Derek Vouri-Richard

Abstract

This article considers the role of the General Motors Corporation (GM) in the changing racial regime of American society during World War II. Working-class Black mobilization ruptured the racial regime of wartime America. Industry and cinema were paradigmatic sites in which this rupture was felt, as Black organizations confronted the defense industry’s racially segregated labor relations and denigrating cinematic representations of Black life. GM acquiesced to Black mobilization by, for the first time, fracturing its factory color line. The auto corporation did not, however, extend this fracturing to its defense film production practices. I analyze three GM defense films—Close Harmony (1942), Victory is Our Business (1942), and These People (1944)—to demonstrate how the auto corporation used cinema to reinforce a white racial regime that was under attack. Moreover, I compare GM’s defense films to other modes of American cinema, in the defense industry and entertainment, that reevaluated how to represent Black life amid working-class Black mobilization. In doing so, I build on Haidee Wasson’s and Charles Acland’s study on “useful cinema” by considering the racial function of GM’s nontheatrical film practices.                                                                                        

Keywords

Film, Useful Cinema, General Motors, Jam Handy Organization, Racial Capitalism

Introduction

During World War II, Black working-class mobilization ruptured the racial regime of wartime America. Industry and cinema were paradigmatic sites in which this rupture was felt, as Black organizations confronted the defense industry’s racially segregated labor relations and denigrating cinematic representations of Black life. This article considers the role of the General Motors Corporation (GM) in this changing racial regime. GM became the auto manufacturing industry leader in the mid-twentieth century and a preeminent wartime defense contractor. It was also a racially segregated corporation. When Black activism challenged the defense industry’s racially segregated hiring practices, GM, for the first time, fractured its factory color line. The auto corporation, however, did not extend this fracturing to its defense film production practices.[1]

During the war, GM, and its sponsored and industrial film production partner, the Jam Handy Organization (JHO), produced the defense films Close Harmony (1942), Victory is Our Business (1942), and These People (1944) to promote the auto corporation’s defense production practices. Two of the films enter GM factories and the third crafts a fictional drama about defense production. Turning to Richard Dyer’s study of whiteness as a cultural and ideological process in which institutions codify beliefs in white supremacy through ubiquitous modes of signifying and representing white bodies, I consider the significations of whiteness and Blackness in GM-JHO films.[2] In covering the racial significations of GM’s defense films, I am also building on Charles R. Acland’s and Haidee Wasson’s study on “useful cinema.” Acland and Wasson identify the need to study the social and political function of nontheatrical cinema (2-3).[3]  I contend that a function, not the only function, of GM’s defense films concerned reinforcing a white “racial consensus” that was under attack (Robinson, Forgeries 50). As wartime film producers in the defense industry and entertainment responded to working-class Black mobilization by moving Black life closer to the foreground of cinematic narratives, GM’s defense films kept Blackness on the margins or outside the frame.

GM’s Cinematic Manufacturing of Whiteness Before the War

While ascending to the leading auto manufacturer in the 1920s and 1930s, GM’s public relations apparatus molded a white corporate identity, what Roland Marchand calls a “corporate soul,” by mass producing images of white workers, consumers, families, and citizens (4).[4] Institutional advertisements in the 1920s promoted automobility by situating white families in angelic illustrations of social interactions.[5] The company's in-house periodical, GM Folks, used lavish photography to feature white employees participating in hobbies and community activities (Marchand 239-41). Conversely, one of the corporation’s more overtly anti-Black marketing practices was to discourage dealers from selling its luxury Cadillacs to Black consumers, as the car was becoming popular among the Black bourgeoisie. It was not until the dire economic situation of the 1930s, and at the urging of Cadillac’s general manager Nicholas Dreystadt, that GM acquiesced to marketing Cadillacs to Black buyers.[6] During this decade, GM also made motion pictures a more regular feature in its growing public relations arsenal.[7] GM Films entered communities through dealer programs and events such as the auto corporation’s annual “Parade of Progress” tour.[8] By 1937, GM established a library that distributed films to theaters, schools, clubs, and other nontheatrical venues. Over the succeeding decades, the library would grow to house thousands of films that reached millions of viewers in hundreds of thousands of screenings (Bird 131, 150-51). One of GM’s most prolific film production partners was JHO.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, JHO became the market leader in the sponsored and industrial film industry. The film company’s close relationship with GM greatly aided its ascendence.[9] In the 1930s, JHO relocated its headquarters from Chicago, Illinois to Detroit, Michigan to be closer to the auto manufacturer; JHO’s relocation included occupying offices in GM’s Detroit headquarters building and establishing a motion picture studio less than a mile from the GM headquarters.[10] GM’s and JHO’s film production, distribution, and exhibition practices came in the wake of the Ford Motor Company’s own pioneering use of motion pictures, which began in 1913 (Grieveson 26).[11] JHO produced sales training filmstrips, promotional motion pictures, multimedia training programs, animated films, and live shows for GM, along with other major American companies.[12] At the height of the film company’s popularity, JHO employed more than seven hundred people including writers, photographers, planners, artists, salespeople, and actors. William L. Bird Jr., a leading scholar on JHO, asserts that the film company became the nation’s largest employer of theatrical and showbiz personnel in the 1950s (124-25).[13] JHO filmstrips explained company histories, promoted products, covered sales training, maintenance and repair protocols, management training, and foremen training.[14] JHO motion pictures promoted products, shaped company identities, and advocated for social and economic issues.[15] The films were exhibited in movie theaters and newsreel theaters, at World’s Fairs, in company meetings and conferences, at investor programs, sales training programs, trade association and civic organization gatherings, schools, car dealerships, and, later, on television.[16] Together, GM and JHO became a potent ideological vehicle of mid-century nation building.[17]

