Cinema Civil Rights : Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era [1&nbsp;ed.] 9780813571379, 9780813571362
"Cinema Civil Rights" presents the untold history of how black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced...
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CINEM A CIVIL RIGHTS

CINEM A CIVIL RIGHTS Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era

Ellen C . Scot t

Rutger s Uni v er sit y Press New Brunswick, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scott, Ellen C., 1978 – Cinema civil rights : regulation, repression, and race in the classical Hollywood era / Ellen C. Scott. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978 – 0 – 8135 – 7136 – 2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978 – 0 – 8135 – 7135 – 5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978 – 0 – 8135 – 7137 – 9 (e-book) 1. African Americans in motion pictures. 2. Racism in motion pictures. 3. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in motion pictures. 4. African Americans in the motion picture industry x History — 20th century. 5. African American political activists — History — 20th century. 6. African Americans — Civil rights — History — 20th century. 7. Motion pictures — United States — History — 20th century. 8. Motion picture industry — United States — History — 20th century. 9. Motion pictures — Censorship — United States — History — 20th century. I. Title. PN1995.9.N4S35 2014 791.43'652996073 — dc23 2014014281 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2015 by Ellen C. Scott All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Rachel Evangeline Scott (May 23, 1933 – December 1, 2012)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Regulating Race, Structuring Absence: Industry Self-Censorship and African American Representability

11

2

State Censorship and the Color Line

68

3

Racial Trauma, Civil Rights, and the Brutal Imagination of Darryl F. Zanuck

108

4

Shadowboxing: Black Interpretive Activism in the Classical Hollywood Era

147

Conclusion

187

Notes Index

197 243

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book is supposed to be a lonely, solitary proposition. But everything about this process has convinced me that the very best things happen only when people work together. My gratitude goes to Gaylyn Studlar, for her brilliant early direction of this project, and to Matthew Bernstein, Matthew Countryman, and Catherine Benamou, for their supportive and nuanced readings and advice. I was supported, as well, by a really wonderful community of scholars at the University of Michigan, for which I am very thankful. I would also like to thank the Mellon and Ford Foundations for generous pre- and post-doctoral support, the PSC CUNY Research Foundation, and Leslie Mitchner of Rutgers University Press for seeing promise in this project. Archives and their enthusiastic staffs were vital to this project. I am so grateful to everyone at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, especially Barbara Hall, Val Almendarez, Jenny Romero, Kristine Krueger, and Janet Lorenz for inspiration, friendship, direction and, occasionally, housing. I also would like to thank the staff members at the state archives of Maryland, Ohio, and Virginia, especially William Markley at the Ohio Historical Society and Joanne Porter, a gifted archivist at the Virginia State Archives, who went out of her way to give me support and aid my research. Many thanks also to Jonathon Auxier at the Warner Bros. Archive, Ned Comstock at the University of Southern California, and Mark Quigley at UCLA, as well as Zoran Sinobad at the Library of Congress and Bill Gorman at the New York State Archives. I am also indebted in countless ways to the intellectual community at the University of Pennsylvania, especially Herman Beavers, John L. Jackson, Camille Charles, Timothy Corrigan, Karen Beckman, Peter DeCherney, Meta Mezaj, Barbara Savage, Tukufu Zuberi, and Doug Massey, who have always supported me as a scholar and believed that I had a contribution to make. Valerie SwainCade McCoullum, Pat Ravenell, Brian Kirk, Carol Davis, Onyx Finney, Deborah Porter, Deborah Broadnax, and Gale Garrison and the staff of the University of Pennsylvania Library always helped me, cheered me on (and up when I needed it), and made Penn a home for me again. Thanks also to those members of the academic community who provided collegial support to me in this process: Jacqueline Stewart, Tamara Walker, Bambi Haggins, Chris Cagle, Iliana Teitelbaum, Frances Gateward, Lea Rosenberg, Sonia Peterson Lewis, Ines Casillas, Lesa Lapeyrouse, Karen Bowdre, Nicole Turner, Eric Schaefer, Daniel Barrett, Ling-Ling Zhao, Charles Gentry, Kristen Whissel, and the Penn Cinema Studies and Philadelphia Cinema Studies Colloquia. I also owe a great debt to my colleagues at Queens College, who have ix

x

Acknowledgments

generously welcomed and supported me: Amy Herzog, Jonathan Buchsbaum, Roopali Mukherjee, Anu Kapse, Susan McMillan, Leslie McCleave, Joy Fuqua, Zoe Beloff, Michael Lacy, Julian Cornell, Noah Tsika, Dean Bill McClure, Dean Tamara Evans, Karen Mandoukous, and my mentors, Mara Einstein and Rick Maxwell. Thanks to Jose Ruiz who helped with many technical woes. My gratitude also extends to Eric Schramm, whose thoughtful comments went a long way toward clarifying and tightening the writing in this book. I also want to thank Eric McDuffie, Joe Barbarese, Ilina Singh, Almitra David, Ms. Rachel and Mr. Roland Wilson, and all my teachers and the staff at Friends Select School who educated me in innumerable ways. There are also those whose extraordinary acts of provision made this project possible, like Kevin Delaney, David Berger and Holly Maxon, Dick Easterlin and Eileen Crimmins, Magali Safardi Larsen, and Drew Faust and Charles Rosenberg. Thanks to my friends Lori Dean, Rachel Anglade, Rasool Berry, Misty Felton, Josina Guess, Charles and Isabel Barkley, Charlie and Helen Potter, Erica Haviv, Danielle Herbert, David Noble, Dustin Kidd, and Josh Klugman. To my students, especially the Ethnic Media Collective, thank you for your inspiration. Lastly, I owe an inexpressible debt to my family, the Scotts and Grosses, especially Diane Morris, Pat Waddy, David Scott, Frederick Scott, and Norma Scott and her cousin, Henry Sampson. I want to reserve my deepest gratitude for my mother, Gretchen Condran, my grandmother, Rachel Scott, my sister, Margaret Scott, and my father, Barry Scott, for their support. I want to thank my son, Kenji Thomas Johnson, because his wisdom and energy reminds me of what really matters. Thanks also to Seymour, Buddy, and April for keeping me company. And to my husband, Doug Johnson, who read countless drafts and still managed to take care of all of us, there are not words enough to say how much you have done; this would not have been possible without you.

CINEM A CIVIL RIGHTS

INTRODUCTION

The idea of American freedom has in practice consistently relied upon a pathological denial of the rights of African Americans to equal citizenship — and a simultaneous denial that these rights are being withheld. Accordingly, classical Hollywood, in its role as America’s dream factory, largely maintained the myth of Black inferiority while minimizing America’s long history of racial injustice. Countless films reinforced Black stereotypes, normalized economic and social segregation, and systematically avoided admitting the unjustness of racial inequality, often through the dissemination of the mammy, mulatto, buck, and Uncle Tom characters. As Donald Bogle has compellingly argued, the tradition of stereotypy, one that transcended the plantation chronotope and infiltrated various urban locales, became a direct expression of Hollywood racism.1 Studies of exceptions to Hollywood’s patterned racial mythology have predominantly focused on how African American talent, either directorial or onscreen, exceeded the imposed limitations.2 However, the structure of limitation itself requires investigation. Alongside stereotyping in classical Hollywood cinema lies a quizzical pattern of images both strange and attenuated from the actual, lived narratives of civil rights, distanced and alienated from their roots in history and Black experience. Take, for instance, Storm Warning, a 1950 Warner Bros. film about the Ku Klux Klan with no Black people in major roles; the Klan’s victims are played by Ginger Rogers and Doris Day, both platinum blondes. Another example is The Foxes of Harrow (1948), where an enslaved woman’s attempt to kill her newborn child to save him from slavery is a brutal footnote in a white plantation story. Another film exemplifies this pattern of repressed civil rights representations. The Ox-Bow Incident, an anti-lynching film made in 1943, does not feature a Black protagonist (although Black actor Leigh Whipper appears as a bystander who condemns the mob action). It is set in the Old West rather than the contemporary South, where lynching was still practiced during the Second World War. Lynching, while discussed obsessively in the drama, is shown at a distance and expressionistically — as hanging bodies casting a shadow. Lost in the film’s chiaroscuro white guilt is any feeling of the racial brutality of lynching. Despite these 1

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omissions, Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), praised the film for its bold forthrightness. It reminded him, he wrote to Twentieth Century – Fox, of the recent Mississippi lynching of Black fourteen-year-olds Ernest Green and Charles Lang, who allegedly assaulted a white girl later found to be their frequent playmate. The girl was never assaulted; a single unreliable witness made the accusation. “But the mob, as in the ‘Ox-Bow Incident’ refused to search for the truth,” wrote White. “With pliers they pulled pieces of flesh out of the still living bodies of the youngsters. One member of the mob drove a screwdriver down the throat of one of the boys as he cried out for mercy. . . . So you can see, therefore, that the film ‘The OxBow Incident’ is most opportune.”3 Though ostensibly a letter of congratulation, White’s overlay of the vivid description of the actual lynching onto the mild OxBow Incident brings to mind the silences — the ominous tameness and lingering triviality — of Fox’s film, which failed to show lynching’s place in a brutal racialized regime of white supremacy. It is this tameness — and warped indirection — in the appearance of questions of Black equality on the American screen that is the central focus of this book.

