Utilizing Film in Our Courses on Slavery and the Enslaved

Teaching the history of slavery in the United States well, like teaching any complex topic mired in historical mythologies and mixed public interests, is a daunting task. Pedagogical approaches to slavery have to face off against centuries of public misconceptions and avoidance. I constantly try to engage and inform students who have longstanding perceptions about the institution and those who were a part of it. Their typical ideas about slavery are expressed in declarations and queries made in class such as: “My middle school teacher told us that the Civil War was not about slavery.” “Are you saying that Africans actually sold other Africans?!” “Why didn’t slaves resist their enslavement?”

Other young scholars file into my classes who generally (not necessarily genuinely) want to know more about U.S., African American, southern or Civil War history, but not so much about that “difficult” aspect of our national past that included two and half centuries of racialized human bondage. They want to learn more about the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, but not Sally Hemings, Ona Judge, or Dunmore’s Proclamation. They prefer analyzing Civil War battle strategies and statistics, not locating the primary documents that speak to the hard fight for and against black freedom. Many are inspired by the heroic work of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and others, but recoil at descriptions of the horror of their lives under the lash. Of course, this is what we sign up for—enhancing our students’ knowledge and pushing their intellectual boundaries beyond the comfort zone of what they “know,” or hope, to be truth.

Certainly great research monographs, comprehensive survey texts, and primary sources—increasingly published and online— along with historical novels and shorter works of fiction with black bondage as subject, intellectually engage and capture the attention and imaginations of those who study slavery in our lecture halls and seminar rooms. So too do documentaries, feature length “Hollywood” movies, independent film and TV mini- and full-length series. In the most recent issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era, I contributed a review essay of recent films, miniseries, and television shows that can help guide educators in navigating these complex issues.[1] I encourage scholars to take full advantage in our classrooms (with proper trigger warnings administered) of this growing, and diverse, filmography of slavery.

The institution of slavery has, since the premiere of the film industry, contributed to Hollywood’s evolution as an essential outlet of U.S. popular culture. Indeed, the nation’s fascination with black bondage, plantation life and the Lost Cause were some of the first historicized subjects screen writers and producers drew on to attract, and amuse, broad audiences. Indeed, the institution of black bondage had been such a part of the nation’s history from the period of European colonization forward, that many early films about the nation’s history necessarily included slavery and enslaved people, even if only in background faces, locations and cultural references. This pattern continued through Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s, 40s and 50s and beyond. Indeed, much of what made “gold” for pre-Civil Rights era Hollywood were the blockbuster films with superstar actors and slavery as a storyline or backdrop. These films were aimed to attract mostly white adult and juvenile audiences, although certainly black moviegoers patronized them too. White actresses Shirley Temple, Vivian Leigh, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Elizabeth Taylor, Maureen O’Hara and many others starred in these films. Equal numbers of popular white thespians, if not more, did so as well.

Black entertainers benefitted too from the being a part of these film projects, including Oscar recipient Hattie McDaniel, George Reed, Kenny Washington, wildly popular Bill Bojangles Robinson, James Baskett, Rex Ingram and first black contract actress Madame Sul-Te-Wan. Likewise, one of these “big” films, Foxes of Harrow (1947) starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara, was the first movie adapted from a novel penned by an African American writer, Frank Yerby.

As one rightfully imagines, films on the big and small screens, capture the political and social sentiments of their era. These changing perceptions of African Americans and African American history provide an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate to our students changes in popular ideas about race and “races,” to help them trace the evolution of racialization, and to demonstrate how these popular biases find themselves in popular culture, but also in scholarship. Early films about slavery, with rare exception, express the racism of the “nadir.” Edwin Porter’s and Thomas Edison’s 1904 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, employed the same tropes found in blackface and black minstrelsy, coon shouters, tom shows, and other forms of popular entertainment of the time. The slavery historiography of the period, stamped by the most lauded southern historian of the era, Ulrich B. Phillips, likewise proclaimed the happy go lucky, lazy, promiscuous, superstitious, submissive and loyal slave found in most of these early film productions, whether romantic comedies, epic dramas, or animation.

What our students will be able to really see in classroom screenings is that as the public began to embrace different images of black Americans culturally, politically and economically, filmed portrayals of African American slavery also changed. The 1950s, therefore, not only swept in the national civil rights era and global decolonization efforts, but also an evolving slavery filmography that included many more films about African American self-determination manifest in bondspersons’ direct and indirect resistance efforts.

This trend deepened in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1977 airing of the mini-series Roots: The Saga of An American Family, for example, brought a more realistic depiction of slave life across multiple generations into the living rooms of more than the nation’s population. Roots was possible because two decades of black political activism and progress, along with a new social history of slavery largely researched, written and edited from the perspective of the slave, made the trials and triumphs of these bondspeople palatable to a U.S. audience who seemed to really want to know what black slaves, and their slavery, was like.

Roots, neither the early version nor its 2016 remake, gave us a perfect filmed discourse on its subject. The problems with the miniseries, like all the other films about slavery, however, provide wonderful opportunities for students to explore the diversity of the slave experience across generations, regions, and genders, as well as in relationship to the kinds of masters and mistresses they encountered, the types of labor they performed, and the kinds of resistance strategies they devised both individually and collectively. It also allows them to turn a critical eye to the methodological practice and interpretations of historians.

No film, or even movie series, on this immensely complicated and important subject is flawless or comprehensive. There are some works, however, that provide the kind of visual content to our students’ learning process that can “bring to life” the slave’s experiences and humanity, while also inspiring meaningful, critical discourse on historiography, methodology, national mythology and popular culture practices. Examples of this filmography are listed below that I have found can be employed in some manner to help illustrate and spark discussion and analysis of these relevant topics. Each one either engages the mythology, or realities, of the experience of slavery in a manner that can assist in our difficult task of relating this complex subject to the diverse young scholars in our classrooms.

 

Slave Family Life

Huckleberry Finn (1939)

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Slaves (1969)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Sankofa (1993)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Sexual Violence and Miscegenation

Birth of a Nation (1915)

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Band of Angels (1957)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Queen (1992)

Sankofa (1993)

Jefferson in Paris (1995)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

Belle (2013)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Resistance

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Band of Angels (1957)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969

Burn! (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

A House Divided: Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion (1982)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Quilombo (1984)

Sankofa (1993)

Amistad (1997)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

African Cultural Remembrance and Retention

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Tamango (1958)

Burn! (1969)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Sankofa (1993)

Amistad (1997)

Quilombo (1984)

 

Relationships between Plantation Mistresses and their Bondspersons

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Mandingo (1975)

Quilombo (1984)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Queen (1992)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Relationships between Plantation Masters and their Bondspersons

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Band of Angels (1957)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Sankofa 91993)

Jefferson in Paris (1995)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Enslaved Women’s Lives

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Queen (1992)

Sankofa (1993)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Slave Labor and the Economy

Burn! (1969)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Quilombo (1984)

Sankofa (1993)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

[1] Brenda E. Stevenson, “Filming Black Voices and Stories: Slavery on America’s Screens,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 488-520. The article is available through subscription and on Project Muse.