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REEL FREEDOM
In 1926, a man named Robert Thomas and a male friend, both Black, had to fight off a white female usher, white manager, and six riot officers to be allowed to take the orchestra seats they had purchased rather than be banished to the balcony at Harlem’s Loew’s Victoria Theatre. This was just one of many incidents in the early 20th century in which Black New Yorkers, no strangers to racist treatment, endured discrimination and violence while trying to attend one of the city’s theaters. In this well-written work, Lopez “traces Black film culture in New York City from its origins in the early twentieth century to its firm establishment in the 1930s,” defining Black film culture as “Black New Yorkers’ interactions with cinema and surrounding institutions, not necessarily the cinematic output itself.” In illuminating chapters, she describes the alternative venues Black audiences had to locate when established theaters proved inhospitable; the “young Black girls’ and women’s moviegoing experiences” and the fear that their attendance led to “promiscuity, criminality, and incorrigibility”; the battles that Oscar Micheaux, “the most successful Black filmmaker in the first half of the twentieth century,” had to wage to get his “racially charged” films approved by censors; the attempts by film operators to unionize; and the pioneering reporting of Black journalists, particularly at the New York Age, to call attention to the “connections between racist cinema and its proprietors and the debilitating effects of racism on Black New Yorkers.” The writing is sometimes dry, but Lopez brings this sorry period to life by recounting memorable moments, as when she notes the 1930 incident of the projection booth at the Renaissance Theatre crashing down onto the patrons below, a tragedy that would have been worse if the projectionists hadn’t turned off the projector first and prevented a fire.
In 1926, a man named Robert Thomas and a male friend, both Black, had to fight off a white female usher, white manager, and six riot officers to be allowed to take the orchestra seats they had purchased rather than be banished to the balcony at Harlem’s Loew’s Victoria Theatre. This was just one of many incidents in the early 20th century in which Black New Yorkers, no strangers to racist treatment, endured discrimination and violence while trying to attend one of the city’s theaters. In this well-written work, Lopez “traces Black film culture in New York City from its origins in the early twentieth century to its firm establishment in the 1930s,” defining Black film culture as “Black New Yorkers’ interactions with cinema and surrounding institutions, not necessarily the cinematic output itself.” In illuminating chapters, she describes the alternative venues Black audiences had to locate when established theaters proved inhospitable; the “young Black girls’ and women’s moviegoing experiences” and the fear that their attendance led to “promiscuity, criminality, and incorrigibility”; the battles that Oscar Micheaux, “the most successful Black filmmaker in the first half of the twentieth century,” had to wage to get his “racially charged” films approved by censors; the attempts by film operators to unionize; and the pioneering reporting of Black journalists, particularly at the New York Age, to call attention to the “connections between racist cinema and its proprietors and the debilitating effects of racism on Black New Yorkers.” The writing is sometimes dry, but Lopez brings this sorry period to life by recounting memorable moments, as when she notes the 1930 incident of the projection booth at the Renaissance Theatre crashing down onto the patrons below, a tragedy that would have been worse if the projectionists hadn’t turned off the projector first and prevented a fire.