Repression and Representability Storm Warning, The Foxes of Harrow, and The Ox-Bow Incident suggest that civil rights abuses were not absent entirely from the classical Hollywood screen. And yet they leave us with the question of how to make sense of cinematic narratives that touch on Black civil rights but where racial taboos have strangely chased race itself out of the text’s center. How do these narratives speak to Black freedom struggles? How do we more systematically account for the structures behind what Ed Guerrero calls “racial fragments” and what Thomas Cripps calls the “absent presence” of Black people and anti-Black racism in American cinema?4 This book takes the position that we can best account for these representations (and their haunting absences) by understanding three things: the system of cinematic repression, the pattern of representability that emerged as a result, and the responses of Black activists to these latent, stuttering manifestations. What follows, then, is a history of the repression of civil rights on the American screen and the struggle of African American activists to find civil rights among a jumbled cache of images that most often ignored the Black need for freedom. While it highlights moments of screen revelation, this book pushes beyond the films themselves to account systematically for the decision-making processes that yielded them. The institutions that regulated cinema — the Production Code Administration, state censorship boards, and the studios themselves — combined to create what I term a “system of vetting,” a repressive apparatus that worked across various texts to create the warped image of Black life we often associate with classical Hollywood. This book’s institutional focus

Introduction

3

reveals how each element of this system (rather than any individual director or film) contributed to the behind-the-scenes discussion of acceptable Black images and how race crucially marked these discussions. Simultaneous with and parallel to the narrative of Hollywood’s Black representations is the story of race and independent filmmakers, who, as J. Ronald Green, Jane Gaines, and others have articulated, struggled against great odds to develop a meaningful representation of the Black condition in America.5 Although many race filmmakers also repressed interracial discourse according to Hollywood norms, it is true that these films provide something closer to an interior Black perspective on civil rights abuses.6 As I show, the system of vetting stifled race filmmakers significantly. My focus in the book, however, is on Hollywood films — which unduly shaped the standards to which all other films (race, foreign, and independent) would be held. The system of vetting created an imposing wall of repression. Yet repression is an unpredictable and unstable instrument — one prone to revealing perversities. Repression has a dominating force. Even when it is resisted, the tension created by the uttered prohibition remains a center of gravity, a focal point, and the most stable ground on which representation is based. According to Michel Foucault, repression leads to a counterintuitive and unruly “incitement” around the taboo.7 Christian Metz likewise insists that censorship is never complete or linear but rather sets in motion the mechanisms of circumlocution. It is a technology of “refractions” that deflects the repressed material into other realms.8 Despite, or even because of, the hysterical efforts to repress the much-evidenced truth of America’s racial wrongs, Hollywood obliquely revealed these wrongs quite frequently in its films. Furthermore, the documentable reality and historical fact of Black suffering sometimes impelled even racist film producers to admit certain injustices, especially when the wrong could be diffused by an air of pastness and without an in-depth exploration of racism’s dynamics (as in the social problem film’s formula). Notwithstanding the repressive logic of these films that tentatively engaged civil rights, they frequently circumnavigated the terrain of Black oppression. And they ultimately failed to avoid the civil rights questions they repressed. But as the above examples show, these moments were by no means direct or satisfying expressions of the pain and struggle of African Americans — or of the subjective experiences of oppression Black people really shared. Nor did these Hollywood films typically have a direct impact on freedom struggles. But the persistent appearance of civil rights issues in mainstream films demands deeper consideration, especially given the structuring importance of the taboo of admitting America’s racial wrongs to the preservation of whiteness as we know it. How, why, and under what pressures of sublimation civil rights issues were allowed to surface in American cinema is a story that can only be told with great attention to the policies and politics of the institutions charged with repressing American

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cinema — the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) (later known as the Motion Picture Association of America [MPAA]), state censors, and indeed the Hollywood studios themselves. In the light of these policies, the repressed, compressed screen renditions take on a clearer logic. Thus, rather than discussing civil rights’ appearance in the cinema solely in terms of repression, I address it in terms of “representability.” As Patricia White provocatively asks in her study of lesbian representability under a Hollywood system that prohibited homosexuality: “When representation is forbidden, where do we look?” The result of repression is not absence but rather diffused, oblique, indirect, deniable presence — a presence that can be made recognizable through intertextuality, extratextual discourse, and through visual coding.9 White’s notion differs from the idea of “reading against the grain,” which is unbound by the structures and “realities” of the text; it seeks the evidences of repressed material that are ironically entwined in the very sinews — the narrative structures and signifiers — that seal their prohibition. Prohibition itself, in this way, is generative. When it comes to civil rights, the notion of representability allows us to examine both representation and repression, and more exactly how representation emerges through a veil of domination and in spite of the intent of the censor and even the author. That is, it allows us to examine not only the policies of various censors — that is, what was prohibited — but also how repressed material manifested itself, if in strange and errant ways. In this case, it reveals how even in racist texts (or texts where Black people are absent or where racial politics are reversed and white people are the physical or psychic victims of violence broadly known to be racialized), the obsessive return to narratives of racial violation is often the centering force and a symptom of an underlying, often ideologically misguided concern about civil rights. Each of the first three chapters examines a different repressive institution that restrained the cinematic civil rights imagination. Chapter 1 explores the MPPDA, which oversaw the Production Code Administration (PCA), the most centralized and consistent censor of the American cinema during the classical era. Drawing on earlier studies of the MPPDA, which indicate the importance of industry policy, this chapter delineates the PCA’s hand in repressing racial lynching, miscegenation, and social equality and in rerouting this racial imaginary into other realms. Chapter 2 investigates the racial policies of state censorship boards. It shows that race was a structuring anxiety in film regulation beyond the Progressive Era where Lee Grieveson, Dan Streible, J. Douglas Smith, and Charlene Regester, among others, have noted its prevalence.10 Chapter 3 gives a case study of studio production itself. The chapter gleans (from close analysis of archival evidence of internal negotiations) the role of the studio — and the studio head specifically — in spurring and repressively “managing” representations of civil rights issues by focusing on Twentieth Century – Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck. The final chapter explores how African Americans turned Hollywood’s repressions

Introduction

5

into their own expression, critiquing Hollywood’s silences and amplifying the muted images Hollywood did present. What I provide in chapter 4 is a textually engaged analysis of Black film protests. It includes not only the NAACP but also those unofficial actions organized or improvised by those with less institutional power or clout in the years leading up to the mass movement for civil rights.11 It is crucial that this book ends not with the films themselves but with how activist publics used them to reveal what they repressed — and explained their negative or positive value to American civil rights issues. Together these chapters reveal that understanding the process of adaptation, creative development, and censorship that most American films endured is crucial to understanding Black representations. Screenplays from which racial angles were removed reveal that the reach of civil rights censorship was far greater than can be seen on the surface of the films themselves. Although exploring the history of any one film is helpful, systematic analysis of policy and representation reveals more about the patterns of repression that limited civil rights images. I turn now to defining the term “civil rights” as I use it in this book. I define the term, following Martha Biondi, as “the right to due process and equality before the law.”12 The concept of “the law” has both legal and imaginary components, however. Civil rights issues were made visible through three main guises during the classical Hollywood era: lynching, social equality, and miscegenation. I focus on these three structuring concerns. However, I occasionally include other issues — onscreen Black militancy, white racism within the criminal justice system, or racial brutality during slavery, for example — when they raise questions of civil rights among activists or industry officials. Each of the three core civil rights themes on which I focus has an important relationship to the American narrative of race and to the symbolic system of racial oppression. In the United States, lynching was a racialized form of violence and punishment that was much more frequently visited upon Blacks than whites.13 But one wouldn’t know this from watching American films, where lynching was most frequently seen in the western — and there as an outmoded form of justice on the lawless frontier. During the 1920s and 1930s, it is little surprise that the antilynching movement was the least common denominator of civil rights activism. Lynching was perhaps the greatest violation of civil rights, one that not only stamped out Black life with a demeaning, gruesome force but also with a clear symbolism of white corporeal control meant to facilitate the enforcement of segregation. Southern whites used the term “social equality between the races” when African Americans dispensed with the deference and groveling that segregation required — and especially when they seemed to have a camaraderie with white women. For them, “social equality” was communicated by various screen signifiers that spanned the gamut from sassy Black maids to interracial cabaret numbers to slave revolts. The underlying threat was integration and violation of the social ordering of the color line. Social equality’s broken racial boundaries

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not only threatened to bring about miscegenation but further threatened to undermine the racial hierarchy. While lynching and equality have a clearer relationship to movement goals, miscegenation has had an important, if indirect relationship to civil rights. Of course, Black civil rights activists never fought for the right to miscegenate. However, Black activists had to fight against the myth of the Black male rapist that formed the basis for white conceptions of miscegenation. Miscegenation is, perhaps, the most historically consistent excuse for the denial of civil rights and equality — the white race card that has undergirded centuries of Black subjugation, motivating segregation and the denial of rights. Denying Black men and women the right to marry with other races was also itself a curtailment of Black civil rights, one that implicitly argued Black inferiority. Further, miscegenation stood at the epicenter of other American race problems. Though for many whites “miscegenation” was synonymous with the Black rape of white women and the weakening of the white race, this narrative repressed a host of realities that America could not accept: that white men had historically raped Black women, that white women desired Black men, and that miscegenation’s contingent myth of the Black rapist was designed to excuse lynching as a form of social violence and control.14 For many African Americans, the word “miscegenation” signified something bigger — and uglier — than Black rape. It was a justification for segregation, white violence, torture, and railroading — a fearsome illusion cast, like a dark shadow, across the color line. From a cinematic perspective, miscegenation helped to enshrine white womanhood as the center of the scopic regime in which Black being — let alone desire — was most often visible only as symptom, wound, rupture, mistake, and blemish. The history of denial accompanying miscegenation made repression of cinematic images of interracial desire necessary — and linked these representations to the quest for civil rights. Although activists highlighted many other important civil rights issues, these issues were essential to the onscreen color line. Their cinematic repression helped to maintain their repression in the broader American imaginary.

