ShareThisCan movies or television really teach us anything useful about African American history? It's a reasonable question to ask as we begin Black History Month.Certainly, the legacy of such famous films as "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) and "Gone With the Wind" (1939) was to give the public a distorted view of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction while offering portrayals of African Americans that were either virulently hateful or condescending.And because of such films, says Patricia Turner, professor of African American studies at University of California, Davis, "a lot of the public thinks that the plantation was the dominant entity on which slaves lived during the era of slavery." In fact, Turner says, "very, very few slaves lived on plantations. Most slaves lived in units that had 10 or fewer slaves on them."Even a more recent film like "Glory" (1989), which is far better intentioned in its depiction of African Americans, "is pretty inaccurate historically," Turner says.For recommendations of some worth checking out, we talked to Turner as well as Roberto Pomo, a professor of theater and film studies who teaches a class on "Multicultural Perspectives on American Cinema" at California State University, Sacramento, and Michele Foss Snowden, an assistant professor of communications at CSUS who has written about race in film and television.From television, all three cited Alex Haley's 1977 miniseries "Roots" as a more accurate treatment of slavery.Snowden also recommends the 1993 movie "Sankofa," made by UCLA-trained Ethiopian director Haile Gerima. It's about an African American supermodel (Oyafunmike Ogunlano) working at a photo shoot in West Africa in a building that had been a holding area for African slaves about to be shipped to America.Pomo adds that Steven Spielberg's "Amistad" (1997), the story of a mutiny aboard a slave ship in 1839, is an "excellent film" and "very powerful."With regard to the long era of segregation and Jim Crow laws, Turner says Denzel Washington's current film, "The Great Debaters," about a debate team at an African American college in Texas during the 1930s, "was very well done. It's not a story that is commonly told -- the notion of black higher education during that era -- (and it includes) a range of different black characters."And Pomo views "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962) as "an attempt by Hollywood to make it right, and it works. It is a landmark Hollywood film that vividly portrays racism in the 1930s."All three experts praise many of Spike Lee's films, particularly "Malcolm X" (1992), with Turner citing Denzel Washington's "terrific performance," Snowden noting its "historical importance" and Pomo mentioning its "epic" quality. In addition to these historical films and TV movies, there are films and shows that portrayed African Americans honestly and fairly in their own time -- and now, with the passage of decades, survive as historical documents themselves.Both Turner and Pomo point to the work of independent African American film director Oscar Micheaux. His films from the 1910s through the 1940s, such as "Within Our Gates" and "The Scar of Shame," Pomo says, let us "see characters who are realistic and not stereotypical at all."Turner says that the "race films" made by Micheaux and others "served a need in the community for blacks to be able to see themselves on the screen."Pomo also mentions some Hollywood-made films from the late 1920s through the 1940s with all-black casts -- "Hallelujah," "Cabin in the Sky" and "Stormy Weather" -- that managed to "allow black performers to really shine in the eyes of Hollywood.""A Raisin in the Sun," the 1961 film version of Lorraine Hansbury's play, "gives you a slice of 1950s life," Turner says.Snowden cites the 1968-71 TV series "Julia," in which Diahann Carroll starred as a widowed single mother and a nurse. "It wasn't a comedy and it wasn't making fun of her."Considering Sidney Poitier's two big films from 1967 -- Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night," in which he plays a Northern police detective investigating a murder in Mississippi, and Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," where Poitier becomes engaged to a white woman, much to the chagrin of both his and her parents -- Turner notes that the "real accomplishment" of both is having "a black star sharing the screen with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and Rod Steiger."(Contact Bruce Dancis at bdancis (at)sacbee.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
A sharper focus on black history
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