GM and JHO media spotlit white consumers and workers to portray American business as a sacred institution of American life. GM-JHO films combined the kind of exhibitionist modes of cinematic representation that were popular in the pre-story period of early cinema with formal devices more typically employed in story films.[18] Exhibitionist features, or attractions, of GM films included factory views of industrial machinery, assembly line labor, and mass-produced products (Gunning 56-59). GM-JHO films embedded these spectacles in conventional story structures by using stylistic principles common to the classical Hollywood style: centered and symmetrical framing, cutting into scenes with alternating camera angles and distance, movie music, sequential scenes with degrees of continuity editing, and narrative closure (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson part 1). The GM-JHO 1936 film Master Hands, produced for GM’s Chevrolet division, enters a Chevrolet factory to turn auto production into an orchestral performance. The Detroit Philharmonic’s score, a moving camera, close-ups, medium shots, and long shots of white workers, automatic machines, assembly lines, raw materials, and car parts combine to narrate a symphony of mass production (Fig. 1).[19] Notably, when the camera enters the foundry, one of the few departments where some Black workers found employment before the war, low lighting obscures and de-racializes the workers in the frame (00:05:35). GM-JHO’s From Dawn to Sunset (1937), also produced for Chevrolet, echoes the kind of nostalgic and patriotic imagery featured in Ford’s 1910s and 1920s Americanization films as part of crafting a longer and more sophisticated narrative about white modes of residence, labor, and consumption (Grieveson 40-1). Through a series of six montages, the film combines romantic imagery of historical landmarks and city horizons with domestic views, factory scenes, and long sequences of familial consumption to narrate a one-day odyssey of white American capitalism (Fig. 2).[20]  
The 1940 GM-JHO film To New Horizons portrays white modes of consumption and living as part of envisioning a future auto-centric utopia. GM and JHO produced Horizons for the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair (“‘New Horizons’” 15).[21] The film accompanied GM’s famous Futurama exhibition, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, that transported viewers through a large diorama of a future 1960s city embellished in superhighways that seamlessly connect rural and urban regions. Horizons covers the diorama by positioning it at the end of a linear narrative of technological and entrepreneurial progress. Early scenes show modes of transportation from an earlier time: horses, a stagecoach, and dirt roads. The images transition to more modern modes of living. A large farmhouse and barn rest on rolling pastures, a woman and child stand outside a multistory home, children run into a large brick building, perhaps a school. Domestic spaces feature a white woman pulling bread out of an iron stove, a hand turns on a furnace, and another hand draws a barrel bath with a kettle. The narrative moves into a contemporary milieu where domestic scenes show white men and women pulling slices of bread out of plastic wrapping, putting food in refrigerators, setting dining tables with silverware and porcelain plates, and drawing baths with running water. Outside the home, consumers drive cars and purchase appliances and furniture at retail stores (Fig. 3). It is only in the final scene of the film’s first act, before it shifts to covering the Futurama exhibition, that Horizons can no longer avoid incorporating Black life into its providential narrative. This is because the film features the railway, a technology and industry that created mass forms of employment and upward mobility for Black Americans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and inspired one of the earliest Black-produced film, William Foster’s The Railroad Porter (1913) (Stewart 174, 194). Horizons, however, puts a Black railroad porter in the background of the frame when featuring white passengers approaching a train (Fig. 4; 00:07:26).
GM and JHO produced Horizons, From Dawn to Sunset, and Master Hands amid a boost in American film production, which in no small part was due to the development of synchronized sound. Amid this filmmaking surge, other film producers turned their cameras towards Black life. Scenes of Black labor open Pare Lorentz’s 1938 Farm Security Administration documentary, The River, on the Mississippi River and agricultural preservation. Following the pioneering work of Foster, and, after Foster, Oscar Micheaux, producers of race films, some of whom initially strove to distance themselves from the Hollywood machine before merging with Hollywood’s style and resources, explored Black American life with Black casts and filmmakers from the early to the mid-twentieth century.[22] A financial high mark in the Black film market came in 1937 with the release of Ralph Cooper’s and George Randol’s 1937 gangster film, Dark Manhattan, which inspired an increase in Black film productions (Taves 343-49; Cripps, Slow chs. 3, 7, 12; Robinson, Forgeries 364-71). In the nontheatrical realm, Black churches in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania produced 16mm films featuring their congregants and church programs from the 1920s through the 1940s (Johnson 72). The role of Black characters in major Hollywood studio films with predominately white casts also increased. Unfortunately, these Black portrayals were often regressive, prompting Donald Bogle to describe the first decade of sound cinema as “the Age of the Negro Servant” (35-36). The role of Black characters in pre-World War II sound Hollywood films deserves more nuance.[23] Amid the infantilizing and racist portrayals of Blackness, Black performers embedded venerable and subversive performances into Hollywood entertainment and helped lay the groundwork for more progressive portrayals of Blackness after the war. For example, Clarence Brooks’s, who would later appear in Dark Manhattan, performance as a Black doctor in Arrowsmith (1931) earned acclaim from Black audiences, and Mantan Moreland’s comedic roles in 1940s mystery films inspired Cedric J. Robinson to describe the comedian as enacting a subtle “form of racial solipsism” (Cripps, Slow 299-300; Robinson, Forgeries 373).[24] Moreover, Black actors found roles—though often marginalized ones—in increasingly popular 1930s and 1940s Hollywood social problem films that conveyed Popular Front sympathies by exploring labor exploitation, wealth inequality, and prison reform through narratives often set in urban spaces (Cripps, Slow 279-92, 304-6; Balio, 280-98). Liberal social problem films contradicted GM’s and JHO’s teleological narratives of (white) enterprise, narratives that erased Black life and exposed the auto corporation’s racially segregated labor relations.
 
Black Workers Fracture GM’s Factory Color Line During the War

GM approached the World War II defense production period with ingrained “race management” practices (Roediger and Esch 15). Following David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, race management concerns managerial methods that use ideologies on race to structure segregated labor practices and categories (6-11). The prewar auto industry was an exemplary site of race management towards Black labor. The great migration brought streams of Black workers from Southern states into northern industrial cities around the same time that the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 restricted the flow of European immigrant workers (Roediger and Esch 170-93). This labor movement created large Black labor pools in auto hubs such as Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Like other auto manufacturers, GM exploited these labor pools.

