Carlton Moss lecture, "Role of Culture in the Afro-American Freedom Movement," at the University of Iowa, October 11, 1974

Darwin Turner: With the current emphasis upon heritage in Black culture, perhaps not enough attention is being given to the role of Black teachers in transmitting this culture through informal education and through formal educational institutions. Two evenings ago, our guest lecturer was Randolph Edmonds. This evening, our speaker is one of the most distinguished pupils of Randolph Edmonds, Carlton Moss, who having studied under such individuals as Elmer Rice and Tennessee Williams, states that Randolph Edmonds is the individual primarily responsible for his approach to theater, for his beliefs about theater. Darwin Turner: Carlton Moss was born and reared in New Jersey. He studied theater at Morgan State College in Baltimore at Columbia University. He worked in the negro section of the federal theater along with John Houseman and Orson Welles. And after Houseman's departure from that section of the federal theater, Carlton Moss became one of the leaders of the group. He wrote radio plays for the Office of War Information, and for 10 years, wrote radio plays on NBC. One of the first Blacks, perhaps the first to have a continuing record of success as a writer for radio and one who was all too frequently unknown as a Black and perhaps even more embarrassingly, confused with Carlton Morse, who was the author of a radio series featuring a character with a very broad Southern accent. Darwin Turner: Carlton Moss, however, wrote plays about Black people who sometimes bothered the producers because the Black people weren't sufficiently different from the white people. He wrote such productions as Folks from Dixie, Meeting House, Careless Love, An Episode About Nat Turner. He went into orientation and information during the war and wrote films, and after the war went into educational film making. His most distinguished educational films are a story of Frederick Douglas, another of George Washington Carver, and the most recent, a story of Paul Laurence Dunbar. All of these are prize winning films. Darwin Turner: For four years, he has been a lecturer. And in this age of the commuting professor, he has been one of the more distant commuters moving back and forth between University of California at Irvine and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, teaching film and film making at both institutions. Currently, he is working on health films. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you this evening, Carlton Moss, to discuss the Role of Culture in the Black Liberation Movement. Carlton Moss: Thank you, Dr. Turner. I first wanted to tell you that Dr. Turner visited us at the University of California at Irvine last November, where we held a Centennial celebration in honor of Paul Laurence Dunbar. And he blessed us with a very distinguished paper, which I'm told will be published. So it will be possible for all of you to enjoy as we enjoyed and for us to enjoy again, his scholarly paper on the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. I also want to thank him for bringing out his volume on Black drama, which deals with some of the contemporary Black writers and particularly with some of the pioneers in the 20th century in Black stage writing. Carlton Moss: And I also want to thank him for this conference. I happen to be one of those who believes that it is this kind of conference that stimulates the activity that will come or the activity that is necessary to carry on the traditions to which I am going to refer to tonight. I want to talk to you about the role of culture in the Afro-American freedom movement. When I refer to culture, I'm thinking of the complex of material and spiritual goods created by mankind in the process of its social development. My special concern with spiritual goods is because my research is in the area of motion pictures. And since films deal with ideas, it is logical that I focus on the themes that have come out of our way of life. Carlton Moss: However, for the record, let me say in passing that I am aware of the wealth in material goods that were produced by our unpaid labor for more than 250 years. Now, to begin with, I'd like to tell you where I'm coming from with my approach to the subject of spiritual goods. It seems to me that we have two cultures in the United States, one conceived by the enslavers, the other by the enslaved. The enslavers based their culture on the concept that all men are created equal, give me liberty or give me death, no taxation without representation. However, they attempted to put in force a pattern of life that denied their concept of liberty, freedom, and opportunity to the non-white people. Carlton Moss: Black culture took the pursuit of happiness concept and set in motion a movement to establish that it was their right as much as it was anyone else's. As I see it, the second culture, Black culture, became the stronger of the two. Some of you may find that difficult to accept. I'm thinking of those who say we are still slaves. If I may be personal for a moment, my grandfather was a slave and his accounts of the system make me believe there's a