“Don’t Pray for Me, Pray for Them!”: Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night and Hollywood “Redneckification” of Anti-Black Racism

Abstract

Since winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1968, Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night has been considered a landmark of Hollywood civil rights cinema. In Virgil Tibbs, generally considered the silver screen’s first Black detective, Sidney Poitier captured widespread anger over the glacial pace of social change in the early 1960s. Yet In the Heat of the Night also works to reproduce post-war Hollywood’s narrative regionalization of racism, in which discrimination, racial violence, and forms of institutional and structural racism are construed as distinctly southern phenomena. With emphasis on specific production decisions involving Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay, Jewison’s directorial choices, and the calculations of industry executives, this article considers how Hollywood’s “redneckification” of racism works to efface not only histories of racism in the American North and West but also the Canadian racism which marked Jewison’s Toronto childhood and animated his anti-racist sensibilities as a filmmaker.