GM plant managers, who oversaw hiring decisions, either banned Black employment or restricted Black labor to the most dangerous and lowest paid factory positions.[25] GM Fisher Body plants in Flint enacted some of the corporation’s strictest color lines by limiting Black employment to janitorial and foundry positions.[26] Zaragosa Vargas shows that Fisher Body also pitted Black and Mexican workers against each other for jobs (102). Foundry work was especially dangerous, involving casting heavy metals in large furnaces. Across American industry, white managers used pseudo-scientific beliefs that espoused that Black workers’ darker skin supposedly allowed them to endure the high temperatures of foundry furnaces to restrict Black workers to the foundry (Roediger and Esch 190-91). Black workers labored in foundries in GM plants in Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, and Pontiac, Michigan.[27] If Black labor was not hot, then it was often dirty. When Robert Dunn investigated the conditions of Black labor at a Chevrolet plant in the late 1920s, he described Black laborers as “engaged in the dirtiest, roughest, and most disagreeable work, for example, in the painting of axles” (qtd. in Northrup, Organized 187). In the 1930s, GM’s vice president Louis G. Seaton claimed that Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Oldsmobile plants in Detroit and Lansing, Michigan employed Black workers in production positions, and Lloyd H. Bailer found that Chevrolet and Buick plants promoted some Black workers (Northrup, Automobile 11; Bailer, “Negro Worker” 420, 424). However, the specific kind of Black production positions is unknown. If we are to believe Seaton, such positions were likely the more dangerous or dirty production positions. Moreover, GM employed a significantly smaller percentage of Black workers entering World War II than its auto manufacturing competitors, especially Ford, whose 1940 Black workforce constituted eleven percent while GM’s Black laborers constituted a miniscule two and half percent of the company’s one hundred thousand workers (Northrup, Organized 187 and Automobile 10-12; Bailer, “Negro Worker” 416). However, one should not view Ford’s higher employment of Black labor as indicative of more egalitarian race-labor relations; Esch argues that Black laborers at Ford were treated “more akin to colonized subjects” (5). GM’s whiteness was not unique to the auto industry, and it carried its segregated labor practices into the defense production period.

During the war, GM grew enormously as it garnered more defense contracts than any other American company.[28] With this, the auto manufacturer’s employment surged, and, through the aid of government subsidies and tax breaks, it expanded plant construction (Farber 234; Lichtenstein, Dangerous 200-1). As victory became GM’s business, approximately ninety percent of GM’s wartime operations consisted of manufacturing military equipment (Farber 233). As it converted to defense production, the corporation initially upheld its factory color lines (Lichtenstein, Dangerous 209; “Ask Knudsen” 1). GM’s Saginaw Michigan Steering Gear division, for example, employed some three thousand men to produce machine guns, not one of whom was Black (“Inconsistent” 2). Factory color lines spread throughout the defense industry and spurred Black working-class mobilization.

Black workers and citizens, primarily based in industrial regions, retaliated against factory color lines. In the early 1940s, Black workers led job walkouts and work stoppages, and Black organizations, such as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), mobilized protests across the nation.[29] Detroit became a beating heart of Black activism, with its NAACP chapter growing into the organization’s largest faction (Lichtenstein, Dangerous 207). The growth of working-class Black activism in Detroit is a major reason why Nelson Lichtenstein and Robert Korstad locate 1940s Black mobilization as a starting point for the Civil Rights movement (786-88, 793-94, 797-98). Outside of Detroit, the Pittsburgh Courier, a national Black newspaper, popularized the “Double V” campaign that called for a defeat against fascism abroad and an end to domestic racial segregation (Koppes and Black, “Blacks” 387). In early 1941, A. Philip Randolph and the Black labor union the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters inspired one of the most influential wartime national Black movements by calling for a nationwide march on Washington, D.C. to protest unequal employment opportunities (Foner 240-41). The impending march pushed the Roosevelt administration to issue Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense production and government and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to increase Black employment in defense production.[30] Moreover, the Office of Production Management’s (OPM) Labor Division created employment training branches for Black workers while government officials in the newly created Office of War Information (OWI) advocated for the hiring and promotion of more Black government employees (Koppes and Black, “Blacks” 387; Weaver, Labor 132-34). In this new climate, GM was forced to reevaluate its factory color lines.

Black mobilization forced GM to hire and promote more Black workers during defense production.[31] In some cases, GM’s dismantling of its color line was swift. In Flint, Black employment rose, in some factories, from single digits to close to triple digits (Highsmith 85). Fisher Body joined GM Saginaw Steering Company, A. C. Spark Plug, and GM’s forge plants in promoting Black workers to production positions while Oldsmobile employed GM’s first Black apprentices.[32] Overall, Detroit’s Black workforce increased from four to fifteen percent (Sugrue 19, 95). This growth included Black men and women. The most transgressive employment of Black women occurred at Cadillac when general manager Dreystadt, to the chagrin of GM executives, hired approximately two thousand Black women, who were former sex workers, for precision production labor (Drucker 270-71; Cray 318-19). Outside of Detroit, Fisher Body employed eighty women janitors while A. C. Spark Plug, also in Flint, promoted Annalea Bannister to an office position (Highsmith 85-86).[33] As more Black workers entered factories, white workers were forced to confront their allegiance to their social class, their race, and their company.

In Southern regions, white GM workers and the still nascent United Automobile Workers union (UAW) demonstrated the influence of “wages of whiteness” by prioritizing racial segregation over working-class solidarity (Roediger; Bailer, “Automobile” 550, 557).[34] Chevrolet workers in an Atlanta, Georgia local banned Black workers from gaining union membership and a St. Louis, Missouri local used separate seniority lists for white and Black workers.[35] Across the South, Black union membership was generally small in regions with predominant white labor forces (Bailer, “Automobile” 557). Southern resistance to Black employment should not come as a surprise, as less than a decade before the beginning of the war Southern representatives prevented an antilynching bill from passing through the Senate (Koppes and Black, “Blacks” 387).[36] This shop floor resistance to racial equality pulls the curtain back on the lingering effects of the failure of post-Civil War reconstruction.

Wages of whiteness were not as potent in the North, where Black workers formed more productive relationships with UAW factions. Black workers worked with the UAW, and OPM and FEPC, to secure promotions and rebuff resistance from white workers and union members.[37] Black workers and union members also worked with the NAACP to press GM and the UAW to more actively combat racial discrimination (Meier and Rudwick 98-102). The UAW aided approximately six hundred Black foundry workers in gaining promotions at Buick in Flint, helped stomp out a rumor that Black workers were replacing white workers in New York, and disavowed racially motivated hate strikes (Meier and Rudwick 124-25; Weaver, Labor 207-8; Widick 55-56).[38] In 1943, Detroit became the site on which Black union members worked with the NAACP to protest racist policies and hiring practices by organizing a march of roughly ten thousand people on the city’s Cadillac Square. The march resulted in the UAW adopting the Cadillac Charter, which pledged to combat racial discrimination (Meier and Rudwick 164). Black UAW members even became union organizers at Pontiac, Chevrolet, and Cadillac plants (Meier and Rudwick 41-44, 54, 64-65).[39] The Cadillac Charter was part of Detroit’s complicated and often tragic relationship with mid-century Black progress.