great difference in the pattern of his life and mine. Still, others of you may say that the man stripped us of our culture. Carlton Moss: Yes, the man snatched us from our motherland, stripped us of our language, violated our family ties, but no power on earth can stop us from what the poet calls soul, the philosopher calls the rights of man, and what the revolutionist describes as man's will to struggle for what he knows is his. No person or thing can stop us from that goal. With this in mind, let me remind you of our history of resistance. It is well documented, starting with the first petitions written long before the revolutionary war by slaves. It is documented in the diaries of the slave owners complaining of runaway slaves. It is documented in the action of Richard Allen, who broke from the established church when it refused to treat him as a man. Carlton Moss: It is documented in the boldness of Denmark Vesey, the courage of Harriet Tubman, and the vision of Frederick Douglass. I think we should note particularly the contribution of Harriet Tubman because it demonstrates the strength of this culture that I speak of as a powerful culture, because it was Harriet Tubman who conceived the idea that the way to stop, to break the back of the slave owner was to put in motion a system whereby the slaves would escape. This was not told to her by the abolitionists, it came out of her own ability to see what she was in and to discover how to fight it. Carlton Moss: In addition to these individuals, there are mountains of documents attesting to the great resistance movement among the Black people, a movement who gave rise to the force that saved the nation. This force was articulated by Frederick Douglass who cried out, "Abolish slavery or abandon the union." And it wasn't until the union forces realized this and the Black troops were put in the union army, it wasn't until the union realized this, that they won the war. And those of you who follow American history, it might be wise to look and see what Lincoln said about the value of the 200,000 Black troops who fought in the Civil War. Carlton Moss: In this context, my friends, we can clearly see which is the stronger of the two cultures. In our own time, it is sufficient to say that the Jim Crow practices in the South, the bus, the restaurant, the gas station, these were not broken by the new deal, the fair deal or the square deal. They were broken when a Black woman, Rosa Parks took a seat on a Montgomery bus and refused to move. Or take the example of the Vietnam War, who was the first national figure to speak out against the war? Martin Luther King. Now some of you may be asking, what has this to do with motion pictures? What has it to do with Sweet Sweetback, Chef Number One, SuperFly, Sounder? Carlton Moss: To answer this question, let me start with this premise. The premise that the writer's responsibility is to reproduce life in an artistic form, that he must reflect life as it is and not as it appears, that he must create characters who by their actions, inspire imitation, serve as models for a better way of life, an affirmation of life so to speak. To do this properly, the writer needs certain tools, knowledge of his craft, something to which all mankind has contributed. And then he must know something of his past as well as his present. Knowing the past means he must know his heritage. All writers draw on what they seep in in living in a given society. Carlton Moss: The problem is American writers live in a society that has distorted the meaning of Black culture. A writer that is a potential writer growing up in America is taught to believe or exposed to in the popular literature the fact, quote, "That Black people were brought here from a jungle, taught how to work. Once they were settled, they were happy and would have stayed that way had not a sentimental white man by the name of Abraham Lincoln freed them. Since then, they have been a nuisance." The man in the street puts it this way, "The Blacks are always complaining. Why aren't they like other people? Why don't they do like the Irish, the Jews, the Italians? Carlton Moss: They came here with nothing, look where they are today." Add this to the sociologists who say, "Blacks are culturally deprived." Psychologists who say, "They're over-sensitive, frustrated, ashamed of their Blackness." Political scientists who say, "The Blacks are Black racists, Black nationalists." The popular literature which says, "Blacks are angry, cool, and victims of ghetto living." This is the frame of reference that the filmmaker brings to the subject of Black films. Meanwhile, that second culture that we spoke of has been kept alive by Carter Woodson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Wesley, Frances Ellen Harper, Ida B. Wells, and so on. Carlton Moss: But it is so hidden from the mass that even Black writers are not aware of its impact. A Black writer wrote me recently saying that Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar was not noted for his short stories. The question is, who says so? The same people who said Dunbar should only write dialect points are the ones who say that Dunbar was not noted for his short stories. Yet