Critical Cultural History Behind Screen Repression Behind the textual and institutional history that this book relates is a broader cultural history that vitally informed it. The thirty years under consideration were some of the most eventful in African American history and held a crucial, formative place in what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called “the Long Civil Rights Movement.” This movement had antebellum moorings and was vitally braided into a broader set of cultural activities and shifts.15 The narrative of civil rights in the period was neither one of progress nor decline but rather a patchwork of racial ambiguity and ambivalence. The present book begins in 1926, when

Introduction

7

the film industry created a centralized agency, the Studio Relations Committee (SRC), whose purpose was the review and censorship of the studios’ films. This was just before tumultuous changes brought about in Hollywood by the widespread adoption of synchronized sound and in the country at large by the stock market crash of 1929. The Great Depression was a desperate time for all racial groups. In some instances, fallen fortunes united the races, as the less regulated early 1930s cinema often conveyed. But as Harvard Sitkoff and others have argued, the Depression had a disproportionate effect on African Americans.16 They were not only the last hired and first fired, but, as Robin Kelley has shown, were often told they were ineligible for relief, since there was still demand for domestic and unskilled labor.17 In the midst of this crisis, in 1931, nine African American teenagers were framed as having raped two white girls on a train in Scottsboro, Alabama. Weeks after the accusation, they were tried by an all-white jury and all but one sentenced to death. With the help of various outsiders, including the NAACP, civil rights activists such as Ida B. Wells, and the Communist Party, the “Scottsboro Boys,” as they came to be known, avoided a quick death sentence and each was granted a retrial. Alabama prosecutors continued to doggedly pursue the young men, however, even after Ruby Bates, one of the accusers, recanted her testimony, revealing that Scottsboro police had threatened to prosecute her for sexual activity with white boys on the train if she did not accuse the nine defendants of rape. The case is exceptional not for its violation of Black civil rights: the railroading of Black Americans was nothing new. Scottsboro was remarkable, instead, because progressives and civil rights activists managed to raise national consciousness about the unfair condition of southern racial justice. The trials also have an important link to both the long civil rights movement and its cinematic representation. Not only did the cases against the Scottsboro Boys go to the Supreme Court twice, producing precedent-setting opinions on the need for adequate legal representation and leading to bans against all-white juries, but the national press coverage of the racial injustices within the American judicial system prompted protests across the nation. But while filmmakers might have been expected to compete with each other to screen the Scottsboro story, movies, unlike newspapers, were not protected by the First Amendment and thus were subject to censorship. Indeed, a 1915 Supreme Court ruling (Mutual v. Biograph) pronounced film “a business pure and simple.” Thus the fear of censorship, and the system of vetting I describe in these pages, arose to block the screening of a central event in civil rights discourse in the 1930s, making it a structuring absence in the cinema of the 1930s — and beyond. Part of the success at raising consciousness about the Scottsboro tragedy stemmed from the rising “Cultural Front,” a nebulous, loosely coordinated body of progressives of many races who were working to democratize American culture during the 1930s. A number of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New

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Deal programs, such as the Federal Theater and Federal Writers Projects, gave place and momentum to Cultural Front activities by facilitating collaborations between artists, writers, and intellectuals on the Left. As Michael Denning describes it, “Just as the radical movements of abolition, utopian socialism, and women’s rights sparked the antebellum American Renaissance, so the communisms of the depression triggered a deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture.”18 The Cultural Front’s progressive racial vision and creative intellectual labor made popular an ethnically conscious definition of democracy and accelerated the cultural component of the 1930s anti-lynching agenda. Beyond the anti-lynching movement, the Cultural Front had other effects relevant to this study. Not only did it include film writers, as Denning argues, but the specific localized politico-creative movements such as the Chicago Renaissance provided the foundation for the tradition of Black film criticism based on not only “positive” Black representation alone, but on aesthetic representations of justice, history, and humanity that I outline in these pages. Many of the most important shifts in Black history and Black representation between 1930 and 1960 were brought about by World War II. The war not only changed the national agenda to war mobilization, but it prompted massive migration and semi-official federal adoption of the rhetoric of racial democracy advocated by the Cultural Front. The story of the wartime civil rights struggle begins in January 1941, nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, when A. Philip Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized a massive March on Washington for civil rights and the end of discrimination in national defense industries. Randolph ultimately postponed the march only after he convinced President Franklin Roosevelt to issue a groundbreaking promise to Black Americans — Executive Order 8802 — which ended discrimination in defense industries and formed the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC).19 Though the president stopped short of enforcing desegregation, he had crossed a threshold in admitting the Constitutional guarantee of racial equality that could not be uncrossed. His action and, crucially, the racial rhetoric he adopted prompted U.S. wartime language and imagery to become more inclusive of Black Americans. Randolph’s explicitly all-Black march was not a southern movement but pointed out American racial injustice on a national, institutional, and indeed governmental level.20 Further, it is significant that Randolph enacted what was then the century’s largest and most nationally resonant civil rights protest by first mobilizing his own union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a class of men assumed to be subservient. This altered the national discourse on civil rights by revising the image of Black American servility so comforting to many whites.21 The wartime shift in rhetoric and image, however, did not mean that America had actually arrived at a more thoroughgoing racial equality. Not only did military segregation and brutal racism continue but, according to the Negro Yearbook, there were fifteen documented lynchings and forty-three documented

Introduction

9

attempted lynchings during the war: all those lynched in this period were African Americans.22 In the midst of America’s war for democracy in Europe and the Pacific, there also occurred what were arguably the nation’s worst cluster of race riots, in Harlem and Detroit, in 1943. Part of this violence was clearly backlash against the changing image — and physical movement — of Black people. Nearly one million African Americans were serving in the segregated armed forces, many “remigrating” temporarily to the South for training and thereupon receiving the brunt of the South’s racist backlash against the Black soldier in uniform. In addition, according to Henry Louis Gates, so many southern Blacks moved north and from rural locales to southern cities to gain employment in the defense plants that this movement became the most substantial internal migration in American history.23 How did these events influence film productions? The answer comes through films that were at once restrained and forthcoming on the question of Black equality, such as Bataan (1943), Sahara (1943), and Crash Dive (1943); Stage Door Canteen (1943), which included Black soldiers in an integrated milieu; and Stormy Weather (1943), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), This Is the Army (1943), and Follow the Boys (1944), which included Black soldiers but avoided obvious integration so as not to offend the South. But the wartime concerns about civil rights are also visible in the struggle over other minor Black characters and in films where Black characters and themes were entirely suppressed through censorship. Following World War II, the United States entered a strange and often paradoxical moment in racial discourse and ideology. Absent the wartime imperative, the image of Black inclusion was no longer a national priority. Pro-integration government films like The Negro Sailor (1945), a follow-up to the wartime Negro Soldier (1944), were delayed. And America’s postwar track record on lynching and riots indicates how incomplete American wartime integration was, with its pockets of freedom amidst vast seas of intolerance. Another twenty-eight lynching attempts, some outside the South, took place in 1946.24 Doubt and uncertainty — and sometimes plain-faced reversal and backlash — engulfed the unfulfilled racial promises of the war years. The failures of these promises are perhaps best exemplified in the Columbia, Tennessee, riot of 1946, in which Black veteran James Stephenson struck a white shopkeeper who had threatened his mother. A decorated and uniformed Black veteran was blinded and beaten by whites in South Carolina in the same month.25 And yet despite this backpedaling many Americans, even some Hollywood producers and screenwriters, felt the nation should honor its democratic promise. Hollywood studios made racial problem films, with their often incomplete, ideologically fractured messages about race relations and integration.26 The postwar uncertainty produced some of the most hesitant but also revealing films about racial equality, like Pinky (1949), No Way Out (1950), and The Well (1951), which I examine here.

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Black cinematic representation in the 1950s was influenced not only by the postwar racial concerns, but also by important shifts in the film industry. First was the Supreme Court’s Paramount Decrees of 1948, which challenged the vertical integration of the film industry, forcing the studios to divest of their theater holdings (and thus dismantling the studio system). The effects of this movement were not immediate and developed gradually over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. But the long-term effect of these decrees would be to allow a more significant place for independent cinema — a cinema that could potentially break Hollywood taboos about race and racial controversy. Second, the Supreme Court’s 1952 Miracle Decision extended First Amendment protections to the film industry, meaning that state censorship was largely unconstitutional and the system of vetting on which the repression of sex, race, and violence had developed would be gradually changed. Finally, the coming of television pushed the film industry, which was competing with the new medium in the era of the baby boom, toward greater revelation, controversy, and maturity, including in the realm of race. Also, vitally shaping 1950s cinematic representations of race was the beginning of the mass movement phase of the long civil rights struggle itself, which took place in the wake of transnational anticolonial independence struggles and amid a Cold War clampdown on racial progressivism.27 Three events — the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decisions of 1954 – 1955, the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 – 1956 — helped to put the civil rights movement on a national stage through television and, to a lesser extent, cinema. These events also signaled a shift of national proportions in both the legislation of civil rights issues and Black activism. Though activists shared an aim through the many stages of development of the long civil rights struggle, the strategies, intermediate goals, and even the theory of freedom that guided them shifted significantly. One example was the shift in civil rights leaders’ strategies from the diplomatic to the legislative. The first major southern NAACP court victory in school desegregation was in 1938, but in general the late 1930s civil rights struggle was marked by negotiation with existing white power structures rather than direct action. This legislative campaign for full desegregation would continue, with concentrated victories in the 1950s and 1960s. With the shift to legislative tactics came a greater militancy and a retreat from what Martha Biondi has described as a diplomacy-based civil rights agenda.28 I trace this shift not only with regard to its impact on Black civil rights representability, but also in its effect on Black film activism. These real-life racial issues and social problems, both residual and spectacular in nature, shaped African American experience in a structural way during the period under study. Film representation may have avoided the real facts of America’s racial history in favor of ideologically bound fantasies, but at important moments and in strange, affecting images, these repressed images came forcefully to light.

