October 29, 1949

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2016-10-30 20:48Z by Steven

October 29, 1949

Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers
2016-10-29

Matthew F. Delmont, Professor of History
Arizona State University

On October 29, 1949, the Chicago Defender published Walter White’s review of Elia Kazan’s film Pinky. The film, a drama about racial passing starring Jeanne Crain and Ethel Waters, was the top-grossing film of 1949. White, who led the NAACP from 1931 until his death 1955, wrote, “I have never in all my life wanted so much to like a moving picture as much as I did ‘Pinky.’ As I bought tickets at the Rivoli Theatre in New York I hoped fervently that the praise of most of the New York critics and friends of mine, both colored and white, would be justified…Unhappily for me, I have to say that, as far as my judgement is concerned, [producer Darryl] Zanuck has failed. Some new ground have been broken but they are mere scratches in the vast field of human relationships the picture sought to plow. Southern white police brutality and lechery are vividly and courageously exposed. But one would never know, unless he had other sources of information, that Negroes, even in the most backward areas of Mississippi are not resigned to their ‘place’ and are not only working but making progress against the kind of conditions portrayed in ‘Pinky.'” This review of this film about racial passing is particularly interesting because Walter White was very light skinned, and sometimes passed as white while working as a civil rights investigator in the South…

Read the entire article here.

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AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

Posted in Barack Obama, Course Offerings, History, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-03 17:45Z by Steven

AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

Scripps College, Claremont, California
2013

Matthew Delmont, Assistant Professor of American Studies

This class will explore the conditions and consequences for crossing racial boundaries in the U.S. We will take a multidisciplinary approach, exploring historical, literary, and ethnographic writings along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject. We will examine: Relations among Native Americans, whites, and blacks in the colonial era and nineteenth century; the legal formation of race through miscegena­tion cases; the regulation and representation of multiracial themes in film; the concept of mestizaje; contemporary debates surrounding the Mixed-race/Multiracial movement; and the racial identity of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

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