Donald Bogle is the author of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks:An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films and Brown Sugar, along with several other non-fiction novels. Specifically these two books were primary sources while I was gathering my research. Both books highlight the stereotypes afflicting black entertainers since the beginning of mass reaching entertainment mediums.

What Happened In The Tunnel

In Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 short film, What Happened in the Tunnel, miscegenation emerges as a filmic narrative.  In the film, there are three main characters riding a train: a white woman, black maid and white man. The climax of the film occurs when the white woman responds to the flirtations of the white male passenger by trading seats with her black maid as the train passes through a dark tunnel. When the train emerges from the tunnel the white male is seen unknowingly kissing the black maid, to which he immediately reacts with anguish, disgust and embarrassment. All the while, both the white woman and black maid are enthusiastically amused by the white male’s incidental romantic blunder. I start with this one-minute filmic creation because it is one of the first cinematic interactions to perpetuate the idea of blackness as the ultimate embodiment of undesirability in opposition to the epitome of desirability found in whiteness. Also, although meant to be a comedy, What Happened in the Tunnel also signifies one of the first cinematic representations of miscegenation, which is later deemed illegal by the Production Code Administration from 1930-1956.

Dorothy Dandridge alongside Otto Preminger and her sister Vivian

It is not a secret that Dorothy Dandridge and director, Otto Preminger, had an ellicit affair during the filming of the 1954 film, Carmen Jones. The affair lasted four years and ended after Dandridge's realization that the wealthy film director had no plans of leaving his wife. Dandridge would go on to date several white men following her relationship with Preminger.

My Cousin Daisy Bates amongst other Legends

#BlackHistory Lena Horne and Ricardo Montalban with civil rights heroine Daisy Bates and the “Little Rock Nine,” at New York’s Imperial Theater on June 13, 1958. Horne and Montalban were starring in the musical, Jamaica at the theater.
The “Little Rock Nine” were the nine brave students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas on September 25, 1957. The students are Melba Patillo Beals, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls Lanier, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown Trickey, and Thelma Mothershed Wair.

Dorothy Dandridge and The Nicholas Brothers: Chattanooga Choo Choo