1 • REGUL ATING R ACE, STRUCTURING ABSENCE Industry Self-Censorship and African American Representability

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was the most consistent and powerful censor of American films in the classical era.1 Headed initially by Will Hays, former postmaster general and a representative of the Midwestern sensibilities key to securing the industry’s moral image, the MPPDA worked for the common interests of the major Hollywood studios. Its role, from the late 1920s until 1968, was to suggest changes to Hollywood film scripts to avoid outside censure and censorship by local, state, and international boards. From 1934 to 1968, it seriously undertook the task of reviewing all the major studios’ screenplays. Sensational stories from the headlines, stage, and history might have appealed to individual producers, but the MPPDA was there to weigh each plot and script against what it considered the industry’s collective moral responsibilities and its larger financial interests. This soft censorship was carried out through two successive subunits: the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) (1926 – 1934) and the Production Code Administration (PCA) (1934 – 1968). The MPPDA is most famous for the Production Code, a document devised by industry leaders and two prominent Catholic consultants that largely curtailed screen depictions of sex and crime. For much of its history, the Production Code only contained one explicit reference to race — a prohibition on showing miscegenation, which it defined as “sex relationships between the black and white races.”2 But beyond the Code, the PCA censored films according to “Industry Policy,” an unwritten constellation of MPPDA-designated prohibitions outside the Code that governed delicate subjects as varied as Communism, the presentation of American businesses, and race relations.3 At times, Industry Policy caused greater concern to the industry than the Code itself. Industry 11

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Policy vitally affected African American representation — and the representation of civil rights abuses. In different ways and using different methods, film scholars Ruth Vasey, Lea Jacobs, Stephen Prince, and Stanley Cavell have suggested that when it came to white sex and violence the PCA’s censorship was, in Foucauldian terms, “productive.”4 More specifically, the PCA forced producers to be creative, which led to the repressed material appearing symptomatically and diffusely throughout the texts. Vasey and Jacobs have demonstrated that the advice of MPPDA censors gradually trained Hollywood screenwriters in representing controversy through subtle allusion rather than direct revelation. Thus, they were more than censors; they helped to author a system of representational aversion that allowed indirect, deniable representations to pass beneath the radar. But to what extent did the PCA’s incitation to allusion extend to the representation of African Americans? The movie industry’s self-regulation of civil rights issues can be divided into five eras: the SRC era (1926 – 1934), in which this self-censorship was governed by the MPPDA’s Studio Relations Committee under the leadership of Jason Joy and, later, James Wingate; the early Code era (1934 – 1941), in which the far sterner PCA headed by Joseph Breen governed the process; World War II (1941 – 1945), during which the Office of War Information’s campaign to improve Black representations drew attention to racism in Hollywood; the postwar era (1946 – 1955), during which Breen continued his leadership; and the Shurlock era (1955 – 1961), when Geoffrey Shurlock headed the PCA during the early years of the civil rights movement. During this thirty-two-year span, the MPAA helped to devise a formula for representing civil rights issues onscreen, but to do so while veiling any racial resonance and even omitting direct signifiers to race relations. Over the course of this history, however, based on various cultural shifts — including the Cultural Front, white southern backlash, the democratic discourse of World War II, and the civil rights movement — the PCA gradually shifted its policies on the treatment of racial issues to allow for more nuanced and direct representation.

Civil Rights in Hollywood Images under the SRC, 1926 – 1934 The term “pre-Code” is a widely accepted misnomer: the Code was written in 1930 but it was not until 1934 that it was fully enforced. Thus, the term “preCode” designates not the era before the Code’s existence but rather an era of weak enforcement from 1930 to 1934. This section covers not only the pre-Code era as designated by scholars such as Thomas Doherty, but also the four years prior in which Jason Joy was actively developing the industry censorship standards that would govern the next three decades. Some scholars have suggested the pre-Code era featured greater onscreen racial freedom.5 This is only partly

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true. Black and white extras mingle in crowd scenes, prisons, and breadlines in the hardboiled, unsentimental, pre-Code cinema of the Great Depression. SRC head Jason Joy generally did not cut from finished films these scenes of naturalized integration where the poor, Black and white, intermix without differentiation (but with a wealth of racial wisecracks and insults). This may have been because Joy saw himself as an ally of producers, and these unscripted moments of racial equality were largely backdrop. But when he learned that a script called for racial mixing — especially in pictures set in regions where segregation reigned — he consistently fought hard to have it removed, at least partly out of fear of white backlash. Thus Joy, who is known for having been liberal in his censorship of sexuality and who aided producers in indirectly representing the erotic, sought on the other hand to establish a firm color line and called for the elimination of racial integration, miscegenation, and the racial abuses of the criminal justice system in film.6 Race and Punishment in the SRC Era The abusive penal system became the basis for a film cycle in the early 1930s. Under MPPDA scrutiny, it was almost impossible for producers to show the criminal justice system’s endemic evils or weaknesses, though several tried to reveal the corruption and brutality that produced fatal injustices. Films like The Last Mile (1932), 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing (1932), and Ann Vickers (1933), which raised social questions about the morality of state punishment and depicted prisoner discontentment and revolt, were a tough sell in the face of Depression-era censors, even the more lenient SRC.7 But films that used Black characters to pose challenges to the criminal justice system were subject to even greater scrutiny. Joy restricted the racial implications of the anti-penal film cycle of the early 1930s. Initial treatments for I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Hell’s Highway (1932), and Laughter in Hell (1933), all chain-gang films, criticized the criminal justice system’s brutality and boldly showed that it gave (southern) states the power to lynch. All these films even showed Black multitudes and bit players, sometimes in speaking or singing roles, obliquely revealing state punishment’s disproportionate racial impact. But Joy censored each film for its depiction of race relations. Joy’s persistent concern about offending the South may be explained by the fact that his right-hand man was white Southerner Lamar Trotti, who consistently defended southern segregation, to the point of suggesting the industry avoid alienating even those who supported the Ku Klux Klan.8 In the case of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Joy warned producers not to include too many Black extras so that the southern locale would be less obvious, an instruction that the film’s producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, refused to heed.9 Nervously employing a double negative, Joy asked David O. Selznick, the producer of RKO’s Hell’s Highway, “Would it not be a good idea not to show the negroes and whites chained together?”10 Selznick avoided these shots. But in other

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sequences the racial separation was less firmly policed. Black and white prisoners communicate with each other across the segregated cellblocks, work together on gangs, and, most importantly, escape together, an act that shows allegiance and coordination. Though Joy wanted to avoid offending the South, the film indicted southern race prejudice obliquely. Not only does the head guard call a Black mule-tender a baboon, but Selznick shot scenes in which only Black men are lynched by an all-white posse after a mass escape. Joy twice railed against this sequence and, though Selznick ignored him, RKO official B. B. Kahane removed this and other scenes of “the capture and slaughter of convicts.”11 In terms of race, an important film of the chain-gang cycle was Universal’s bitterly gritty Laughter in Hell, a film that also featured the only onscreen Black lynching of the decade. In the original synopsis, Laughter in Hell’s Barney was a sympathetic, slow-witted white man who, catching his wife in an act of infidelity, murders her and her lover. Sentenced to a prison chain gang, he develops a friendship with a Black inmate named Jackson, eventually escaping but not before suffering whip-wounds that fester without treatment and witnessing four Black inmates being lynched by prison officials. Joy’s initial concern was less brutality than the film’s Alabama setting, given “the South’s dislike of criticism.”12 Showcasing his characteristic alignment with producers, Joy told his supervisor, Will Hays, that the studio should be allowed to be honest, because “if brutality persists on in these days and systems are wrong, I see no reason why we should not be permitted to say so.”13 Trotti, ever concerned about a white southern backlash, pressed Joy to defend whiteness; southern blame should be alleviated by establishing the “justice” of Barney’s imprisonment, contrasting “the brutal head guard with more humane officials,” “soft-peddling . . . flogging [and] hanging,” and setting the film in the 1880s to diminish its commentary on present conditions.14 As the film moved from treatment to first draft, Joy’s racial concerns mounted, and he worried specifically about the lynching of Black men and a scene where Jackson and Barney are whipped. “Perhaps you want to consider having one of the hanged men a white man to avoid a note of racial prejudice,” Joy suggested.15 The studio, however, maintained these elements. A week later, Joy took a sterner tone in defending the racist South. It would violate “policy,” he said, for Universal to contrast a drooping American flag in the prison with a Confederate flag proudly hung in the courtroom or to name any particular southern states. Even the “suggestion that negroes and whites are placed in the same cages” was anathema, although they could be shown “in the same camp together, provided they are not shown to occupy the same quarters.” Integrated quarters could not “be possible in any Southern state and I’m quite sure that it would add a note that Southern audiences would resent.”16 Joy desperately wanted Universal to cut the hanging of Black men by the chain gang official. “Personally,” he wrote, “I wonder if you are going to get out of this scene on the screen all that you hope to