a record of Dunbar's writing shows that his short stories were not only well received, but he sold many, many, many of them. Another example of this business of the frame of reference that the writer comes to this subject with, a few days ago, perhaps some of you are familiar with the producing company called David Wolper. Carlton Moss: They have been on television with a number of historical dramas. And they're now about to do something about Abraham Lincoln. And one of their scholars called me the other day and said, "We're going to do something about Lincoln, I'm wondering if you could say, could tell us anything about Lincoln in reference to Lincoln's involvement or knowledge or association or treatment of Black people?" Now, what does this show? If one has read Du Bois or Woodson or Wesley or some of our novelists, our essayists, you would find, or Frederick Douglass's autobiography, for example, you will find documentation there that shows the quality of the relationship between Douglass and Lincoln. Carlton Moss: And apparently, they met with each other a number of times. And there was a very healthy relationship between them in that Lincoln as Douglass writes it and as the dialogue between them suggest, began to turn to Douglass for advice with this problem of trying to save the union. You would find that, and this again, refers to the strength of this culture that I'm speaking about. In the early days of the abolition movement, when the guidance was in the hand of good people like William Lloyd Garrison, their thesis was, no union with slaveholders. And when Douglass escaped from slavery and became a part of the abolition movement, he joined in this argument, no union with slaveholders. Carlton Moss: Until one night, he went to a church that still stands on the corner of 56th Street and Broadway in New York City. And he had a debate with a Black man by the name of Samuel Ringgold Ward. And Ward took the position that the Constitution of the United States was not a pro slavery document, that it could be interpreted as a pro, an anti-slavery document and that the Black movement should base its case on the positive elements of the Constitution of the United States, which would give them an instrument with which to win over the total population. And it was from that day on that Douglass developed the thesis that the Constitution was not a pro slavery document. Carlton Moss: And it was Douglass more than any other American who agitated, persuaded, and lectured to the North, building this movement that eventually led to a unity between the Black and white forces, which resulted in the overthrow of slavery. Now, all of this is in Douglass's, his writings. And there's some reference to it in Carl Sandberg and some of the other biographers and historians who write about Abraham Lincoln. But here we have a man in an important position in developing a cultural instrument, who had no knowledge that this existed. Luckily he turned to someone he thought did have some knowledge, which again suggests the force of Black culture, because I've known this man some 10 or 15 years. 10 years ago, he would have never asked me this, or if he had asked me, it would have been in a social situation where we would have been at a party or in a semiprofessional meeting where he would have said, "I'm doing a script about Lincoln. What did Lincoln, did he ever have anything to do with Blacks?" And I would have told him, "It's very interesting." And that would have been the end of it. Carlton Moss: But now this forest has reached the point where it influences the dominant culture. And this is why we say it is the stronger of the two strains flowing through American civilization. And we will develop this a little more as we go on. But again, the significant thing that we want to point out here is that this knowledge exists, the positive role, the thinking role. It's amazing when you stop to look at the history of United States and realize that from the Wilmot Proviso through the Kansas Nebraska Bill, the Missouri Compromise and every important domestic piece of legislation that took place in the United States between 1800 and 1860, dealt with this question, and it constantly reflected the force of this second culture, this culture that kept saying, "Abolish slavery or abolish the union. But let us stay with the motion pictures." Carlton Moss: Now, the frame of reference that I've outlined that is the literature, the sociology, the psychology, the political science, the history, all that go into shaping up a man's education, produced a kind of film in United States, because this was the frame of reference, that the writers had when they sat down to make the films. Now we're going to break these films down into four or five categories. The first films which came in the beginning of the film industry at the turn of the century were reflections of the ideas projected by the minstrel. Now, the minstrel was supposedly an imitation of Black life. Now, where did these imitations come from? Carlton Moss: During the days of slavery, they had what they called allowance days. And on an allowance day, all of the slaves were allowed to have two or three hours of recreation, and there