African American Pop culture of the 1920s

[cole phelps]

Films
In the 1920s, more film companies sprang up to exploit the black film audience. Royal Gardens Film Company of Chicago made only one race film. In 1922, Blackburn Velde Productions also made just one film, a vehicle for boxer/actor Jack Johnson. In Kansas City, Missouri there were several black-owned film companies: The Andlauer Film Company, Progress Picture Producing Association, Gate City Feature Films and Turpin Films. In 1926, the Colored Players Film Corporation was founded by white producer David Starkman. The Original Lafayette Players was the first major professional black drama company in the country, founded back in 1915, but they didn’t get into film until 1928. From 1929 to 1930, Monte Brice Productions existed as a vehicle for the black duo Buck & Bubbles. In 1929, The Christie Film Country began making all-black talkies. In 1929, Fox made Hearts in Dixie.

Race movies of the '20s include The Brute, In the Depths of Our Hearts, The Symbol of the Unconquered and Within Our Gates (all 1920), As the World Rolls On, The Black Thunderbolt, By Right of Birth, The Burden of Race, The Call of His People, The Custard Nine, The Gunsaulus Mystery, The Lure of a Woman, Secret Sorrow, The Simp and The Sport of the Gods (all 1921), The Crimson Skull, The Dungeon, Easy Money, For His Mother’s Sake, The Hypocrite, Spitfire and Uncle Jasper's Will (all 1922), The Bull-Dogger, Deceit, Ghost of Tolston's Manor, Regeneration and The Virgin of Seminole (all 1923), Birthright, The Flaming Crisis and A Son of Satan (all 1924), Body and Soul and Marcus Garland (both 1925), The Conjure Woman, The Devil's Disciple, The Flying Ace, The Prince of His Race and Ten Nights in a Barroom (all 1926), The Broken Violin, The House Behind the Cedars, The Millionaire, The Scar of Shame, The Spider's Web and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (all 1927), Black Gold, Children of Fate, The Midnight Ace, Thirty Years Later and When Men Betray (all 1928), Black and Tan, Black Narcissus, Blue Songs, Brown Gravy, Election Day, Fowl Play, The Framing of the Shrew, Hallelujah!, Hearts in Dixie, In and Out, The Lady Fare, Melancholy Dame, Music Hath Harms, Oft in the Silly Night, St. Louis Blues and Wages of Sin (all 1929).

BLACK CINEMA OF THE '20s

Black actors who got their start in the 1920s include Allen 'Farina' Hoskins, Anita Bush, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Bill Pickett, Clarence Muse, Daniel L. Haynes, Ethel Waters, Eugene Jackson, Eva Jessye, Evelyn Ellis, Fredi Washington, Gertrude Howard, John Lester Johnson, Laura Bowman, Leigh Whipper, Lincoln "Stepin Fetchit" Perry, Lorenzo Tucker, Mamie Smith, Nelly “Madame Sul-Te-Wan” Conley, Matthew 'Stymie' Beard, Mildred Washington, Nina Mae McKinney, Paul Robeson, Pearl McCormack, Spencer Williams, Theresa Harris, Trixie Smith and Zack Williams.

 

[cole phelps]

In the South, to comply with laws on racial segregation, race movies were screened at designated black theaters. Though northern cities were not formally segregated, race films were generally shown in theaters in black neighborhoods. Many large northern theaters incorporated special balconies reserved for blacks.
While it was rare for race films to be shown to white audiences, white theaters often reserved special time-slots for black moviegoers. This resulted in race films often being screened as matinées and midnight shows. During the height of their popularity, race films were shown in as many as 1,100 theaters around the country.