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get. . . . It is difficult for me to believe a chain-gang boss would have the right to execute State prisoners.”17 Joy also recommended visual techniques to downplay the lynching, describing with considerable detail how to achieve the effect of lynching without directly showing it. If Universal insisted on keeping the scene, he said, censorable details like the shadows of the hanging figures, shots of the noose around a man’s neck, and other “gruesome” details should be removed and the whole thing played as much as possible by suggestion. But Universal Studios boss Carl Laemmle refused to cut the lynching scene, arguing that the director would handle it “with discrimination.”18 In the end, Laemmle and director Edward Cahn persisted in shooting the scenes graphically. Despite interventions from the MPPDA’s James Wingate (a former New York state censor), state censorship took its toll: New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania (as well as Chicago) cut almost all of the lynching sequence, allowing only shots establishing that a hanging is about to take place. However, each state modified the scene in a different way, indicating its own state-level approach to the art of indirection and regulatory editing. Pennsylvania permitted the most, a “view . . . of guard bringing noose toward him, of wagon moving and of rope stretching.”19 Ohio allowed only a “view of rope hanging from tree as prisoners approach place of execution.”20 New York permitted “scenes where prisoners get on cart and cart drives away.”21 These states also cut a scene where Barney and Jackson are whipped together. Thus the SRC learned a valuable lesson from municipal, state, and even international rejection of these sequences: racial lynching would be taboo on the Hollywood screen for the remainder of the 1930s. Pre-Code Miscegenation SRC concerns about racialized violence in the penal system were largely limited to this cycle. But concern about miscegenation — and its suggestion of Black equality — predated the Code itself. A document entitled the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” that Joy used to guide producers before the Code forbade miscegenation. But in industry discourse and in practice, miscegenation meant more than just implied interracial sex. As early as 1927, Hays had pronounced it “inadvisable always to show white women in scenes with negroes where there is any inference of miscegenation or social relationship,” a very broad standard that could keep any adjacent social mixing off the screen.22 Though Joy sought to remove miscegenation from the screen, he did not always succeed. For example, Joy never reviewed First National’s Golden Dawn (1930), based on Oscar Hammerstein’s operetta set in British East Africa during World War I, a film with mulatto characters and direct representation of interracial desire. Mooda (Alice Gentle) openly states that she is half white and half Black, and has an illicit relationship with a white man. Further, a white colonialist blithely explains in song how to woo a “dusky jungle queen” and get her to “share a jungle bungalow with you.”23

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Nor did the SRC try to eliminate the provocative dance sequence in Flying Down to Rio (1932), in which dark Brazilians dance closely with blondes wearing very little. Later, white men, gawking at the Black Brazilian dancers, even quip, “No wonder it never gets cold in this country.” Although set abroad, this sequence’s American implications are heightened through its star — Etta Moten, an African American singer and actress. Joy, however, raised no objections, perhaps because the race of the characters was not specified in the script. Joy also limited his enforcement of the studio’s ban on miscegenation to Black-white couples, stating that white marriage to dark-skinned Pacific islanders, Asians, or Native Americans was permissible.24 Not only did Joy’s liberalism make tangential miscegenation more visible, but in several films, such as Isle of Escape (1930), the use of African American extras as South Sea Islanders, Brazilians, or Africans in romantic scenes with white American actors furthered the film’s connotation of American, Black-white miscegenation.25 But Joy counseled against script elements that showed Black-white miscegenation on the narrative surface, especially when these films bore connections to the real-life Rhinelander court case of 1925, in which white socialite Kip Rhinelander claimed he was tricked into marrying Alice Jones, a woman he thought was white but was actually a Black domestic. In Five Star Final (1931), newspapermen reveal that white Nancy Townsend (Frances Starr) is really Nancy Vorhees, who ten years earlier killed her unfaithful husband. The film not only focuses on revealing hidden identities but openly mentions the Rhinelander case as a point of comparison, a fact that prompted censors’ attention to the film’s “public opinion angle.”26 The script hinted at miscegenation when a newspaper man quipped, “I’ll go in your contest, Ziggie, if you’ll get me a girl with ten thousand dollars . . . and she don’t even have to be white,” a line absent in the finished film after Joy asked producer Hal Wallis to remove it. In RKO’s newspaper yarn Is My Face Red? (1932), initial treatments had “a white man . . . having an affair with a mulatto.” Joy asked producers to “forego” this element, citing offense to “raceconscious people” and the Code’s “clause regarding miscegenation.”27 The producers acquiesced. But the SRC’s removal of miscegenation was often incomplete, as we can see in the MPPDA’s file on Morocco (1930). In Paramount’s original treatment, the French Foreign Legion commander, a Corsican, was to have a Moorish wife who flirts with an American in a café where “blacks and whites mingle, wealth being the only distinction.” This café and its style of integration were problematic for Joy who, after correspondence from French consultant Valentin Mandelstamm, warned that the script was not specific enough about whether “they are black women and white men or vice versa.”28 Joy wrote Paramount that the “Café scene in which you have black sitting with white, etc. etc. wealth being the only distinction should be modified so that blacks and whites are not shown together. In this

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connection Madame Caesar ought to be a French lady rather than a Moor. This is more logical and avoids the danger that otherwise would develop,” a vague reference to the ban on miscegenation.29 Paramount did avoid any direct inference of miscegenation, but Madame Caesar (Eve Southern) is consistently associated with the Moors. She speaks their language, wears their garb, and consorts with them by night when she has them attack Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). The film also connotes racial mixing in another way, one more pertinent to American race relations. Several Los Angeles “black beauties” play African entertainers and lovers of the Legionaries, as Black press reviewers noted.30 Thus the film gives the aura of miscegenation without any case in point. And the racially controversial aspects of the story that Joy sought to remove were only dulled. We can also see Joy’s concern about miscegenation in the file on the all-Black film Hallelujah! (1929). Joy urged MGM to omit shots of Zeke (Daniel Haynes) passionately kissing his fiancée, Missy Rose (Victoria Spivey), because “white people will object to a strong negro exhibiting passion.”31 This indicates that the concern about miscegenation was limited not only to the narrative, but to the spectator’s gaze at the screen. Strong Black men who exhibited sexuality threatened white scopic regimes even when their sexuality was directed toward Black women — in part perhaps because censors knew white women were also watching. This suggests that the SRC was concerned not only about onscreen signifiers of miscegenation but also about audience titillation that might give rise to imaginary miscegenation. Perhaps the greatest pre-Code concern about miscegenation was occasioned by a film that was not made until 1948, with objections coming from not only Joy but also his MPPDA superiors. Lulu Belle was a well-known contemporary play, supposedly based on the life of singers Florence Mills or Josephine Baker, about a hardboiled Black woman who vamps a white barber and then a white boxer. The title character threatens whiteness and respectability with her undeterred, interracial social climbing, her humiliation of white men, and her defiance of the law.32 She drives all her white lovers to madness until one of them kills her in rage. Co-written by Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur and staged for 461 Broadway performances in 1926, the play was reprised multiple times over the next several years and was coveted as a property by nearly every studio. Studio fascination with Lulu Belle (a property often discussed alongside Shanghai Gesture and Harem) seems to have been an extension of Hollywood’s fixation with the “exotic mode” Gaylyn Studlar has described. This mode “exploited the display value of a heightened cultural exoticism” even if the exotic subject was actually white.33 In the case of Lulu Belle, however, the pleasurable “otherness” did not have the deniability of carnivalesque alterity that Studlar describes, as the play was based on a purportedly true contemporary scandal.34 Harry Warner wanted to adapt the play himself, but he wrote to Hays that he understood its

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danger from a personal angle: “All I can say is, when I saw the play with my wife, I was ashamed to look at her, and at that time I was married to her for 23 years.”35 In seeking MPPDA approval, studios sought to remedy the film’s violations of the miscegenation clause in several ways. In 1930, one producer from Fox sought to make the film with a white woman playing Lulu Belle in blackface. Universal sent in multiple treatments in 1930 and 1932 that made Lulu Belle French, French-Creole, or just “white.”36 But to Hays, these modifications still left the implication of justified adultery and, worse, let audiences make connections to the scandalous play in which the protagonist was undeniably Black.37 While the SRC allowed many pre-Code films showing adultery, it was the stain of miscegenation that led to the MPPDA’s rejection of the play under the Formula of 1924, which discouraged “studios from picturizing a book or play containing ‘salacious or otherwise harmful’ subject matter for fear that it might have ‘a deleterious effect on the industry in general.’ ”38 Despite proposals from MGM, Warner Bros., and Universal (as well as director Howard Hawks) to make the story without miscegenation, the SRC and PCA rejected all requests until 1948 — and even then Lulu Belle, played by white actress Dorothy Lamour, was portrayed as French rather than a light-skinned Black woman. The threat of aggressive Black sexuality loomed over both the Lulu Belle and Hallelujah! film projects and suggests that the fear of visualizing interracial desire greatly influenced the SRC, whether or not it took place onscreen. Joy not only acquiesced to the white racist view of miscegenation, but also was indifferent to Black activists and civil rights groups.39 He consistently heeded Trotti’s advice to ignore the NAACP. For example, with Hallelujah! Trotti counseled that Joy should only consider approaching “negro advancement groups” if he wanted to obviate their “rais[ing] a holler.” But, he continued, “I don’t think it matters whether the negroes like the picture or not, but I do wonder whether whites are amenable to such realism.”40 Two years later, in 1930, when NAACP executive secretary Walter White protested against a proposed sound version of The Birth of a Nation, Trotti took a similarly hard line against appeasing African Americans. He could not “see how we can be expected to say it cannot be shown. . . . The picture is semi-historical and the negro villain is shown as an individual, not as a representative of a class. It was certainly no more unfair to the negro than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was unfair to the whites of the South.”41 While southern interests motivated screen treatment of African Americans, MPPDA files reveal the complex, contradictory mechanisms of this repression. Trotti’s figuration of the South stood behind Joy’s constant vigilance in the protection of southern interest, even in scripts where there was no southern angle or setting.42 And we can see Trotti’s imprint on Joy’s decision to censor integration, miscegenation, and lynching. Thus, it mattered that it was a racial conservative like Trotti who voiced the South to the MPPDA. But producers also were devising strategic signification to surmount the MPPDA’s objections.