grew up a kind of folk theater. They would dance, they would sing and they created songs. Some of them, one of them we're going to mention in a few minutes. This was down in the quarters. Now the excitement, the quality of the relaxation became so exciting that it drew the attention of the plantation owners, and they began to go down there and watch. In the course of this, at that time in the United States, you had touring stage companies who went into some of these southern cities. And some of these performers began to notice these and somebody got the bright idea that let's imitate them. Carlton Moss: Now what they did, they didn't imitate them, they imitated Blacks, but they did it in such a way, it was the imitator's version of what they thought the Blacks were thinking and doing, if you understand that. So they weren't true imitations. Now, for many reasons, they weren't imitations in the first place, there was no communication between the people. The lines were so shot that it was impossible for the outsider to get next to the insider. So he's looking at it through very objective eyes. And also the language of the time, the general sociology of the time was, as we indicated here, these people are different. They're different than we are, we being the dominant group. And that doesn't only mean culturally, but they're biologically and physiologically different. So there was no human contact between them and there grew up what we call a minstrel and what it was, was a group of men who would Blacken their faces and set in a semicircle on the stage. Carlton Moss: And there were four, what they call called end men, and they were the comics, they were the Bob Hope's and the Jerry Lewis's and they Artie Thomas's or Danny Thomas's and they would crack jokes. Now, these jokes did not come out of the jokes that they'd heard on the plantation, because in a minute, I'm going to let you see what some of the jokes were on the plantation. They began to be created jokes. Joke writers would sit down and write. Consequently, you got into the language, a stereotyped, a Black actor, Black in the sense that it was a white person who Blackened his face and appeared to be imitating a Black person. And they develop a stage language, and that language was dis, dat, dese, dem, and dos, and I got my razor, and who's that woman I saw you with last night. That wasn't no woman, that was my wife. Chaw, chaw, chaw. Carlton Moss: Now this was the kind of joke. And it's very interesting that I was doing some research on this recently. And I found among these jokes, some antisemitic references, which had nothing to do with the experience of the slaves. So one could only conclude that these jokes were super imposed on this style of performer and had nothing to do with the realities of life. But nevertheless, these minstrels became very popular. There was not a Rotary Club, a Kiwanis Club, a lodge, a college campus, a church or a high school at some sometime did not either see a minstrel or put on a minstrel of its own. And they became very, very popular in the United States. So when the motion pictures came into existence, this was the comedy relief in the American theater. Carlton Moss: So you found it creeping into the motion pictures. I understand that Dr. Cripps was here yesterday, and apparently he showed you some of the very early films. And you may have seen reflections of this minstrel type character in what he showed you. But for instance, let me give you an example of one of them. So you can get some idea of the story. One of the very popular ones was called the masher and it had to do with a male flirt. And he kept pestering ladies walking down the streets with their umbrellas over their heads, out for a stroll. And the high point of the film is he's walking down the street and he sees a lady from behind, she's got an umbrella and he primps himself, gets in position, and he goes around and we know that he's going to ask her for her hand. Carlton Moss: And he goes there and he turns, and when he looks, it's a Black woman and he runs. Now, the implication is he finally got the proper punishment and it ends with his running down the street, Helter Skelter off the scene. Now, this is the kind of thing that you saw in the first pictures where he was the comedy relief. Then came the first of the great motion pictures in America, which was Griffith's Birth of the Nation, which is one of the, certainly among the early pictures, one of the most creative made films. And it set the pattern for motion picture making in the United States. Griffith was an exceptionally talented man. And if you can look at the film from the point of view of his cinematic concept, you will recognize that he was a talent, he was bold, and let's say daring, to have broken the pattern of films, the way that he did. Carlton Moss: And many of the things that he introduced into films, we won't go into here, are still a part of film language. So he was an innovator, but he selected as his subject, a novel that had been written a few years before called the Klansmen. And it dealt with the reconstruction and its thesis was that it was a tragic era in the United States, and the Blacks had run wild with the