Whitney Strub | Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis | Journal of Social History, 40.3

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Whitney Strub | Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis | Journal of Social History, 40.3 | The History Cooperative

BLACK AND WHITE AND BANNED ALL OVER: RACE, CENSORSHIP AND OBSCENITY IN POSTWAR MEMPHIS

By Whitney Strub University of Miami

"I cry, because I love old niggers," Lloyd Binford told a Collier's reporter in 1950, his eyes welling with tears as he recalled his youthful friendships with the black servants on his family's plantation. Before the aghast reporter could respond, Binford expounded on the extent of his love: at his funeral, "two rows of seats in the rear" would be "set aside for my Negro friends."¹	1
While the octogenarian chairman of the Memphis Board of Censors clearly reflected his proudly unreconstructed southernness in his word choices, more pertinent to his duties were those two rows of seats. For in his role as censor, Binford policed the cinematic color line with a rigorous passion, consistently exercising his power to suppress any vision of improper interracial contact or themes from appearing on mid-twentieth-century Memphis screens. More than an anomalous figure, Binford represented several decades of post-World War II Memphis history in which local censorship and obscenity policies were structured by race. This article examines the period from the 1940s through the early 1970s, during which three distinct phases of race-based censorship and racialized conceptions of obscenity shaped Memphis policy.	2
As World War II empowered African Americans, black Memphians assumed a newly assertive public role. Censorship decisions of the 1940s consequently reflected a conscious attempt by the local white power structure to suppress any cinematic content that might serve as fuel for that assertiveness. Vague sexual undercurrents regarding prevalent white southern miscegenation fears ran beneath Binford's censorial opposition to "social equality," but their flow became a gush as the 1950s civil rights movement took formal shape and began pushing for integration. As the Supreme Court made "obscenity" the criterion for suppression, Memphis censors adopted an overtly sexual notion of racialized obscenity predicated on depictions of interracial sexual contact. Finally, as this local obscenity regime gave way to subsequent court rulings, the intermingling of race and obscenity was acted out in different terms in the late 1960s by New Right Mayor Henry Loeb, who used outcries over obscenity as a discursive displacement of the racial issues facing Memphis, harnessing moralistic outrage to efface the more complex dilemmas confronting the city. Again, obscenity policy was shaped by the racial politics of Memphis, in an unsubtle but bluntly effective way that contributed to an effective silencing of public discussion on the urban crisis.	3
If the Supreme Court supplied the lexicon of obscenity, then, the semantics were generated locally. As censor Mrs. Judson McKellar explained to a reporter in 1960, obscenity "means entirely different things to you and to us" from what it meant to the Supreme Court.² That race shaped censorship and local definitions of obscenity in Memphis should, in some sense, be no shock; from the city's early years in the mid-nineteenth century as the hub of slave-trading for the mid South to the much-belated election of its first black mayor in 1991, the history of Memphis remains incomprehensible unless seen through the lens of race.	4
But the histories of censorship and obscenity have generally been written as legalistic narratives, from national perspectives that give little sense of their precise mechanics in specific locations. Only recently have scholars begun to recognize the significance of place in understanding the suppression of texts and media, and despite some valuable work in this direction, much remains to be done.³ By grounding the developing perception of the obscene in the context of postwar Memphis, this article shows how unspoken tensions in a city that prided itself on its peaceful calm could be more forthrightly articulated and acted upon in the indirect forum of suppressing obscenity.	. . .

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