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Interracial Intimacies and Deniable Racial Mixing In this atmosphere of rising repression, cinematic miscegenation and racial equality began to take an altered form. Same-sex interracial intimacy — and sometimes integrated co-habitation — could be shown without offending the miscegenation clause or disturbing racial hierarchies. Studios often protected themselves by confining these bonds to an official employer-servant relationship and by surrounding social equality with Black stereotype. Studios also used nonBlack figures to argue for racial civil rights in a way that would have been too threatening from a Black character, often using visual and narrative parity to link the onscreen civil rights advocate to its Black characters. An example of the latter phenomenon is Massacre (1934), in which Joe Crazy Horse (Richard Barthelmess) comes to identify with his Native people, championing their civil rights, leading an armed revolt, and addressing the Indian Affairs office in Washington. Of particular interest is Joe’s relationship to Sam (Clarence Muse), his sidekick. Sam and Joe share a knowingness about the burden and benefits of playing to racial stereotypes. When their racist boss asks Sam about Joe’s trip to the reservation, Sam responds, “Chief ’s going down to the old plantation to see his old pappy,” satirically mocking the association of African Americans with the plantation, and linking the plantation to the reservation, both spaces of white racial oppression. Sam and Joe ride together through the night to the reservation; upon seeing it, Sam remarks: “The white folks didn’t give the Indians much of a break.” Later, after having visited stoic, sad tribesmen, Sam honks at a horse, making it bolt, then quips, “That’s the first sign of life I’ve seen since we come on the plantation,” again employing a comic slippage between the plantation and the reservation that verbally links Black and Native oppressions. Later, after his war against the white man begins, Joe escapes police custody by having Sam pretend to be him, echoing the film’s earliest sequences when we see Sam’s face superimposed on Joe’s body with the aid of a hand-held mirror. By linking Joe and Sam through their bodies and their common oppression, the film uses Native American oppression to reference Black oppression it dare not speak. Some producers went so far as to represent Black-white friendships that blossomed in the urban milieu, though they made these deniable through the guise of servitude. In Baby Face (1933), career hussy Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) and her African American comrade, Chico (Theresa Harris), are inseparable, with the latter supporting Lily as she suffers abuse at the hand of her father in his speakeasy. While Lily raises herself from the soot-drenched steel town where she grew up to a New York penthouse, using the Nietzschean axiom “Crush out all sentiment” to exploit a succession of men, Chico is her only constant. In the story outline Chico is described as her “friend” and “only confidant,” the person to whom the dissembling Lily reveals her true motivations.43 And as Lily rises to

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Figure 1. Equality of costume was an important way of surreptitiously arguing for social equality in 1930s Hollywood film. Publicity still from Baby Face (1933). Courtesy of Warner Bros. Archive.

power, Chico becomes her maid. But script drafts explain that Chico is a maid in name only.44 A strange ambiguity haunts this relationship. Is this service relationship a cover for an equal friendship? Or are Chico and Lily romantically — miscegenetically — linked? The two are first united by their shared sexual exploitation, and later Chico’s musical rendition of “St. Louis Woman” becomes a crucial signifier of Lily’s empowered sexual exploits.45 Here, as in other preCode films, Black singing voices become surrogates for white sexuality, and in the process they publicize the sexual stains, impurity, and unwhiteness of their class-passing white mistresses. Black voices perform a kind of miscegenetic intrusion on white sexual intimacy. While the precise nature of Chico and Lily’s bond remains diegetically amorphous, the sexual signifiers linking the two play on the tension around miscegenation, though it renders these in an utterly deniable way. Further, the unexplained contingency of their peculiarly strong attachment highlights moments where (gendered) similarity eclipses racial hierarchy and the two live together as equals. Perhaps the strongest argument for the parity of these two women in the finished film is the costuming, which places the actresses on equal footing (see figure 1).

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The SRC strongly recommended toning down overt sexuality in Baby Face in a lengthy exchange of letters with Warner Bros.46 But nowhere did it even mention the deep, profoundly intense, same-sex interracial relationship. Since their concern was about Lily’s relationship with men, the protective guise of the master-servant relationship may have distracted censors from the social equality and vital relationship Lily and Chico share. While Baby Face obscured Black women’s autonomous humanity and the real oppression of servitude, on another register the lingering intimacy, shared sexual knowledge, and physical proximity of Black and white women suggested social equality and even, perhaps, the miscegenation the screen disallowed.

Miscegenation in the Early Code Era In 1934, Joseph Breen’s arrival in Hollywood meant films such as Golden Dawn and Flying Down to Rio could no longer pass MPPDA scrutiny. Breen not only reviewed all Hollywood scripts, but his Production Code Administration had the sanctions Joy lacked: Code violators would be slapped with a $25,000 fine and be denied the PCA seal that unlocked national distribution to lucrative firstrun theaters. Even interracial desire expressed in song failed to pass muster under this new regime. In an early script of Belle of the Nineties (1934), a song called “Creole Man” revealed Mae West’s character’s desire for “a creole man — warm, highbrown skin; the kind of face to share your bread and gin with; the kind of guy it’s heavenly to sin with . . . black, shiny hair — hair you wanna see upon a pillow; sleepy eyes that give me such a thrill — Oh, I’m talkin’ ’bout my creole man.”47 With Breen’s more restrictive approach, these lines would never make it to the screen. Still, in a provocative musical exchange in the film between Mae West and an all-Black band led by Duke Ellington, West employs her famous double entendre in describing the Black musicians’ skill with their instruments — a fiddler who “sure do pull some bow” and a “hot cornet that you could never forget.” Editing and reaction shots get across some of the desire Breen sought to remove. But Breen did allow some visible signs of miscegenation onscreen. Breen generally accepted interracial romance between whites and non-Black racial groups, as Joy had before him. Films could skirt the Code’s anti-miscegenation clause when the nonwhite love interest was a Native American, as in Behold, My Wife (1934), or a South Seas islander, as in White Heat (1934). Not only did Othello (whom Breen called a “Moor” rather than a Negro) pass PCA muster in three screen adaptations (Men Are Not Gods [1936], Orson Welles’s The Tragedy of Othello [1953], and Sergei Yutkovich’s 1955 Russian adaptation), but, in the early Code era, he approved at least one American Black-white interracial relationship onscreen. With the stage-proven Show Boat (1935), Breen saw “no serious objection” to casting Paul Robeson, “the negro, to play the part he played on the stage,”

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even though a white woman in blackface would play his wife. Breen cautioned, however, against “any physical contact between the white woman and the negro man for the reason that many people know Aunt Jemima is a white woman and might be repulsed by the sight of her being fondled by a man who is a negro.”48 In the finished film, Hattie McDaniel plays Robeson’s wife. But Breen’s combined allowance and disgust indicates that though Show Boat, a proven stage hit, could stretch the miscegenation ban’s boundaries, interracial touch still had to be avoided. Imitation of Life and “The Negro Question” John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934) was never primarily a miscegenation narrative.49 But Joseph Breen emphasized the implicit miscegenation angle, which was censorable under the Code, in order to curtail a number of other racial issues that did not come under the Code’s purview. “The main theme,” Breen defensively argued, “is founded upon the result of sex association between the white and black race (miscegenation), and as such, in our opinion, it not only violates the Production Code, but is very dangerous from the standpoint both of industry and public policy.”50 Although Breen praised “the beautiful motherdaughter love,” even “as it applies to the colored woman with her white child,” what he found censorable as miscegenation was Peola — whom he called miscegenation’s “result.” As a signifier of said transgression, her very existence violated the Code and emerging industry policy.51 Breen argued that the problem with Peola was that she suggested the “possibility of miscegenation,” one that went unpunished and was latent, omnipresent, and free-floating in the film because it had no “active portrayal” therein.52 Breen’s official argument that the film was about miscegenation hid numerous deeper racial concerns — most prominently that it pointed to the problem of American racism. Breen enumerated “the serious racial problems” presented by Peola’s “passing for white.”53 “Prejudice against the black race,” which the film “brought into sharp relief,” frightened PCA consultant J. B. Lewis, as did the use of the word “nigger . . . in derision.” In the script, the impoverished Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) makes a fortune on a pancake recipe that Delilah (Louise Beavers) has devised. Lewis worried that the Pullmans appear to exploit Delilah, never giving her “proper credit” for their fortune and leaving the two Black women “somewhat downtrodden throughout the plot.”54 These factors made Lewis believe that “this picture would incite new racial prejudices and might lead in some instances, to open hostility.”55 Nor was the MPPDA concerned only about the South. Hays wrote to Universal’s Robert Cochrane that the depiction of lynching and miscegenation would “prevent exhibition in Southern states . . . English colonies . . . [and] large northern cities which have substantial percentage of negro population,” a concern that suggests a desire to avoid being associated with any potential northern Black dissent. This concern was significant

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enough that the MPPDA successfully stalled the film’s production for several months, hoping to avoid its production entirely.56 But the clearest indication that the MPPDA was concerned with more than simply miscegenation came from the New York office — the place where industry policy was often decided. Maurice McKenzie, executive assistant to Hays, explicitly told Breen that “the big problem . . . is not, as we see it, a problem of miscegenation — that is, the act of miscegenation has occurred so remotely in the ancestry of the characters that it need not concern us.” What was a “policy” concern — and one “fraught with the gravest danger,” McKenzie stated — was the film’s “racial problem,” most dangerously revealed in “the lynching scene.”57 Hays found Breen’s report of the film’s “persons and situations (lynching scene, pretending to be white when black, etc.)” so dangerous that he told its producer that he hoped the picture would not be made.58 Preeminent among the industry’s policy concerns was that “the big dramatic punch of the picture describes the lust of a young negro boy who believes that a white girl has given him a ‘come on’ signal and who nearly gets lynched as a result.”59 According to the Chicago Defender’s Harry Levette (who was also an extra in many Hollywood films), the near-lynching scene occurred when “Peola, pretending to be white, accused a young colored man of attempting to flirt with her. Just as they have strung him up, she breaks down with remorse and screams, ‘Don’t, don’t do it, I’m a n — r too.’ ”60 Citing experts, the MPPDA impressed upon the studio “the troubles such a picture will encounter. . . . The lynching scene would appear to be especially dangerous.”61 Breen’s resolve against the lynching scene only strengthened. So, too, did Universal’s resolve to shoot the scene.62 Breen predictably discouraged this, because including it would “undoubtedly aggravate and emphasize” the film’s “dangerous element.” With Hays, Breen was even more absolute: “The danger point in this story is the handling of the ‘negro question.’ . . . They are going ahead with its production. . . . We have advised them definitely, however, that the element of lynching would, we believe, be entirely unsuitable for screen presentation, and that we would not pass the picture if it were in.”63 Universal eventually dropped this plot line. Though in many cases self-regulation was softer than outside censorship, the clear, unambiguous push for omission of racially motivated lynching can genuinely be called censorship. Breen used the idea of miscegenation to argue against a film whose actual threat lay in a much broader set of racial problems (including, prominently, racism), as the PCA internal memo’s invocation of “the Negro question,” “prejudice,” “inflammatory racial questions,” “exploitation,” and, most clearly, “lynching” indicates. Universal’s self-censorship strategy followed the implications of Breen’s initial letter, removing the harshest racial elements. None of the film’s characters uttered the word “nigger.”64 Black men — the biggest threat with regards to miscegenation — were entirely written out save a single line of