virtues of the South. Now this is the general thesis of it, and Griffith continued this. It is argued that he softened some of it, but he continued the philosophy of Birth of a Nation. As a matter of fact, it opens with the seeds of this unity resewn when these people were first brought here. The suggestion being that there is a mythical bond between white people that makes them automatically by remote, resent, and dislike, hate Black people. Carlton Moss: And the second part of his thesis is that there are some Blacks, they are good Blacks, but we must determine what is good for them. And as long as they obey the rules, as we make the rules, then there's a way for us to get along with them. That's generally what's underlying the Birth of a Nation. But it introduced the second stage of the film character. Now, mind you, it's important since we're dealing here with writing that none of this material was written by Black writers. Another significant thing in connection with what we're talking about, the strength of this culture, when Griffith's film came out, the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson at the time, is reported to have said that it was, "Like writing history with lightning." Carlton Moss: Now a group of Blacks headed by the NAACP challenged the picture. And it's interesting that when we discuss it in the classroom setting today, that many of the young people say, "But what good did it do?" And yet when we look back on it and we see what the relationship was between Blacks and whites in the United States, that in 1915, and see that this small group of people, were able to stir up enough feeling and to educate to the extent that many of the original things that Griffith had in the film, were deleted as a result of their protest. And also that what this did, it articulated the position of the Black population at that time, which is something that is of great importance to us today, not only because it showed the strength of that culture, but it also indicates this continuous thing that has run through Black culture since the Blacks first came here in 1619. Carlton Moss: So when we look at it today and we look at it in its proper perspective, I think it's safe to say that it was very important what this small group of Blacks were able to do in challenging the thesis of in Birth of a Nation. But even more important is the fact that apparently a negative propaganda cannot survive if it goes counter to the natural flow or the natural laws of social development. Now that is to say that according to Birth of a Nation, the thesis there and what they were asking for, we would not be able to have this meeting today on University of Iowa campus, had that thesis been accepted. Carlton Moss: And perhaps a better way of explaining that would be that in 1947, I believe it was before Griffith died, he said that, "He didn't think," now mind you, when the picture was shown, he wanted everybody to see it. He said, "He didn't think that it was proper and wise to show that film at that time." And at that time, of course, meaning during the forties, and also meaning that the climate had changed and it had changed in the opposite direction of what he and Dixon, the author of the Klansmen had thought it would. Carlton Moss: So we get the Griffith type of film, which created a second image. Now following that, and again, this shows the sensitivity of the motion picture industry, there came on the scene, a flock of musicals, starting with the first sound picture, a Hallelujah, and then going through to you had a half a dozen pictures where what they would do, they would take all of the popular Vaudeville talent and put them in one film. Now, there were two reasons for this. One, there was a continuing resistance protest or reaction to motion pictures in a section of the Black community. And also Black entertainers, Vaudeville entertainers were popular in the Vaudeville theater or in the nightclub or entertainment world. And consequently, the filmmakers realized there was a market for them, but what they would do is put them all in one picture. Carlton Moss: They do that now because of the tremendous competition. But if you went to one of these musicals, you'd see everybody from Bill Robinson to to Ethel Waters, to Duke Ellington, to Cab Calloway, they would all be there. Then in the forties, this whole question of the Black role in films took on a new turn, and this was a struggle to change, even the musical roles. Now, mind you, the writers have not been involved in this to the extent that they're writing they've been involved, but not to the extent that they're writing. And then you began to get individual pictures that would have one or two characters. I remember they made a film on Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, and there was a Black physician in that. And through the film history, you will find incidence of one or two characters having a positive line. Carlton Moss: I remember that in the early forties, John Houseman made a film at Paramount Pictures and without the knowledge of the front office, and we will talk about that when we talk about the structure of the motion picture industry. He was able to get some Black