Movies About Slavery
Abbie Buesing
Film has been the most influential medium in the presentation of the history of slavery to the general public.[1][2] The American film industry has had a complex relationship with slavery, and until recent decades often avoided the topic. Films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915)[3] and Gone with the Wind (1939) became controversial because they gave a favorable depiction. In 1940, The Santa Fe Trail gave a strong condemnation of abolitionist John Brown's attacks on slavery.[4] The American civil rights movement in the 1950s made defiant slaves into heroes.[5]
Most Hollywood films used American settings, although Spartacus (1960) dealt with an actual slave revolt in the Roman Empire known as the Third Servile War.[6] It failed, and all the rebels were executed, but their spirit lived on according to the film.[7] The Last Supper (La ltima cena in Spanish) was a 1976 film directed by Cuban Toms Gutirrez Alea about the teaching of Christianity to slaves in Cuba and emphasizes the role of ritual and revolt. The 1969 film Burn! takes place on the imaginary Portuguese island of Queimada (where the locals speak Spanish) and merges historical events that took place in Brazil, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, and elsewhere.[8]
Film has long shaped our nation's historical memory, for good and bad. Film historian Ron Briley offers ways to responsibly use films in the classroom to reframe the typical narrative of American slavery and Reconstruction.
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Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have always loved the movies. Among my fondest childhood memories are trips with Aunt Shirley and Aunt Shelley to the old Kings Plaza Theater on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. There, I left the borough behind to explore galaxies far, far away, and phoned home when I found the Lost Ark before traipsing through the Temple of Doom.
My film class covers the black experience from slavery through the present. Once a week, we meet at a theater on the outskirts of campus and watch a major motion picture. The last time I taught the class, we started with 12 Years A Slave and ended with Moonlight, and in between, we screened everything from Amistad and Glory to Fences and Fruitvale Station. These movies make the black experience come alive, adding depth and dimension to the famous and the forgotten, to the extraordinary and the everyday. They help students imagine the seemingly unimaginable; generating empathy by capturing and conveying deep emotion.
As much as my students enjoy these films, they alone are not enough to teach them to think critically about popular portrayals of hard history like American slavery, so I pair every movie with documentary films. Sometimes, three and four a week. I found that students who resist reading 20 minutes a night will watch a two-hour documentary in a heartbeat.
An area where we might look at employing film in the classroom and how feature films have really influenced how we view a period is in the teaching of Reconstruction, and I think in teaching Reconstruction, you must relate that to slavery, because I think the popular perception of Reconstruction is a rather negative one. Historians such as Eric Foner have done a great job in recent years of trying to change how we perceive Reconstruction; to view Reconstruction as a great experiment, a biracial coalition seeking to promote racial understanding, trying to overcome the burden of slavery.
What I would like to do is talk about some specific examples. This sort of myth of Reconstruction, which one still often finds in the history classroom and in some textbooks, has been perpetuated in films such as Birth of a Nation from 1915 and Gone With the Wind from 1939. These two pivotal films really present the negative stereotype of Reconstruction, which has permeated American popular culture, and to a great extent, American politics throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.
What happens is, Silas Lynch reveals that he wants to marry a white woman, and Stoneman seems okay with this till he finds out that the woman that Silas Lynch wants to marry is his daughter, Elsa. This sets off the entire conflict here, where Elsa is taken captive, the father is taken captive in town; meanwhile out in the countryside, freed blacks are taking over and attacking a cabin in which the Stoneman and Cameron families, other members of the family, have taken refuge.
A very troubling moment in American history. However, in many textbooks, many teachers, presentations, this stereotype of Reconstruction has been perpetuated. And it continued with the very famous Gone With the Wind in 1939, and I use Gone With the Wind after we have screened the Birth of a Nation. The first half of the film is set in slavery; the second half of Gone With the Wind deals with Reconstruction, and Gone With the Wind is a little less over the top in its racism than Birth of a Nation. The NAACP insisted that use of, for example, the N-word, be taken out of the film, and actually, the Klan is not mentioned by name, but is certainly alluded to.
Again, the bad guys are the northern troops, the freed blacks, except for loyal former slaves like Sam, and this is all orchestrated by the carpetbaggers. But again, this view of Reconstruction very much perpetuated in popular culture, from Gone With the Wind down to the present.
The film culminates in a series of court cases, but culminates in the arguments of John Quincy Adams, former president, who is now in the House of Representatives and played by Anthony Hopkins, in a role for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It culminates in his argument before the Supreme Court, in which he basically appeals for the freedom for the mutineers and their leader, Cinqu. He says that they should be freed, and he uses primarily arguments from the Declaration of Independence. He appeals to the court using the arguments of people like Jefferson, even though he was a slave owner. His own father, John Adams, George Washington, also a slave owner. And what happens is, the court agrees, and the mutineers are freed and returned to their home in West Africa.
But something else that I would point out to students about the film is that, while it does show black agency in terms of the slave revolt and finally winning their freedom, Hollywood films often tend to emphasize the white characters. So in many ways, the center of the film becomes John Quincy Adams making his arguments before the Supreme Court, and the film tends to ignore the fact that the court, in setting these former slaves free, really was not so much using the Declaration of Independence in their reasoning. They were really talking more about property rights, which they wanted to be sure were protected. After all, this is the same Supreme Court that issues the Dred Scott decision later. Of course, that decision upheld that blacks were not citizens of the United States and therefore, there could be no restrictions legislatively put on slavery and declared them as a compromise, unconstitutional. I think that aspect needs to be pointed out in students evaluating the film; this tendency to often, even in films that are empathetic toward blacks, to still emphasize the white character.
They present this regiment finally going into action in the assault against Fort Wagner in South Carolina, and the film very much does a good job of showing black agency as the troops want to fight for their freedom. This was not something that was just done by whites and handed to blacks. Instead, this was something that blacks took a very important role in, and essentially, the information on the attack is accurate. The attack was unsuccessful, and what you have, in a lack of respect afterwards, is sort of a mass grave in which the black troops were thrown in, their bodies.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ron Briley is a film historian who recently retired from Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico after teaching history for 37 years. He was also an adjunct professor of history at the University of New Mexico, Valencia campus for 20 years. Mr. Briley is the author of five books and numerous articles on the intersection of history, politics and film.
79% of Black adults said they were likely to see a film about the experience of present-day Black Americans, while 61% said they would be likely to see a film about slavery or segregation in the United States.
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As a member of the colored community, you can bet I've grown up hearing about all the ways we ("black" folks specifically) have been oppressed by the "white man". Historically speaking, this has absolutely been the case - systemically & socially. That's not even a debate.
Nevertheless, I for one am tired of reminiscing in the rearview mirror of time on how our community has been finessed & fucked time & time again. In this BLM era it has almost become a fetish to recollect the lows of our people's history.
Instead of another slavery movie (just in case we forgot!) or other piece of "entertainment" depicting us killing & betraying each other for profit or pride, how about something triumphant? How about we focus on the achievements made & all the favorable outcomes? Right, I guess those kinds of stories don't trigger the same visceral emotional responses as shame, fear, hate & rage - energies the corporate media machine feeds on - literally.
If slavery wasn't critical to enabling economies of scale for the agricultural machine, if the land & spices of Turtle Island's various indigenous tribes weren't necessary for colonial expansion & profitable commodities of trade, I'm not so sure "hate" would have been a potent enough motivator for the atrocities committed.
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