Black Male Frames: African Americans in a Century of Hollywood Cinema, 1903‐2003Roland LeanderWilliamsJr.Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Abstract

Black Male Frames: African Americans in a Century of Hollywood Cinema, 1903-2003 Roland Leander Williams, Jr. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015.In Roland Leander Williams, Jr.'s second monograph, Black Male Frames, the author argues that today's commercial film industry carries on a centuries-old practice of dividing African American male roles into two slavery-era stereotypes: a contented slave or a wretched freeman (xv). An associate professor of English at Temple University, Williams illustrates how film professionals package and sell variations of these two characters to American moviegoers, depending on what the social and political climate behind the scenes will allow and without compromising ticket sales. Using five case studies that move forward through time, the author contextualizes the careers of iconic African-American actors-Sam Lucas, Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman-and demonstrates that Hollywood's history of marginalizing black actors to certain roles is one that continues to repeat itself and, unfortunately, shows no sign of stopping.Black Male Frames opens with a summary of the historical events responsible for breathing life into the stereotype that Blacks could go along with the system, or they could go against it (14). Starting in the early seventeenth century, Williams describes a time when laws reduced blacks to chattle and barred them from marriage, property, and family and Shakespeare created an obstinate Caliban to contrast with his obliging Othello (8, 14). Two hundred years later, Harriet Beecher Stowe's loyal Tom and defiant George characters reinforced this same dichotomy while minstrelsy's popular white performers Thomas Rice, who played the loyal servant Jim Crow, and George Washington Dixon, who played the scoundrel Zip Coon, donned blackface makeup for audiences across the country, inspiring copycat performances along the way (19). Williams's historical analysis leaves no question about how fully this limited perception of black men had saturated American culture by the nineteenth century.Following analyses of the life and times of Lucas and Robeson, Williams puts the spotlight on actors with whom readers will be more familiar. The son of Bahamian parents, Sidney Poitier grew up extremely poor in the 1930s, and, after a brief prison stay, young Poitier's parents sent him off to live with his brother in Miami where Jim Crow custom taught him to stoop and smile in the company of (89). A shift occurred throughout World War Two, however, and speaking of blacks as primitives was going out of vogue; whites increasingly recognized the need for black inclusion (93). Williams argues that the desegregation of the military, Jackie Robinson's taking the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Brown v. …