characters in the film who were not dancers or singers, or who were not opening and shutting doors. And when the film was previewed, the head of the studio at that time was a man who had been an exhibitor with a chain of theaters in the South. And he went to Houseman and he said, as Houseman tells it, he said, "You sneak them niggers in on me this time. But the next time I'll see to it that you don't put any in any of our films." Now, I point this out to show you, to tell you that the pattern was not to include these. When they include these being Blacks, when they were included, it was through the conviction of an individual producer or director, or possibly a star. Carlton Moss: But along with this came this campaign largely spearheaded by on a national scale, by the NACP, when there was a demand that the type of character changed. After the war, you had a complete change, and you had the introduction of the acceptable "Acceptable Negro." The first being a character by the name, they called him Mossy. And I'll tell you why they call him Mossy. They called him Mossy, because the guy who wrote it had been one of my colleagues in the army. And I suppose in some way to show his association with me, he called the guy Mossy, but they should have put on that, you know that little phrase they put on there, "Any relation to characters here is purely incidental,", or whatever it is because the character had nothing to do with me. Carlton Moss: But nevertheless, Mossy was the first of the new breed and he was the acceptable Black. In other words, he had all of the dimensions of the standard white characters, and the message was that he is to be accepted. And I define those people as escapees. In other words, some get outside of the mass and get certain privileges, and they are the escapees. Well, this was the beginning of the escapee tradition. And you saw it again in the characters played by Sidney Poitier, where he was always characterized as a man with two dimensions, height and width, but never any depth. Carlton Moss: If you take it any one of those films, for instance, I'm thinking now of Lilies in the Field, where he was solicitous to do everything that these nuns wanted. Just anything, just ask me to do anything. And he never had any attachment for anyone, he's just somebody floating. He is a handsome "desirable looking," in terms of what is attractive in American culture, and he had no connection with anybody, just a floater, didn't even have a picture in his car, just a nice guy. And interesting, they got a lot of fan mail on him and the mail read like this. "He's so nice. He's so nice. He's such a nice man." Carlton Moss: Well, then you had... He built this up into being one of the top box office attractions in the United States with an avalanche of these films. Now you remember there was one called the one about the blind girl, where she couldn't see him, so it was all right to have this relationship between them. Then there was the one slender thread where the woman was neurotic, three times a prostitute, a child deserter on the verge of suicide, 36 times. And yet they did everything by telephone. So you see it was contrived so that there wouldn't be any contact. So the answer is he's so nice, because he never complained, those others always complaining. The Sidney Poitier films, which created this acceptable character, this person who fits in, who has all of the virtues of the stock Hollywood movie hero. Now, the significant thing is that none of these films were written by Black writers. And yet, we are here to discuss the question of the Black writer in the motion picture field. Now, to do that, I want to set a frame of reference that will suggest the source of the Black writers' ideological content or ideological source. Carlton Moss: I want to quote here from a lyric written by our great and great grandparents, and by our, I'm not speaking to my brothers, my blood brothers, and those of you who are my fraternal brothers, you will understand this. This is the lyric. We raise the wheat, they give us the corn. We bake the bread, they give us the crust. We sift the meal, they give us the husk. We peel the meat and they give us the skin. And that's the way they take us in. We skim the pot, they give us the liquor and say, that's good enough for a nigger. Walk over, walk over, your butter and fat, poor nigger, you can't get over that. Carlton Moss: Now this lyric is from a song that was sung on allowance days. Remember I mentioned earlier that they had what they called allowance days, where the slaves would get together. Now, this was the kind of stuff, a material that was created there among the slaves themselves. In additions, which this is where a lot of the folk tunes grew up. And a lot of the spirituals grew up. And when we examined these for their content in general, you will find this resistance cord, a resistant strain running through them. The same resistance strain that I mentioned was in the bonus of Vesey and then the courage of Tubman and in the vision of Frederick Douglas. Carlton Moss: Now in these perceptive references to the pathology of the slave owners, they indicate that these early writers were sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the people. In other words, they show that the songs were reflecting, what the people were feeling about their general condition and search, if you will, and you will never find any piece of folk literature written or made up by the slaves where they're going around, shouting about how wonderful slavery is. It's just not there. So you'll find this resistance thing running through a resistant strain, rather than running through all of it. Carlton Moss: You find it in the folk stories, in the jokes about the master. I remember there's a minstrel song called Old Uncle Ned is dead and he's gone where all the dark, he should go. I see somebody nodding, which means that they've heard it in high school or in a church minstrel or somewhere. But now I ran across that song and the lyric went this way. Now, how it got this name I don't know. But again, it has no reference to me. Oh, Mr. Carlton, the master is dead and he's gone where all masters ought to go. Now you get the difference and the content of that song and the content of the song that became popular in our schools and et cetera. Carlton Moss: So you, again, you see this train running through all of our early literature and you see it in the breaking of the minstrel. Now the minstrels were broken by the Blacks themselves. Now this is how they did it. Now, I'm not suggesting that a group of Black sat down and said, "Look, we're going to break up that minstrel." That isn't where it happened. What they did, the first thing they had to do was to get on the stage. And gradually after many, many years of minstrel performances, Blacks, themselves were introduced to the minstrel stage and they had to Blacken their faces as the white actors did. Carlton Moss: And they were advertised as authentic darkies. The minstrels were advertised as darkie shows, they were advertised as authentic darkies. Now, once this porthole was established, the character of the minstrels began to change. And after the turn of the century, there was a complete change when a group of articulate Blacks who had some opportunity in terms of a formal education, particularly in the field of music. And it's an interesting story, which we won't go into tonight to trace how, when the union bands went South with their instruments, how they taught many of these newly freed people, how to play instruments and how this later developed industry and instrument playing. Carlton Moss: And this does not to bypass the instrument playing. They grew up on the plantation itself with the string instruments. I'm talking about brass and woodwind instruments that came out of a lot of it out of these civil war bands. But by the turn of the century, there was enough formal education among the Blacks to create an advanced group in the area of music. And you had developing musical comedies and what they did to break the minstrel, they were the first to introduce women on the stage in what we now know as the chorus line. And recently there's a book that's come out on the Reminiscences of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle that goes into some of this period. But this was a significant culture contribution in the field of musical comedy presentation. And it began to eliminate the minstrel. Carlton Moss: Now, many of these shows carried blackface comedians and what their face is still Black. But the bulk of them and the general content was a step away, a good step away from the minstrel. And it introduced for the first time in the commercial theater productions written and conceived by Blacks. And out of that grew a number of Black songwriters prior to that the rise of Tin Pan Alley with Irving Berlin and those fellows, most of that material was written by Blacks writers. Carlton Moss: This takes us another step forward in this whole question of the conception of the material, which is the most important is who conceives the idea and what his frame of reference is when he conceives it. Now we move from this change of image to the motion pictures. There's a man in New York by the name of Lee Whipper. I believe he's 100 years old now, he's close to it. And Whipper was one of the grandsons or in some way related to one of the radical reconstructionist in South Carolina, I believe. He went to Howard University and trained to be a lawyer. And then he decided he wanted to go on stage. And he became active in the Black Theater Movement. Carlton Moss: Now at the same time, there was a man by the name of Adolph Zukor who came here from one of the Eastern European countries and started off as a furrier. And as many as a number of salesmen did in the early part of the motion picture industry, he moved from selling furs to operating a Nickelodeon, eventually becoming a film producer. He became a successful film producer and successful film producers are not very nice people. As a matter of fact, he was referred to in the industry as the creep by his colleagues, obviously because of his business methods. And we may say something about that motion pictures is a very, very dirty business. Carlton Moss: Now, but anyway, Zukor was the head of paramount pictures. And the story goes that Whipper tried to get an appointment to see him. He