| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gerald R. Butters, Jr. Black Manhood on the Silent Screen. (Culture America.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2002. Pp. xviii, 270. $35.00.
Building on the work of Thomas Cripps, Donald Bogle, Daniel J. Leab, Henry T. Sampson, Mark Reid, Pearl Bowser, Louise Spence, and especially Jane Gaines, Gerald R. Butters, Jr.'s book explores the ways in which white filmmakers of the silent era portrayed African Americans and how African Americans responded to those overwhelmingly negative images by producing race films that offered positive depictions of black life and manhood. "Euro-American and African-American men," Butters argues, "used motion pictures as gendering and racializing devices in the era of silent films (1896–1931) as a way to construct their own identity and collective identities of nationhood, racial group, and 'maleness'" (p. xviii).	1
Between 1896 and 1915, white filmmakers reproduced negative stereotypes and "ethnic and racial codes that were already evident in popular culture" (p. 21). Black men (usually played by white actors in black face) were depicted as chicken thieves, crap shooters, watermelon eaters, funky dancers, or razor-wielding hoodlums. The few positive images of black manhood were seen in actualities such as Colored Invincibles (1898), which showed black troops helping Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders take San Juan Hill, or fight films that followed the exploits of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson.	2
The release of Birth of a Nation in 1915 led a small but growing number of black filmmakers to challenge dominant images of white cinema by making movies that presented a "more realistic black culture to an African-American moveiegoing audience" (p. 94). Between 1914 and the early 1920s, African-American men directed over 100 films whose major theme was the defense of black manhood. In three successive chapters, Butters surveys race-film companies that operated between 1910 and 1923, analyzes the silent era's preeminent race filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux, and offers a close reading of Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920).	. . .

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