Even with the UAW’s help, Black Detroiters were forced to fight for fair treatment in and out of the factory. Over a dozen Detroit plants experienced hate strikes as the motor city’s “old elite,” along with English and European immigrants, feared being replaced by Black workers (Lichtenstein, Dangerous 207-8).[40] The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) also infiltrated Detroit auto plants and formed ties with white workers (Meier and Rudwick 109-10).[41] Outside the factory, Black residents fought against the noxious combination of a housing shortage and racist residential structures. To remedy the housing shortage, Detroit developed public housing projects. City government agencies, private developers and realtors, banks, and homeowners used restrictive racial covenants, neighborhood improvement associations, and politics to ensure that the projects kept white residents away from Black residents (Sugrue 41-47). From late 1941 to early 1942, this racial turf war reached more intense levels of violence when white citizens attempted to seize a housing project originally designated for Black occupants. white citizens called for the Sojourner Truth public housing project, which was being constructed close to a Polish American neighborhood, to be designated for white residents. City officials initially caved to the protests and reversed the designated occupants. Black residents and activists, including the NAACP, subsequently pushed back. The city eventually flipped back to designating that the project be occupied by Black occupants. But the fight was not over. The night before Black residents moved into Sojourner, the KKK burned a cross near the project. Later, a riot ensued, which led to over two hundred arrests and more than one hundred people, mostly Black, being held for trial.[42] The following year, a more violent race riot broke out on Detroit’s Belle Isle Park and spread throughout the Southeast side of the city. In the aftermath of the multi-day riot, thirty-four people died, twenty-five of whom were Black (Sugrue 29; Geschwender 66-68).[43] GM defense film production, and the broader defense film industry, arose in this “economy of difference” and were part of shaping the changing racial regime of wartime America (Robinson, Forgeries 29).

Useful Cinema and Racial Capitalism

Black mobilization during wartime inspired cinematic forms of resistance. Black newsreels targeted at race film audiences covered the ways in which Black Americans contributed to the war effort, while the OWI and other government agencies worked with Black organizations and Hollywood filmmakers to promote Black participation in conservative narratives of wartime American unity and patriotism.[44] This work challenged more mainstream defense films produced and sponsored by Hollywood newsreels, the War Department, and American corporations that omitted or undermined the ways in which Black life contributed to the war effort. In early 1944, Black presses directly confronted defense films that excluded Black life, which was undoubtedly motivated by fears of censorship from Southern markets, by accusing Hollywood newsreels and the War Department of removing Black soldiers from their war coverage material (Clark 270-72). Amid this resistance, GM’s and JHO’s defense films continued to erase and marginalize Black life.

Defense films that covered the ways in which Black Americans contributed to the war effort were produced by the nascent Black newsreel film company All-American News (AAN), the OWI, the Department of Agriculture, and the Army. AAN was founded by Emmanuel Glucksman in 1942 and featured the on- and off-screen talents of Black film personnel Charles Wilson and William Alexander. The film company was also supported by Claude Barnett, the Black journalist and founder of the Associated Negro Press (Clark 263-64). AAN content was didactic and vocational, as newsreels targeted at Black viewers combined coverage of Black soldiers’ contribution to the war with stories of Black achievement and pedagogical material on improving behavior and manners (Clark 276-82). Many of the government’s wartime motion picture endeavors came through the OWI. The OWI, established in 1942 and staffed by New Deal liberals, was the government’s principal defense propaganda agency (Koppes and Black, “Blacks” 383 and “Show” 87). It strove to address Black audiences by producing Negro Colleges in Wartime (1943). The film, which has a runtime of under ten minutes, recognizes politically uncontroversial Black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, in covering the ways in which Black colleges support the war (Cripps and Culbert 619). In 1943 the Department of Agriculture produced the well-intended but reductionist and low-budget Henry Browne, Farmer (Cripps and Culbert 619). The film, whose plot was originally conceptualized by Barnett,  follows a Black farmer and his family, who grow peanuts to supply the military with peanut oil (Cripps, Making 107).[45] Its iconography, unfortunately, resembles 1930s Hollywood films that romanticized the antebellum South by portraying the Browne farm and home as antiquated: the farm lacks a tractor and the family uses a horse and buggy to go into the city.[46] Over images of barefooted family members tending to crops, the narrator describes the farm as “forty acres of land; not particularly good land either. A barn that isn’t big or even new and no tractor. Just a team of mules, an understanding of the earth, and things that grow, and long hours of hard work for everyone” (00:04:57). The Army Air Forces 1944 film Wings for this Man associates Black life with modern machinery by covering the Tuskegee Institute’s Black fighter pilots. However, the film espouses a “colorblind” racial logic by avoiding discussion of race; the clearest articulation of this logic comes when the film’s narrator – Ronald Reagan – states, “you can’t judge a man here [Tuskegee] by the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose” (00:06:50; Cripps, Making 119). A more racially conscious, and sophisticated, cinematic exploration of Black soldiers was also produced by the Army and involved collaborating with Hollywood, a much-desired site of reform for the NAACP.

The year 1942 was a watershed year in American cinema’s portrayals of Blackness. This was the year in which AAN was launched. In Hollywood, Warner Brothers released the pro-interventionist wartime drama, Casablanca, in which a sophisticated Black piano player named Sam, played by Dooley Wilson, helps Humphrey Bogart rejoin the American fight against fascism (Cripps, Slow 370-73). The same year, more structural interventions towards representing Blackness occurred behind the scenes, so to speak, when Walter White of the NAACP and Wendell Wilkie of Twentieth Century-Fox reached an agreement with Hollywood studio bosses to create more liberating representations of Black life (Cripps, Slow 375-76).[47] This crucible of changing racial significations influenced defense filmmaking when, the same year, the Army’s Information and Education Division (I&E) began collaborating with Hollywood personnel to produce a film about Black Americans supporting the war. The Army had experience in working with Hollywood filmmakers to produce wartime propaganda films, as esteemed filmmaker Frank Capra produced the Why We Fight series for the Army. I&E turned to Capra and his staff of Hollywood regulars to begin developing a film about Black soldiers. The film’s most formative developments, including writing the film’s script, were overseen by the director Stuart Heisler, whom Capra appointed, the Black writer and serviceman Carlton Moss, and I&E social scientists. Moss, who had a background in theater, including developing the revue Salute to the Negro Troops, also acted in the film (Cripps and Culbert 617, 620-23; Cripps, Making 205). Producing the film involved visiting Black soldiers at nearly twenty Army posts across the United States. To quote Thomas Cripps and David Culbert, “never before had a film purporting to document Black American achievement been made with such professional competence” (625). The finished product was the forty-minute film The Negro Soldier (1944).[48]

