cultural narratives is as much an inalienable claim to citizenship as is any other right. However, Jim Crow systems result in marginalized groups’ loss of basic citizenship through political disenfranchisement. Barriers to attain equal rights to produce popular cinema resemble exclusions from citizenship that characterized the experiences of Black people during previous Jim Crow eras. Lacking the capabilities to contribute to cinematic expression in an ideal fashion, African Americans achieve only an incomplete cultural citizenship and belonging in the United States.
Black Directors: Then and Now
The quest for representation in Hollywood for Black directors has run the gamut from full exclusion to a growing inclusion. Throughout the vast majority of the twentieth century, African Americans were barred from directing Hollywood films. In the onset of the American film industry and the Hollywood system, African Americans were excluded as directors at major Hollywood studios. Barred from the mainstream film industry, African Americans such as Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams labored outside Hollywood studios, starting independent film companies and disseminating “race movies”—films that, from the 1910s through the 1950s, centered on Black themes, featured Black casts, and targeted Black audiences.35 Some producers especially stood out from the bunch. During the silent-film era, Bill Foster’s Chicago-based Foster Photoplay produced short films such as The Railroad Porter (1912) and The Fall Guy (1913). Soon after, the Universal Studios actor Noble Johnson founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which likewise produced short films, its first being The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916).36
Following the production of short films, African Americans ventured into feature filmmaking. By far, the most prominent filmmaker during the silent era was Oscar Micheaux, who in 1918 started the Micheaux Film & Book Company and in 1919 directed the first feature-length film by an African American filmmaker: The Homesteader, a film adaptation of his second novel. Over the course of his prolific career, Micheaux made twenty-six silent films and seventeen sound films.37 In the late 1920s, however, Black cinema’s progress faced strong obstacles including the depletion of financing in the time of the Great Depression and a lack of resources during the transition from silent to sound films. Still, independent Black filmmaking and race movies thrived up until the 1950s, with filmmakers such as Spencer Williams, who started the Lincoln Talking Pictures Company. Despite early filmmakers’ successful careers outside Hollywood, all the while, Black Americans remained entirely excluded from directorial work within mainstream film companies. Like the racial order of the broader society, this situation was bound to change in the coming decades.
During the 1940s, the top priority for Black Americans in the film industry became the push for integration into Hollywood. These aspirations followed a growing integration ideology of antidiscrimination rhetoric, spurred by African American troops fighting for equal treatment in the armed forces during and following World War II.38 Increasingly, African Americans brought pressure on institutions to end racial discrimination and integrate schools, communities, and workplaces. Led by the Hollywood chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), African American directors challenged their exclusion from white Hollywood companies.39 Advocates lobbied to improve the on-screen portrayal of Black characters and to increase the behind-the-camera presence of Black creative talent on mainstream films. African Americans also participated in letter-writing campaigns, picket lines, protests, and boycotts to advocate for film-industry jobs on-screen and behind the camera. This activism during the civil rights era orchestrated the entry of Black directors into Hollywood in the post-civil-rights era.
Since the end of the civil rights era, African Americans have gained increased access to directing films at Hollywood studios. With Gordon Parks Sr.’s film adaptation of his novel The Learning Tree, he became the first African American to direct a Hollywood film, for Warner Brothers, in 1969. Yet amid the 1960s era of social-problem films, on-screen fictional advancement far outpaced behind-the-camera working conditions for racial minorities. During the 1970s Blaxploitation era, Melvin Van Peebles directed The Watermelon Man (1970) for Columbia, Gordon Parks Jr. directed Superfly (1972) for Warner Brothers, Ivan Dixon directed Trouble Man (1972) for 20th Century Fox, and Michael Schultz directed Car Wash (1976) for Universal Pictures—to name a few who pioneered entry into Hollywood.
Whereas before the 1960s, there were no Black directors in Hollywood, by the 1980s, African Americans accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of film directors, according to Directors Guild of America membership. Subsequently, the 1980s and 1990s brought about what the film scholar Ed Guerrero calls the “Black Film Boom”—a spike in directing, with Hollywood studios optioning independent works of Black filmmakers for commercial release.40 This group of commercial independent trailblazers included Spike Lee, the writer/director of the 1986 romantic comedy She’s Gotta Have It, about a woman and her three lovers; Robert Townsend, the writer/director of the 1987 satirical comedy Hollywood Shuffle, about stereotyped roles for Black folks in show business; and John Singleton, the writer/director of Boyz N the Hood (1991), about the lives of three young men in South Central Los Angeles.
Black women also gained access to Hollywood film directing, beginning with the Haitian-born Euzhan Palcy, who directed A Dry White Season (1989) for Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). Years later, the Miramax film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1993), a coming-of-age story about an adolescent girl in Brooklyn, became the first mainstream film released to theaters that was written and directed by an American-born Black woman, Leslie Harris. In 1994, Darnell Martin’s I Like It like That, for Columbia, became the first Black-female-directed film distributed by a major Hollywood studio. Martin’s entrée into directing was followed by that of other Black female directors. In 1997, for example, Kasi Lemmons wrote and directed Eve’s Bayou, a period drama that followed a mystical Louisiana family during the 1960s. Three years later, Gina Prince-Bythewood wrote and directed the popular sports romance Love and Basketball (2000). By the 2000s, the percentage of Black directors had nearly tripled to between 6 and 8 percent and also included a number of female directors.41 In just a few short decades, Hollywood became more inclusive of Black directors. The pendulum of Hollywood film directing swung from complete exclusion to growing inclusion.
Still, directors and audiences witness an unsteady number of Black movies in theaters. Tyler Perry, known for his Madea comedies and dramas, describes this pattern as waves of Black movies that come and go: “Hollywood always has a wave, and in these waves comes films about people of color. It’s just a wave that happens and once it crests, it goes away. Back in the nineties there were lots of movies about African American people, then I come along for many years and it’s only me out there.”42 Over the years, there has hardly been a strong, uninterrupted output of Black-directed movies in theaters. Rather, there are ebbs and flows, highs and lulls. The media researcher Stacy Smith and colleagues report no meaningful change in the percentage of Black directors of top-grossing films between 2007 and 2013. In fact, only 6.5 percent of the one hundred top-grossing films in 2013 had Black directors: Malcolm D. Lee’s Scary Movie 5 and Best Man Holiday, Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas and Temptation, McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Lee Daniels’s The Butler, and Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen.43
Beyond the sheer inconsistency in the presence of Black directors behind the camera of Hollywood motion pictures, these trends also reflect that when the film industry as a whole takes a hit and the total film output for all studios decreases, racial minorities receive the hardest blows and suffer the most in lack of employment. This harsh reality is consistent with other studies that report that Blacks are the first to be fired from companies when business subsides.44 At any rate, their level of representation throughout the history of Hollywood remains below their 13 percent share of the general U.S. population.
Despite an overall promising increase in African American participation in film directing over the past decades, the problem of racial inequality in the film industry remains a constant fixture in contemporary public discourse and among scholars of film, media, communications, sociology, and economics. Film professionals, content creators, activist groups, critics, and audiences also sense problems amid progress. Accusations of racial inequality and discriminatory treatment still remain prominent, and
