Black History Month & Black Cinema

What should one study?


In his pioneering rap poem, entitled Black History, by Gil Scott Heron :

I was wondering about our yesterdays and started digging through the rubble...And to say the least somebody went through a hell of a lot of trouble...to make sure that when we looked things up, we wouldn't fare too well...that we would come up with totally unreliable, portraits of ourselves.

Many groundbreaking thinkers understood that it was vital for African Americans to know their history, a people who were robbed of their cultures, religions, names, lands and material possessions. The tradition and practice of Black History month has extended to other areas around the globe, furnishing race-pride which has become the antidote for prejudice. The occasion was first called Black History Week, and it was begun in 1926 for Americans to learn what had been left out of their history textbooks and newspapers concerning African Americans - it's inventor was Dr. Carter G. Woodson. February was chosen to honor Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, whose birthdays are both in that month; and that's probably why there is so much corresponding coverage on CNN about both Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln - drawing a comparison between the two presidents. I personally don't ascribe to the hype that is often placed on black history month as I did in years past, simply because I now view my history as a piece of world history. An evolution in the way that African history is distributed is what I look for now.

History of the lunch counter sit-ins
It's been done...over and over and over...LET'S EVOLVE


Because I'm a media-nerd, I've decided to give you Black History Web-surfers an interesting piece of history to look up. In 1915, Woodson established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, this was to become the basis or foundation for what is Black History Month now. In that same year (1915) a film called "Birth of a Nation" was released. It was the most profitable American film of all time until Disney's Snow White & the Seven Dwarves came out in 1937. Imagine that...that this film virtually held box-office sales prisoner for an entire 23 years.

I remember seeing a clip of this film in a Wu-tang music video.


The film depicts a mid-19th century south plagued by mulattos and abolitionists who scheme to keep the white man down and raise up the black man in what is, to its intended audience, an obviously grotesque perversion of natural order. In government sessions, the reconstruction-empowered black politicians (played buffoonishly by white actors) take off their shoes and feast on fried chicken. Luckily, the chivalric Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue.

This film was pretty much the accepted version of history until well after World War II. The film even received a special screening at the White House, where president Woodrow Wilson supposedly remarked, "It [the film] is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The quote was later argued to be from someone else but the film was still marketed as "Federally-endorsed."

The same year Birth of a Nation was released, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was founded in Nebraska. Organized by brothers George and Noble Johnson with the aim of encouraging black pride while upholding the social order of the day, it was the first company to produce what came to be known as "Race Movies," which tried to balance an accurate depiction of black folks' lives and at the same time actively promote a positive image. If you wanna learn more about this piece of black history - CHECK OUT this blog article.