The Negro Soldier stands apart from AAN newsreels and other Black defense films through grounding didactic messaging in a racially conscious and fictionalized narrative developed with Hollywood resources. The film is a social realist drama that expands on Casablanca’s Black patriotism by promoting the ways in which Black life has contributed to shaping democratic institutions in the United States. Though it does not explore domestic race relations, the film foregrounds Black literacy and competency to celebrate the American “way of life” over international fascism. Most of the film’s cast is Black, and Black performers occupy the significant roles. The narrative features a Black preacher, played by Moss, giving an urgent sermon on the war (Cripps and Culbert 625). At the beginning of the sermon, the preacher recognizes congregants who are part of the armed services, and then compares Joe Lewis’s 1938 defeat of Max Schmelling in the boxing ring to the global conflict. The preacher’s most explicit juxtaposition of American freedom with fascism occurs when he reads aloud passages from Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf that criticize Black progress in America. While he reads, the camera cuts across close-ups and medium shots of stoic congregants wearing fur coats, suits and ties, dresses, and accoutrement such as hats, brooches, and pearl necklaces (Fig. 5; 00:05:10). The sermon then becomes a survey of Black participation in American wars and nation building. The preacher describes Crispus Attucks and other Black men who fought for American independence as American revolutionary monuments and iconography fill the frame. Omitting slavery entirely, the preacher narrates nineteenth-century wars and rebuilding over scenes of white and Black men fighting and laboring alongside one another. A medium shot creates a symmetrical mise-en-scène by framing a Black man and a white man straddling a railroad track while wielding sledgehammers (Fig. 6; 00:09:36). A subsequent scene features a Black veteran, Jim, directly addressing the camera as he describes building factories and working on the Panama Canal after fighting in the Spanish-American War (Fig. 7; 00:10:15). The preacher covers World War I by naming Black soldiers who fought and died over images of monuments honoring Black servicemen. The sermon then moves to identifying Black professionals and institutions, including Black colleges and athletes at the 1936 Olympic games. As the sermon covers the dire situation in war-torn Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor, the preacher refutes ideologies of Japan being “the savior of the colored races” (00:18:53).[49] The first half of the film ends with the preacher citing military divisions in which Black Americans were currently serving.
A congregant then becomes the narrator. She is a mother, Ms. Bronson, who describes her son Robert's journey to becoming an infantry officer by reading his correspondence to the congregation. Medium shots and close-ups frame the mother, in a black blouse and hat, standing among the pews with her son’s letter in hand (Fig. 8; 00:20:37). The camera leaves the church to show her son’s rise in the infantry. As Robert is welcomed into an Army camp, he stands among white and Black men wearing a hat and jacket over a shirt and tie (Fig. 9; 00:21:55). Robert describes his work experience in defense manufacturing to an interviewer by citing operating boring mills, tool grinders, and drill presses (00:22:18). Montages feature Robert and other soldiers being fitted for uniforms, learning how to salute, marching, and participating in recreational activities such as football, ping pong, and reading. The film momentarily slows down to describe the Army library. As Robert describes listening to poetry, a close-up features a Black woman reading An Anthology of American Negro Literature. Throughout the shot, the camera moves into a closer view of the book’s cover (Fig. 10; 00:27:46). The next scenes cover Black women soldiers who were members in the Women’s Army Corps, and shows them marching and operating automobiles. During a Sunday service, an Army chaplain highlights the increased number of Black soldiers and soldiers with high school educations serving in the current war (00:30:08).
The preacher resumes the narration in the film’s final section. He describes the roles of other Black soldiers over scenes featuring airborne Tuskegee pilots, jeeps traversing snow-covered terrains, moving tanks evading enemy fire, and anti-aircraft men loading artillery. He cites former tailors, printers, cooks, carpenters, and teachers becoming military engineers, quartermasters, mechanics, infantrymen, and radio operators (00:32:40). After recognizing fallen soldiers, the sermon ends with the preacher impressing upon his congregation, one final time, the importance of defending democratic freedom against fascism. A montage of masses of Black marching soldiers then closes the film (Figs. 11-12; 00:39:00-00:40:04). In foregrounding Black intelligence, The Negro Soldier stands out as a transgressive mode of didacticism that countered the dominant, even ubiquitous, white modes of signification employed in other defense propaganda films, especially films produced by GM and JHO.[50]
GM-JHO defense films abdicated The Negro Soldier’s ideologies of Black acumen by promoting white forms of labor while obscuring and degrading Black labor in patriotic narratives of production and victory. GM-JHO’s These People (1944) is also a social realist narrative that covers GM’s (and more broadly, American enterprise’s) conversion from peacetime production to wartime production. The film’s mode of narration is, ironically, akin to the Soviet historical materialist cinema of 1925-1933 (Bordwell, Narration ch. 11). These People uses symphonic music and a didactic offscreen narrator to describe the conversion of a GM Frigidaire plant in Dayton, Ohio into a site of defense production. The narrative alternates between two primary spaces: the Dayton factory and overseas war combat sequences, the latter sequences having been shot by the Army Air Forces Combat Film Service. City views of Dayton make up the film’s third space. In covering these different spaces, the camera alternates between long shots, medium shots, and close-ups of people, machines, tools, factory buildings, military planes and weapons, and city horizons. The subjects who populate the narrative are defense workers, along with American soldiers and Dayton citizens. Together, these people are patriotic Americans fighting at home and abroad to win the war. In exploring these people, the camera gravitates towards white workers.