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dialogue about Peola’s father. Mother love — between Bea and Delilah — would flow broadly, replacing heterosexual romance as a representation of interracial intimacy. Visually, however, the film would challenge Hays’s 1927 stipulation that “white women” should not be shown in scenes indicating “social relationship” with Black people. Peola is, in fact, distanced from other Black people. Her connection to the Black community is limited to verbal allusions to her eventual happiness at a Negro college. Conversely, the film strongly suggests Peola’s link to whiteness throughout the film, in what we might call “comparison blocking” — that is, shots that would cause audiences to compare Peola to the film’s white characters, demonstrating her similarity. For example, on the night of Bea’s party, Bea herself and several party guests bear a striking resemblance to Peola, in terms of skin tone and dress (see figure 2). Using the film’s details and margins against censorship’s proscriptions, Stahl employed dress, hairstyle, and clothing, all mise-en-scène intangibles that had been used to subvert censorship in the fallen women’s film, to suggest Peola’s equality with white people — perhaps even suggesting to some her presence and integration into a white world — that the narrative denied and that the PCA wanted audiences to overlook.65 The film’s final sequences visually confirm the messiness of racial categorization that the film’s narrative instructs us to ignore. The incredible variation in phenotype and skin tone among the crowds at Bea’s funeral undermines audiences’ visual assurance of the distinguishability of Black and white and, by extension, the severability of the races. Breen would privately praise Imitation of Life to Universal’s Harry Zehner, calling it, despite its “spotty” box office numbers in the South and throughout the country, “a very fine picture . . . that has real merit.”66 This indicates that despite — and perhaps even because of — its relegation of transgressions of the color line to the visual minutiae of mise-en-scène, the film had avoided the industry policy concerns about racial violence, prejudice, and miscegenation Breen so toiled over. But the result was a film where latency and surrogacy replaced direct imagining of the racial injustice to which the original book — and industry self-censors — made reference. Crafting Deniable Lynching: Breen and Mob Violence in the Late 1930s Breen’s concern about screening the lynching of African Americans, evident in the file on Imitation of Life, continued into the late 1930s. Between 1936 and 1938, in the midst of a heightened national struggle for a federal anti-lynching bill, studios proposed many films opposing mob violence.67 The emergent national discussion on lynching was partially crystalized in films like Fury (1936), They Won’t Forget (1937), It Could Happen to You (1937), and Outcast (1937), as Black press reviewers noted.68 Warner Bros.’ Black Legion (1937), Columbia’s Legion of Terror (1936), and the Halperin brothers’ Nation Aflame (1937), all of which came on the heels of sensational trials of Black Legion members in 1935 and 1936,

figure 2. Scenes with Peola (Fredi Washington) lookalikes at the party (top), intercut

with actual images of marginalized Peola (bottom), graphically assert her presence among whites, where the narrative insists on her absence — and highlight the impossibility of enforcing segregation. Frame captures from Imitation of Life (1934).

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revealed that white supremacist terrorism could be found in the North as well as the South. Lynching represented a trio of offenses to the industry censors: it suggested the weakness of law and order in keeping the peace; it was brutal; and it had racial implications. Industry policy on racial discrimination was honed early in the PCA’s existence. In the file on The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), for example, Breen stated clearly: “It is our policy to suggest that any picture prepared for general distribution should avoid the use of any material which tends to bring up the racial differences and prejudices between the black and white races. We suggest, therefore, that all such material be deleted or changed.”69 This policy on screen depictions of racism would affect all representations of civil rights abuses but would become particularly important for the screen regulation of lynching. Indications that government officials condoned lynching were generally unacceptable to Breen.70 State censor boards disliked lynching to the point of removing the word from dialogue. Films suggesting that officers of the law were racist also concerned Breen.71 So with the 1930s anti-lynching film cycle, Breen set parameters on how lynching and racial terror could be pictured. He counseled filmmakers that the mob’s sadistic incitements to maim had to be omitted, and warned that censors would cut shots of a rope hanging over a tree limb.72 But as had been true under Joy’s SRC, Breen was concerned about lynching not just because of law enforcement or brutality but also because of its revelation of white racism. Lest we think that Breen’s concern about lynching was merely about brutality, it is useful to compare his reactions to Imitation of Life and Fury. While Breen disallowed Imitation of Life’s lynching, he allowed — and even helped to get across — a far more graphic lynching sequence in the prestige film Fury only two years later when the mob’s victim was not Black — and survived the attack.73 Still, Breen let pass the inclusion of minor Black characters in both Fury and They Won’t Forget. And though directors Fritz Lang and Mervyn LeRoy had never intended to make films about Black lynching, they used these bit roles to indicate indirectly the racial terror their films elided, symptomatically revealing its structuring absences.74 In Fury, the first figure we see after the lynch party is formed is a Black shoeshine man, who has been watching the mob’s formation from behind the door of the bar. He is elevated on the shoeshine stand, invisible to the determined mob in plain sight (see figure 3). Elevation was key to lynching’s spectacular logic, as the Black body, strung at a height, dangled as an uplifted banner of white supremacy. Here the elevated Black figure looms above the crowd, reminding viewers of Black lynching. Having Black extras and bit actors circulate on the margins of these lynching scenes was a seemingly unsophisticated way to signify the racial history of lynching, especially by contrast with the complex representations of sexuality in the Code era. But it was also one that could be utterly denied because these figures were

Figure 3. The Black shoeshine escapes from the mob but to a raised position not dissimilar from that of the lynching victim. Here he directly addresses the camera. Frame captures from Fury (1936).

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entirely divorced from the questions of justice in the mainstage narrative, and their role in the scene hidden in plain sight. They Won’t Forget references the Scottsboro incident and the railroading of Black suspects, as Matthew Bernstein notes.75 Not only do police officers initially accuse Black janitor Tump Redwine (Clinton Rosemond) of the murder of Mary Clay (Lana Turner), but they keep Redwine incarcerated after another man, Robert Hale (Edward Norris), has been charged, using racial terror to encourage his false testimony. The consistent visual framing of Redwine behind bars in the elevator and the prison and among encroaching white bodies is enhanced by the camera’s own gaze, which, like that of the press, surrounds him on all sides and zeroes in with narrowing precision (see figure 4). This, along with his bullied testimony in court, cinematically renders the sense of his being railroaded, while the repeated use of the tune “Dixie” in these scenes associates this entrapment with the white South. The PCA’s repression of lynching’s racial history is confirmed most clearly in its prohibition on Stevedore, a leftist, anti-capitalist play written by George Sklar and Paul Peters and produced first by the Federal Theater Project but eventually at Broadway’s Civic Repertory Theater. The play is about a Black dockworker framed for raping a white woman because he organizes Black and white workers against capitalism. The play finishes with Black workers barricading their neighborhood against a white lynch mob, a Black woman shooting dead her white would-be assaulters, and white dockworkers joining the Black defense in solidarity. In 1937, Universal’s Carl Laemmle, intending to make the film, submitted a thirty-six-page treatment to the PCA. The script was co-written by Hollywood portrait artist Roman Freulich, a Polish-born Jew, and Rena M. Vale, a scriptwriter for Universal who was, at the time, a communist and friend of Paul Robeson (though she would later become very active in California’s anticommunist movement). Freulich and Vale’s treatment promised to broaden the scope of the original play with an opening documentary montage revealing segregation in neighborhoods and on trains and contrasting Black poverty with white wealth. Freulich had made two earlier films: Prisoner (1934), an avant-garde, dialogueless sound film, and The Broken Earth (1936), a meditative film starring Clarence Muse as a Black sharecropper praying for his sick son. The latter film Freulich intended as the first of a trilogy films centering on Black life. However, neither this trilogy nor Stevedore would come to the screen. First, Joseph Breen pronounced the play unfilmable: This story seems to us to be exceedingly dangerous from the standpoint of the Production Code, because it deals with such an inflammatory subject. Portraying as it does the unfair treatment of the blacks by the whites, and touching upon the subject of an alleged attack by a black man on a white woman, an attempted lynching of a negro, etc., it suggests to us the kind of story which, if made into a

Figure 4. The cinematography communicates the white state surveillance that entraps Tump Redwine (Clinton Rosemond) in these frame captures from They Won’t Forget (1937).

