The best American Movies about race and prejudice
Hollywood has addressed the difficult and often destructive theme of racism and stereotypical prejudice since its early beginnings. Over the years the films themselves, the political bent, the actors and the filmmakers have changed, but the message has generally stayed the same.
Looking back at the history of the genre, I’ve discovered some wonderful movies, realising that race and prejudice has been the basis for some of the most powerful and brilliant films Hollywood has produced.
And, it really has been a trek through the ages of American cinema. D.W. Griffith got the fire started with his racist “A Birth Of A Nation” but then, unbeknownst to a lot of casual cinemagoers, we don’t then have to wait 50 years for Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck to put the record straight in “In The Heat Of The Night” and “To Kill A Mockingbird”. Oscar Micheaux, the first African-American filmmaker, made “Within Our Gates” in 1919 as a riposte to Griffith’s depiction of African-American people in the south. Micheaux, having to work outside the studio system, continued making films about the African-American struggle with mainly black actors and crew, throughout the 1920s and 1930s before his untimely death in 1951.
And even then we have to wait for Mockingbird and Heat, with Hollywood addressing various social, class, and prejudice issues in the late 1940s and 1950s. Gregory Peck actually starred in one of these – “Gentlemen’s Agreement”, about a journalist posing as a Jew to investigate anti-Semitism in upper-class New York city.
After the golden period of Sidney Poitier in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the introduction of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Hollywood produced literally hundreds of movies about racial discrimination, particularly concerning African-American life in urban America. These urban films, which were shot on low-budgets and quickly made, became known as Blaxploitation.
Hollywood made some of the most exhilarating films about the subject in the 1980s and 1990s, in the sense that it tried to put a positive spin on past events without diminishing the devastating effects of racial intolerance. These films were perhaps a cathartic experience for an American audience wanting to forget its links to the slave trade.
Read my more in-depth introduction to American race and prejudice cinema here.