These People opens with long shots of masses of white workers outside factory buildings. The subsequent intertitle contextualizes factory workers as part of the war by describing defense production as a battle against “the enemy” (00:00:40). The film then cuts to exterior scenes of white soldiers in uniform and flying gear boarding planes, and planes lifting off the ground. An eleven-second sequence foreshadows the film’s ending by cutting across four close-ups of white pilots’ faces (Fig. 13; 00:01:20). The camera moves back to the factory where upright propeller blades glide along conveyors. The narrator unites these two locales by referring to them as “fronts” (00:02:00). Outside the factory, views of Dayton feature buildings along a river and pedestrians moving through a busy intersection as the narrator proclaims that Dayton is “a city full of war industries, a city full of war workers” (00:02:23). With this, the film establishes its milieu: industry, military, and city are united in a fight for freedom. The film then moves more intimately into the Dayton plant to promote the white worker-heroes.
The narrator explains how a Frigidaire plant was converted from a peacetime manufacturer to a defense manufacturer. First is the physical remodeling of the factory. The background music becomes more muted over a tableau of six suited white men around a table covered with blueprints—plant engineers coordinating the reconstruction of the factory (Fig. 14; 00:04:34). Images transition from barren rooms to construction scenes and then to large defense machines. The narrator moves to training defense workers. Women workers become a crucial ingredient to fighting the enemy. As the narrator describes the training of women, blunt imagery features a woman pushing a rolling pin transitioning to a woman assembling a cylindrical device in the factory (00:05:40). Medium and long shots show factory spaces full of white men and women working alongside one another.
The narrative moves into a more detailed coverage of precision production. Scenes of white men operating forklifts and drilling machines and women measuring propeller blades fill the frame. As the narrator describes balancing blades, the camera moves from medium shots of men handling blades to close-ups of hands adjusting tools and parts. A long shot shows five white men operating machines that produce gun bolts (Fig. 15; 00:09:43). These factory views then transition to an airborne soldier shooting down planes as the narrator cites the more than two hundred parts that make up aircraft machine guns (00:10:00). As the camera reenters the factory, the film covers the shift from craft modes of production to modern machine production, with scenes of white men and women handling materials and operating machines. As the narrator describes innovations in packaging guns, the camera cuts from workers wrapping plastic around guns to soldiers carrying guns across different terrains.
The film ends by framing individual workers. In this one-minute sequence, the visual language shifts to an intimate montage that frames the faces of the Dayton worker-heroes in isolated close-ups and medium shots over the narrator’s oration: “Here in the ability of American industry, in the ability of these people, of all the people in American industry to meet and conquer a challenging new problem is the secret weapon the enemy did not expect” (00:14:34). This montage includes the film’s only explicit shot of a Black worker. Pointedly, the film’s framing of the Black worker is distinct from its framing of the white workers. Along with the Black worker, a man, the montage features six white men and five white women. The camera frames the white men using tools, in an office setting, or against moving machinery (Fig. 16). The camera frames the women either against moving machinery or in a melodramatic soft-focus close-up that obscures the background to more brightly light the women’s faces (Fig. 17). Conversely, the camera does not frame the Black man alongside machinery, in an office, or through sentimental soft-focus photography. Rather, the camera frames the Black man, dressed in a nondescript button-down shirt, against a barren wall (Fig. 18; 00:14:35). The camera also retreats from a close-up to a medium shot to frame the Black man; the only other time the camera uses a medium shot in the montage is to show a white man in a suit and tie sitting at an office desk. The Black man is slightly off center and maintains a downcast posture. Moreover, the length of the take is shorter. While the camera holds on some of the white workers for up to five seconds, it frames the Black worker for less than two seconds. In this denouement, Black labor becomes what Richard Wright would call an outsider in the American system of industrial labor.
GM’s and JHO’s Victory is Our Business (1942) is another historical materialist narrative. Whereas These People foregrounds precision production, Victory promotes the scope of GM’s defense production operations; in the first minute of the film, the narrator proclaims that GM defense production covers nearly one hundred plants. A zealous narrator and shorter takes gloss over different defense products in indiscriminate factory spaces until, at around the halfway point, the film settles into two locales: a Dayton factory and overseas war scenes. The war footage sits in between two Dayton factory sequences. Across this bricolage of factory scenes, Victory also conceals Black labor.

The opening minute of the film enters the General Motors Institute of Technology where the corporation trains defense workers. A long shot shows rows of studious white men bent over desks as the narrator proclaims the importance of “training men for the tremendous job of making, using, and maintaining the tools of war” (Fig. 19; 00:00:41). Classroom imagery flows seamlessly into factory views featuring white workers operating machines. The film fades to black before opening again onto a long shot of two columns of workers assembling material. The subsequent minutes feature short sequences of production views inside unnamed factories as the narrator orates GM’s triumphant panorama of war production: “Production mounts and new blood is added. Girls and women take their place on the line, along with the men of industry” (00:51:00). Rows of white women operate welding machinery behind face masks, more women operate drill presses, and men assemble trucks. The camera moves from medium shots and close-ups of men assembling a large engine to long shots of rows of engines as the narrator spotlights three plants that produce diesel engines. Shell cartridges glide along conveyors to punctuate the narrator’s explanation of the speed with which GM produces weapons. The camera moves into a foundry to cover GM’s innovative methods of casting metal. Amid fire-breathing furnaces, white men shielded in goggles and gloves move iron buckets (00:02:31). Back in the factory, white men and women operate roller bearing machines. A canted angle frames a factory woman donning a pearl necklace (Fig. 20; 00:03:07).
The film moves on to cover plane production. The camera cuts from white men polishing metal cylinders to a close-up of a spinning propeller and then to men pushing a plane out of a factory. The narrator covers producing plane engines over a series of eleven shots of white men assembling engines. High and low angles shoot men assembling parts. A poetic medium shot with a slightly low angle gazes up at a man adjusting parts, as an American flag hangs above him (00:03:59). The camera cuts to a closer two-shot of two men working on an engine and then pulls farther back to show a row of men tending to engines. The most revealing shot in the sequence follows. A medium shot frames a tableau of six white men around one engine. Two of the men wear dark vests over white shirts, while the other men wear dark long-sleeved shirts. Beyond the tableau, in the background of the frame, stands a Black man wearing a white t-shirt (Fig. 21; 00:04:05). This shot of racial disharmony among workers is a visual allegory of the “organizing structure” of racism and an antithesis to the symmetrical framing of a Black and white worker straddling a railroad track in The Negro Soldier (Robinson, Black 67; Fig. 22).
Victory then moves to a Dayton plant as the narrator covers the production of bomber planes. Medium shots and long shots of bespectacled white women working with lightweight material transition to a moving camera gliding past white men tending to nearly finished planes. As a plane rolls out of a hangar, the narrator describes Dayton as “a city at war!” (00:05:07). An abrupt cut follows. The film moves from the factory to the battlefield. Battleships fire cannons into the horizon, an aerial overhead shot shows bombs falling through the sky, soldiers carrying rifles disappear into smoke, and buildings are ablaze.