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picture, we would have to reject, in the dispensation of our duties in connection with the Production Code.76

Breen summed up his rejection of Stevedore with reference neither to miscegenation nor lynching, but rather to an “inflammatory racial question,” the same reason he had given to opposing Imitation of Life.77 A 1938 MPPDA internal report on Industry Policy, which praises Breen’s Stevedore decision as a “public service,” reveals the industry policy against racial lynching. Breen was to be lauded for insisting “that screen material involving racial conflicts between white and blacks be handed in such a way as to avoid fanning the flame of race prejudice. The film Fury proves conclusively that there is a way to handle satisfactorily and with tremendous dramatic power the heinous crime of lynching without including the racial angle.”78 An exception from 1939 suggests the shape of the PCA’s policy on racial lynching. In MGM’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim (Rex Ingram), a runaway slave, is nearly lynched because townsfolk think he has murdered Huck (Mickey Rooney). What makes the timid PCA’s acceptance of this storyline strange is the film’s discourse on freedom. Unlike in the novel, in the film Jim’s wife and son are free — and Jim talks about meeting them in a free state. Further, when Huck first discovers Jim’s escape and says he has to return him to his owner, Jim neither shrinks nor acquiesces but rather, as the 1940s sociologist and Black film scholar Lawrence Reddick notes, shows “the passionate wish for freedom on the part of the runaway slave.”79 Throughout the film Jim is perpetually one misstep away from lynching. A white mob searches for Jim and when asked whether they plan to arrest him, they say, “We don’t arrest that kind,” revealing a racism that never graced the screen in the 1936 – 1937 lynching film cycle. Jim eludes lynchers until Huck’s wounds force him to either take him to a doctor or watch him die. The doctor turns Jim in, ironically for the murder of the boy he just saved. A mob storms the jail and overcomes the sheriff. “Why doesn’t someone come help me?” Jim says as he shrinks from the madding throng. Several close-up subjective shots from Jim’s perspective reveal lynching’s terror, as the mob congeals and breaks into the jail. But by the end of the scene, Jim stops cowering and stands to meet his would-be killers. Huck’s appearance halts the lynch party. At the end of the film, Huck, who has become an abolitionist, convinces the widow to free Jim. The final image is of Huck waving goodbye to Jim, who has boarded an abolitionist’s steamboat to travel North to his family. How did such a strong scene of lynching, linked to anti-slavery sentiment, make it to the screen if the PCA had effectively barred racialized lynching? Though Breen had creatively helped Fury’s makers — and despite the similarities in the setting and sadism of the two lynching scenes, he strongly warned Louis B. Mayer about the scene’s racial lynching and insisted that the word “nigger” be “dropped”:

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The entire sequence showing the mob of whites attempting to lynch a negro is questionable and open to some danger, because of the possibility of inciting racial and sectional animosities. The fact that the negro is saved after he is proved innocent at the last moment is, of course, a mitigating factor. It is our feeling, however, that certain Southern political censor boards may delete the entire sequence or reject the whole picture. We therefore suggest that you assure yourself with regard to this possibility. In any case, these scenes should be handled with the greatest care.80

Breen did pass the film with the scenes of the near lynching of Blacks intact. But this case, like Show Boat, indicates that “pre-tested,” historical, venerated literary and stage fare could achieve a exceptional status in the eyes of the PCA. Breen worried about lynching films, whether the setting was southern or northern. The Black Legion was a white supremacist group making headlines in the mid-1930s. But Breen argued, in response to Warner Bros.’ initial Black Legion treatment, which showed Blacks and whites living together, that “it has been our policy not to approve stories which raise and deal with the provocative and inflammatory subjects of racial and religious prejudice.”81 Warner Bros. insisted that prejudice was “truth necessary to make the film a valuable document,” and the Breen Office, in a memo, reported that they would relent, allowing the studio to “treat the subject as broadly and strongly” as they wished and to “test out the limit of . . . acceptability.” No Black people appear in the finished film, however.82 Breen insisted even more strongly that the racial angle be omitted with Nation Aflame, an independent film produced by the Halperin brothers, who were best known for their zombie films. In an early synopsis, the film showed “a Negro’s house . . . burned down because of some charge that has been trumped up against him” and “a Jew made victim of the clan [sic].”83 The company indicated indirection by stating, “We do not, necessarily, show what is actually done, only the results. But the Jew has been killed.”84 Breen, however, suggested the story would be approved only if “organizations, such as the American Legion, Knights of Columbus, Elks, etc. would not be indicated . . . and also that the victims of the avenging angels would not be definitely characterized as Jews, Catholics, or negroes.”85 Once they had secured an initial okay, however, the Halperins boldly inserted race and religion into later drafts, keeping in racial brutality until June 1936 and a Black speaking character until November, despite Breen’s warnings. Breen was steadfast, however, requiring that Negroes, Jews, Greeks, and varying “others” be assiduously avoided in the script: It will be necessary for you to delete from your story any suggestion that the “angels” are organized to combat “race and religion.” It is our suggestion that you confine your motives in this regard to “foreigners” and that you do not raise any racial or religious questions. That is because such a discussion is highly

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inflammatory and likely to promote and inspire very definite and unfavorable audience reaction.86

Later Breen removed race not only from those at the story’s center but even from marginal montage sequences, stating that “shots which definitely indicate specific races are very objectionable, and should be changed not only to avoid characterizing any particular nationality but also to get away from the gruesomeness that appears in them.”87 Breen’s dogged caution may be partly explained by the fact that Marie Presstman, head of the Maryland board of censors, had written to Breen with concern about the cumulative effects of films about “Ku Klux organizations” on young boys. But nowhere did Presstman indicate race as a concern.88 Ultimately, Legion of Terror, Nation Aflame, and Black Legion all failed to show the Legion’s Black victims. Instead, each film relegated treatment of race to speeches: white judges, law enforcement, or elected officials verbally condemn “racial and religious” prejudice or the Legion’s attack on American values like “equality and religious freedom.” Instead of being marked by race or religion, the victims of the Legion are “foreign.” These substitutions and speeches distance us from the corporeal realities of Black lynching. The case of the Black Legion cycle suggests that the problem with lynching and racial terror was not the South or brutality but that it made visible “inflammatory” racial and religious tensions. In sum, as the issue of lynching became the subject of a studio cycle, Breen pushed filmmakers to make lynching deniable, portraying it through indirect signifiers. The effects of the presentation of lynching as always deferred, never occurring — that is, as a narrative of relief and rescue — contributed to a broader denial of lynching’s real social effects and significant social consequences. More importantly, for the purposes of industry policy, Breen attempted to keep racial lynching off the screen altogether, only allowing the idea of racialized lynching to surface in established “classic” narratives and where the lynching is averted. While these domesticated views of lynching caused viewers to imagine lynching’s horror, they also allowed them to experience catharsis and relief from its the most dire racial realities. Social Equality in the Early Breen Era In the late 1930s, the loudest southern protests against the MPPDA concerned not lynching or miscegenation but depictions of “social equality.” And the PCA responded by tightening its restrictions on these elements, as the cases of Artists and Models (1937), One Mile from Heaven (1937), The Spirit of Youth (1937), and Of Mice and Men (1939) suggest. In the SRC and early PCA era, an emerging but inconsistent policy on integrated scenes can be discerned: generally scenes indicating professional equality got away without even a warning, in films like Arrowsmith (1931) (where a Black doctor works alongside a white one) or Daniel Boone (1936), where Clarence Muse plays the well-dressed, articulate Black

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servant Pompey, who is portrayed as a soliloquizing, gun-toting hero of the settlement. Even integrated public schools (in Three on a Match [1933]) or jails (in Ladies of the Big House [1933], Hold Your Man [1934], and The Mayor of Hell [1933]) escaped regulatory commentary on their interracial camraderie. However, as early as 1934, Breen warned Columbia Pictures that in the zombie film Black Moon (1934), starring Fay Wray, “care will be needed with this scene of Lane [ Jack Holt] and his wife [Dorothy Burgess] dancing to the accompaniment of the Negro orchestra.”89 Here, as elsewhere, Black-white musical sequences bothered the budding PCA, probably because they posed the threat of physical intimacy. As Atlanta censor Mrs. Alonzo Richardson told Variety, the “injection of Negro cabaret scenes” were particularly offensive, since in the South, “halfnaked negro women dancers do not appeal.”90 Nevertheless, the PCA files on films with interracial musical sequences in the 1930s indicate only inconsistent regulation of racial mixing. For example, there is no visible concern about race in the file on The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935), even though Black radio personalities “Dot” and “Dash” (the Nicholas brothers, in one of their most developed, integral roles) cross the color line when they stand in for white radio crooner the Great Lochenvar, proclaiming their love for swooning (and unsuspecting) white ladies on the other end of the wireless. Self-appointed guardians of the white southern order sent several scathing letters that ricocheted through Hollywood’s upper echelons in the late 1930s, most concerning interracial musical sequences. Among the most pointed, detailed, and sustained set of critiques was in regard to “Public Melody Number One,” a musical sequence in the Jack Benny comedy Artists and Models in which Martha Raye in blackface plays moll to Louis Armstrong’s gangster (see figure 5). At first glance, it is not clear why this scene offended the white South. The settings announce it as a stage-bound fantasy. And Raye is in blackface, hardly a mode associated with social equality. However, some contextualization and close reading make clearer how this scene offended the southern system of segregation. The Irish Raye already threatened the color line because her stage persona — especially her scat singing — linked her with blackness and jazz.91 She never touches Armstrong, but her excited proclamations about his “hot cornet” and exaggerated hip-thrusts to his music are suggestive. Her slightly exaggerated, campy dance holds both parody and homage. Where, as Michael Rogin has argued, blackface minstrelsy typically exaggerates racial color with burnt cork in order to reify, by contrast, the whiteness of the performer underneath, Raye’s light-skinned blackface — combined with her playful mixing with Black people — points disconcertingly to the limits of race’s visibility.92 Armstrong’s horn, though only a symbolic weapon standing in place of a gun, literally blows away the scene’s only white men (four machine gun-toting G-men and a police officer). Although the conceit of music and comedy soften undertones of Black aggression, Armstrong nevertheless plays one of the Code era’s only Black

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gangsters, and his mulatto moll (played by a white woman) musically celebrates his triumph over white authority. Threats of a “movement” of exhibitors, t