Themes
Produced primarily in northern cities, the target audience consisted primarily of poor southern blacks and southerners who had migrated northward. Many race films, particularly those produced by white studios, expressed middle-class urban values, especially education and industriousness. Common themes included the "improvement" of the black race, the supposed tension between educated and uneducated blacks, and the tragic consequences in store for blacks who resisted liberal capitalist values. The most famous race movie, The Scar of Shame, incorporated all of these themes.
Race films typically avoided explicit depictions of poverty, ghettos, social decay, and crime. When such elements appeared, they often did so in the background or as plot devices. Race films rarely treated the subjects of social injustice and race relations, although blacks were legally disenfranchised in the South and suffered discrimination in the North and South.
Race films avoided many of the popular black stock characters found in contemporary mainstream films, or else relegated these stereotypes to supporting roles and villains. Micheaux depicted his protagonists as educated, prosperous, and genteel. Micheaux hoped to give his audience something to help them "further the race".

 

[cole phelps]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

1920's bars

 

[Aphrodite]

Awesome thread.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IWunD3r]

#Chuch

 

[Milk N Cookies]

Her hair tho...

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

New Yorkers in the 1920s liked to get dressed up and go out dancing. Everybody was doing the Turkey Trot, the Fox Trot and a wild new dance called the Charleston. By 1924 Fletcher Henderson led the top dance band in residence in Manhattan. For seven years they played the Roseland Ballroom near Times Square. Henderson’s wife Leora recalled, "Around that time Paul Whiteman was called the 'King of Jazz,' so people began calling Fletcher 'The Colored King of Jazz.' Whiteman would be playing all those novelties and semi-classical numbers and Fletcher would turn right around and swing them."




Bandleader Fletcher Henderson. Photo courtesy themusicsover.wordpress.

Fletcher Henderson’s 11-piece orchestra at the Roseland was on the cutting edge. It was the first jazz orchestra of its size in New York to have the loose, improvised sound of a smaller jazz combo that dancers loved. Innovative arrangements by saxophonist Don Redman seamlessly blended formal written parts with improvised hot solos to achieve this effect. The wailing clarinet trio, one of Don Redman's favorite arranging devices, became a signature sound of the Henderson orchestra. And playing Don Redman’s arrangements, the orchestra became one of the first in which reed and brass sections played against each other, creating a call-and-response effect. All of Redman's innovations were widely imitated by other arrangers and composers, including Duke Ellington.




Don Redman. Photo courtesy redhotjazz..

Don Redman’s charts gave birth to the concept of the big band reed section, and paved the way for the sound that defined the Swing Era—more than a decade later.



Riverwalk Jazz presents Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman: The Birth of the Big Band Reed Section with arrangements adapted by the Jim Cullum Jazz Band's clarinetist Ron Hockett from the classic 1920s' scores.



To evoke the distinctive trio sound of the reed section in Don Redman’s arrangements for Fletcher Henderson, clarinetists Allan Vaché and Kim Cusack join Jim Cullum and the Band.

Riverwalk Jazz - Stanford University Libraries

@ 16:33

 

[Archangel]

Tis a wonderful thing to see my forefathers and mothers thrive in such times of antiquity and opression. Mine mind can only wonder what words they would utter to us in current times.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

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[IllmaticDelta]

Noble Drew Ali (who was born Timothy Drew, in North Carolina) (1886-1929) was the founder of the Moorish Science Temple of America. He first founded the Temple in Newark, N.J., in 1923 and soon there were branches in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and other major industrial cities of the northeast, especially in neighborhoods that had attracted mass black migration from the South.



Moorish Science Temple of America

The Moorish Science Temple of America is an American national and religious organization founded by Noble Drew Ali, born Timothy Drew. He based it on the belief that African Americans were descended from the Moors of North West Africa and thus were Moorish by nationality and Islamic by faith. Ali put together elements of major traditions to develop a message of personal transformation through historical education, racial pride and spiritual upliftment. It also intended to provide African Americans with a sense of identity in the world and promote civic involvement. One primary tenet of the Moorish Science Temple is the belief that African-Americans are of Moorish ancestry, specifically from "Moroccan Empire" which, according to Ali, included other countries that surround Morocco today. To join the movement, individuals had to proclaim their "Moorish nationality", were giving "nationality cards" and in religious texts, adherents refer to themselves racially as "Asiatics".[1] Adherents of this movement are known as Moorish-American Moslems and are called "Moorish Scientists" in some circles.

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