As the film returns to Dayton, the narrator praises Dayton’s war workers. White men carry propeller blades, a masked worker grinds a blade, another man pushes ammunition through a conveyor, women assemble small parts at tables, and other men and women operate machinery. This is the narrator’s crescendo on Dayton workers supporting the war. Over views of white workers, the narrator waxes that “it is the sweat of the workman that wins this war. It is the products of these miracle men in a miracle industry. The industries of Dayton and the men and women of Dayton are fighting this war on the production line . . .” (00:09:36). This oration sets up the film’s most formally sophisticated sequence. In the final minute, the medium shots and close-ups of white workers become transparent outlines that are superimposed over a mass of workers marching down a wide hall. Halfway through the superimposed imagery, the outlines of workers transition to transparent wartime battle scenes. Viewers must look closely through this palimpsest to discern sporadic Black workers marching amid the white mass (Figs. 23-24). This multilayered imagery puts a gauze over Black labor and becomes another inversion of The Negro Soldier’s own formally innovative ending of a montage of masses of marching Back soldiers (Figs. 25-26). In The Negro Soldier, marching masses signify Black solidarity and patriotism. In Victory is Our Business, marching masses signify a mode of patriotism and labor in which whiteness alienates Black workers.
In 1942—the same year in which AAN was founded, Warner Brothers released Casablanca, the NAACP reached an agreement with Hollywood studios to create more liberating Black roles, and the Army began developing The Negro Soldier—GM and JHO released their most explicitly racist defense film. Close Harmony (1942) repudiates the more egalitarian racial significations burgeoning throughout wartime American cinema through its portrayal of its one Black character. Close Harmony’s Black character shares the same name as Casablanca’s Black piano player, Sam. But the Sam in Close Harmony is not a sophisticated artist. Rather, he is an unsophisticated servant, made up in the trappings of the derogatory “Tom” archetype.

Unlike These People and Victory is Our Business, Close Harmony is closer to the “classical” mode of narration (Bordwell ch. 9). The barbershop-set narrative dramatizes support for the war through depicting white barbershop workers and patrons debating the quality of American defense production. The white conversing characters include the patron Jim Thompson, a factory manager; Mr. Jefferies, another patron; Max, the barber shop manager; an unnamed manicurist; and a third patron, also unnamed. At the beginning of the film, Thompson is the lone advocate for efficient defense production, while the other white characters argue that American defense production is behind schedule. Thompson gradually wins over the skeptical workers and patrons by explaining the ways in which defense production overcame initial war challenges to meet new demands. Conversely, the narrative positions Sam outside the white characters’ conversation, which is to say outside the film’s primary plot. Sam does not engage or take a side in the defense production debate. Instead, he serves the plot. On one level, he aids the conversation by learning that he has been enlisted into service at the beginning of the film, thus embodying and animating the issue about which the White characters converse. On another level, visually, Sam tends to customers and cleans the shop while the white characters debate the quality of defense production. The film’s framing of Sam accentuates his subordination to the white characters and plot.

Close Harmony opens by emphasizing Sam’s difference from the other characters. A mail carrier delivers a letter to Sam, who viewers first see bent over with his back to the camera (00:00:26). After opening the letter, Sam realizes he has been drafted. The white characters then prompt Sam to read aloud his letter (00:00:50). It immediately becomes apparent that Sam is less sophisticated, as he speaks in a stereotypical and antiquated Black dialect while struggling to read the letter aloud, a striking contrast with the sequences of Black literacy in The Negro Soldier. Furthermore, cuts between Sam and the white workers accentuate the porter's difference. While the manager, other barbers, and manicurist wear smooth white coats and blouses, Sam wears a wrinkled and often unbuttoned jacket with sleeves that are too short to reach his wrists—another marked distantiation from the sophisticated wardrobes of The Negro Soldier’s Black characters (Fig. 27). After he reads his draft letter, the white characters patronize Sam by encouraging him to fight bravely and referring to him as a “good boy” (00:01:40). The barber shop manager, whom Sam refers to as “boss,” selfishly quips, “well I guess that means I’ll have to get me another porter” (00:01:21). Just then, the patron, Jefferies, in a multipiece suit and tie, enters the shop. Sam greets Jefferies by taking the patron’s hat. The debonaire man then pushes the plot towards the defense production conversation as Sam exits the frame.
Medium shots and close-ups frame the white characters as they debate the quality of defense production. Jefferies paces throughout the shop while criticizing defense production as being behind schedule. Another patron, manicurist, and the barber shop manager echo Jefferies’s criticisms. Thompson, the factory manager, then enters the conversation. Surrounded by cosmetics and mirrors, Thompson rebuts defense production criticism. The factory manager, seated in a barber chair and wearing a smock, describes how defense production started slowly, but, as manufacturers adopted new production methods and technologies, factories have met and exceeded defense production schedules. His explanations become more specific. A facial close-up of more than thirty seconds frames Thompson as he breaks down the steps of producing military planes (00:05:05). To demonstrate the challenges that manufacturers had to overcome in producing new products, he points out differences between barber chairs and standard chairs. To underline the need to train workers on how to use new tools, he jokingly offers to finish cutting a patron’s hair. The camera breaks up Thompson’s oration by cutting to tableaus of white patrons and workers. A medium shot frames a standing Jeffries beside a portrait of Abraham Lincoln (00:06:50). A final pair of long close-ups of Thompson’s face close out the factory manager’s argument on effective defense production (Fig. 28). Near the end of his speech, he shifts from explanation to promotion by paraphrasing the Chevrolet war slogan of “producing more for victory” (00:10:00).

