Afro-American, 15 November 1947. 76. Richmond Afro-American, 15 November 15, 1947; VBMP, Box 53. 77. Richmond Afro-American, 15 November 15, 1947; VBMP, Box 53. The Production Code also forbade depictions of individuals being shot in the back. 78. Anne Everett, Returning the Gaze: an anthology of Black film criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC, 2001), 247. 79. Richmond Afro-American, 5 January 1957. In 1956, Hollywood’s governing PCA revised the movie industry’s censorship code to ban any picture that might incite bigotry or hatred among groups from different racial, religious, or national backgrounds. 80. Of course, they stated that they wished to protect all citizens from ‘violence.’ 81. Ira Carmen, Movies, Censorship, and the Law (Ann Arbor, MI, 1966), 49, 50. 82. Between 1952 and 1965, the Court ruled on six film licensing cases. In five, the justices reversed municipal orders to suppress a film. In the sixth, they ruled that a jurisdiction attempting to ban depictions of adultery in an effort to censor ‘sexual immorality’ on-screen created an unconstitutional barrier to the discussion of ideas. While the Court ruled in Roth v. U.S. (1957) that ‘obscenity’ was not constitutionally protected speech, the term itself was vaguely defined and offered little guidance for acceptable film censorship standards. Carmen, 101. The fatal blow to Virginia’s censorship board came via the review of Maryland’s state film censorship board’s actions in Freedman v. Maryland (1965). Again unanimously, the nine justices found that a state censorship board that required all films to be viewed by the board before they could be shown in the state (known as a priori censorship) was unconstitutional because it represented a governmental framework that did not provide adequate safeguards for freedom of expression. Randall, 43. The Court, however, did not strike down all censorship. In fact, it continued to recognize the licensing power of such boards, but not ‘prior censorship.’ Under this decision, however, the actions of Virginia’s board, which operated under a policy of prior censorship, were unconstitutional. 83. Richmond Afro-American, 1957 January 5. 84. Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, television, and race during the Civil Rights struggle (Baltimore, MD, 2001), 68. 85. The previous year, in 1956, Hollywood’s Production Code had been amended to preclude negative stereotyping of racial and ethnic groups and allow responsible depictions of previously forbidden depictions including miscegenation. Frank Miller, Censored Hollywood: sex, sin, and violence on screen (Atlanta, GA, 1994), 168. 86. VBMP. Box 53. 87. From the construction of the letters, most of the writers were white. If some of the letter writers were citizens of color, they did not identify themselves as such. 88. It should be noted that miscegenation was still illegal in Virginia and punishable by several years’ imprisonment in 1957, the year of the film’s release. 89. VBMP. Box 53. Band of Angels (1957) folder. 90. Donald Bogle defines the mythic ‘brutal black buck,’ which he states was first introduced to film audiences with Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, as ‘big, baadddd niggers, oversexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh.’ Sex and racism collided to articulate white fears (and justify white dominance and violence) that every black man was a psychopath lusting after white women. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: an interpretive history of Blacks in American films (New York, 1989), 10, 13. 91. VBMP. Box 53. Band of Angels (1957) folder. 92. VBMP. Box 53. Band of Angels (1957) folder. See Chapter 1 for previous discussions of the vulnerability of youth in absorbing movie images as reality. 93. VBMP. Box 53. In 1954, the Supreme Court invalidated the racial segregation of schools in its Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, KS ruling. In direct response, Virginia governor Thomas Stanley vowed to use all legal means available to continue segregated schools. In 1958, Governor J. Lindsay Almond closed schools in Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Warren and Prince Edward counties rather than integrate them. In 1959, massive resistance ended (with the exception of Prince Edward county), thus beginning more passive resistance with whites fleeing to the suburbs and enrolling their children in private schools. [www.vahistorical.org/sva2002vl/equal.htm] 94. This statement duplicates the discourse surrounding Birth of a Nation. 95. VBMP. Box 53. Band of Angels (1957) file. 96. VBMP. Box 53. Band of Angels (1957) file. No letters were found in the collection that supported the board’s decision to license the film. 97. VBMP. Box 53. Band of Angels (1957) file. Poem ‘The Saddest Story Ever Told’ by Oliver Allstorm. 98. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 August 1957. 99. Celebrate Richmond Theater, 139. 100. Celebrate Richmond Theater, 140.