Sam is an interstitial figure throughout the defense production conversation. While the other characters debate, cut hair, and receive manicures, Sam moves between the margins of the frame. As Thompson discusses receiving defense contracts to produce new material, an out-of-focus Sam, with a broom in hand, crosses the left side of the frame (Fig. 29; 00:03:48). A fragmented and barely visible Sam stands in the background and to the far-left side of the frame as Thompson explains the difference between barber chairs and standard chairs (00:06:18). A seventeen-second sequence visibly contrasts Sam against white characters in a single frame. In this shot, the barber shop manager and manicurist help Jefferies into a barber chair. The manager places a smock over Jefferies and the manicurist attaches a small table to the barber chair before sitting beside the patron. Behind Jefferies, a standing Thompson adjusts his tie while looking in a mirror. In the background, Sam, with his jacket unbuttoned, scratches the top of his head as he looks, perhaps confusedly, at a newspaper in hand—another abdication of Black literacy (00:07:30). Another medium shot featuring Sam polishing shoes in the background breaks up Thompson’s oration (00:09:43). Furthermore, as Thompson finishes his speech, Sam crosses the right side of the frame to retrieve a brush. As he retrieves the brush, Sam’s Blackness becomes a more visible marker of difference as he steps out of the high key lighting that showers the white characters in the center of the frame (Fig. 30; 00:10:02).

Two standalone frames featuring Sam break up the defense production conversation. Both scenes, which total approximately sixteen seconds, feature Sam using a telephone to tell unseen peers that he has been drafted (00:04:10, 00:05:49). In these scenes, the camera does not cover Sam as intimately as it covers the white characters. In fact, Sam is never shot in close-up. Instead, the camera keeps standalone images of Sam in medium shots. A final standalone shot of Sam closes the film. Sam’s interaction with Thompson sets up the closing shot and underlines the factory manager’s position (now shared by the other characters) on defense production. As Thompson leaves the shop, Sam brushes his hat and thanks him for explaining how manufacturers are supplying the military with arms (00:10:16). The film then cuts to a medium shot of Sam using the phone one final time to announce that he has been called (00:10:34). Sam’s enthusiasm is his final service to the film’s plot. His eagerness to enlist, and thus to leave the barber shop, resolves the conflict and establishes peace in the white milieu.

Sam’s performance as an unsophisticated and loyal servant to white superiors unveils ways in which denigrating and centuries-old modes of Black performance and representation permeated throughout the period of modern American manufacturing. GM used films to organize a system of racial significations and labor hierarchies in which Blackness was inferior to whiteness, thus embedding cinema in a system of “racial capitalism” (Robinson, Black 2). Analyzing American industry’s use of media illuminates overlooked social and ideological mechanisms of American capitalism. Industry’s use of cinema, useful cinema, became a powerful force in shaping the American racial regime in the twentieth century.

The Postwar Racial Regime

GM’s defense films foreshadowed the auto corporation’s postwar race-labor relations. As the company strove to cripple a surging postwar labor movement and hastily retreat from a wartime planned economy, it pushed Black workers to the margins of the market.[51] GM enacted largescale decentralized production operations that involved building new plants in suburban and rural regions in the South and West, a process that, over time, abandoned stalwart northern industrial cities with large Black populations such as Detroit and Flint (Highsmith 121-32).[52] Black GM workers were also susceptible to replacement by white workers returning from the war.[53] This had fatal consequences in Detroit’s Cadillac plant. As white workers returned, general manager Dreystadt was forced to lay off the Black women he had hired for precision production. Dreystadt fought to keep the women employed, but the UAW rebuffed him. According to Peter F. Drucker, some of the laid-off women subsequently committed suicide (270; Cray 318-19). Moreover, Black workers who held onto jobs had to keep their guard up against hostile white workers and managers who resumed hate strikes to protest Black promotions, timed Black workers’ labor to scrutinize output, used aptitude and emotional tests to prevent Black promotions, and laid off Black workers before they could gain seniority employment status (Highsmith 87-88, 94-101; Northrup, Automobiles 28-29).[54] GM’s alienation of Black labor contributed to shaping the postwar racial regime.

GM’s postwar race-labor relations, along with the broader erosion of a Left-wing movement that was rooted in labor, was part of a realigning of America’s postwar racial regime towards abdicating Black working-class mobilization (Korstad and Lichtenstein, 800).[55] After the war, corporate power expanded by restricting organized labor’s capacity to influence business and market systems, as well as using aggressive public relations endeavors and public policy, most notably the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism” 133-34).[56] These market forces and government policies, along with the growth of suburban modes of residence and the beginning of the Cold War, helped bequeath a cultural conservatism that peaked with the Red Scare in the mid-1950s. Fears of communism and domestic enemies helped exacerbate tensions between Black workers and labor unions, fracture Black organizations, and deflate Popular Front liberal coalitions while straining public sympathy for progressive movements that could be construed as being associated with communism or socialism (Korstad and Lichtenstein 800-1, 806-9; Foner 287-92; Denning 24-25).[57] In this period of increased enforcement of a cultural consensus, Right-wing groups boycotted and picketed films that explored domestic social problems. As the Red Scare coincided with declining American movie audiences, Hollywood retreated from producing the kind of explicitly liberal and didactic social problem films that filmmakers and writers with Popular Front sympathies made throughout the 1930s and 1940s (Neve 68-78). A final phase of these liberal social realist films occurred just before the Red Scare and the increasing popularity of television forced Hollywood to tighten its purse strings. In the immediate postwar period, studios released “message movies” that explored American race relations and illuminated social issues that the Civil Rights Movement would later foreground (Cripps, Making 219-26; Neve 76).[58] Of these message movies, which included Pinky (1949), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), and No Way Out (1950), Home of the Brave stands out as a spiritual successor to The Negro Soldier. The film, set during World War II, explores the racism that a Black soldier experiences while surveying a Japanese island with fellow white American soldiers. Moreover, Home of the Brave’s writer, Carl Foreman, named his leading Black character, Moss, after his friend Carlton Moss, who wrote and acted in The Negro Soldier (Cripps, Making 222-23). This decline in didactic cinematic treatments of race was not exclusive to Hollywood, as AAN also dissolved in the 1950s (Clark 284-85). As didactic cinematic treatments of race decreased, GM and JHO continued producing sanctimonious films that spotlit white workers, consumers, and suburban dwellers.[59] It would take a new kind of Black mobilization, one with Southern roots, and the emergence of a new cultural left-wing movement to force GM, and continue forcing American cinema, to move Blackness closer to the center of the market and cinematic frame. 

Notes