tried for months to get an appointment to see him. And finally he crashed through and he went down to see Zukor and incidentally, last March Zukor celebrated his 100th birthday, I believe. And he's still active in the motion picture industry. He was the one whose advice was sought on whether or not to run the Godfather for three hours. And it was his suggestion I'm told that they listened to that, made them keep it to three hours. Carlton Moss: Now, I'm pointing this out to point out to you that the same people who shaped the policy in 1900 are still shaping the policy in 1973. So when Whipper went, finally got in to see Mr. Zukor, Whipper tells the story that he went up to the 15th floor and he went through a half a dozen hostile secretaries and et cetera. And he finally got into Zukor. And he said to Mr. Zukor, "Mr. Zukor, I want to make a motion picture." And he says, "About what?" And Whipper says, "Well, I want to make a Black motion picture." And Zukor says, "About what?" And Whipper says, "Well, I'd like to make up from Slavery by Booker T Washington." And Zukor said, "Listen, white folks don't want to see you niggers up from anywhere." And that was the end of the conversation and have the experience. Carlton Moss: Now, I point this out to show you that in the beginning of this industry, Blacks were cut out of the policy making. Now running with that, there is some evidence that Blacks attempted to make their own films. One of course was Bert Williams who tried and his one film met with such disaster. I believe in the first showing someone was killed. And that drove him out of the business. Now to understand another element with Williams, you have to also understand that in the beginning, as it is today, it was a very competitive business. And Williams was the one person in the American theater who had the following, the talent to challenge an early film industry. Carlton Moss: And it's conceivable that one of the things that played a part in making sure that he was driven out of the business was the possibility that he could have been serious competition. Now, running against this, we had a couple of Black companies who tried on their own to make films, and they used Black writers, but these were feeble attempts because they cost production was more than they were able to bring in as a result of the filming of their pictures. And an interesting thing happened there, which also will show you something about the problem that the Black writer and producer was facing. Carlton Moss: One of the Black outfits that made some films, made a film with a man called Noble Johnson. Noble Johnson was one of those kinds of Black people that in my parents' hometown, they used to call issues. And an issue is, is she white? Or is she Black? In other words, you couldn't tell. And Noble Johnson went to Hollywood and he started working as a Indian, as a Mexican, as Spanish, as Black, as Italian as anything. His brother came along and they started this Black company. They made a film and they released it at the same time. One of the white films that Johnson was playing in was playing in Chicago. Carlton Moss: The promoters of the white film went to Noble Johnson this issue and said, "Listen, make up your mind. You're either going to be Black or white because you can't be both." And apparently Johnson driven by the economics of the thing decided that he was going to be white. Thereby, he withdrew his support from this Black company. But added to that, even if he had kept his support, they did not have the capital in order to underwrite the quantity of production necessary to keep a chain of motion picture houses, running and film for 52 weeks out of a year. And consequently, they finally went broke. Carlton Moss: Now, other things contributed to this, the influenza epidemic also hurt them. But it was impossible for these little companies to make pictures and compete with the total market. Consequently, you had these companies dying on the vine, but they did produce some writers. And if I can get personal again, for a moment, I was involved in one of these companies and with all of its shortcomings and by shortcomings, the man that I worked for did not have the money. He could not get the technical help on par with the technical help that the other films had. He had to get what we described as the white rejects. And there were reject squared, which means that they were rejected twice. Somebody else had already rejected them. And now we finally get them when it's impossible for them to go anywhere else. Carlton Moss: They were limited in their skills. And here we had filmmakers who were limited in their experience. In technical terms and historic terms, you got relatively poor films. But what it did, it gave me personally, because I got involved in, it gave me, as I got from Professor Edmonds, the feeling that it was possible. It was possible for Black people to involve themselves in this and to do this. Carlton Moss: Now, this may not mean much to this generation of Blacks, but in that time, when the Black community was cut off and all of the literature said that you can't do this, you'll never make it. And when there was so much hostility against you, when you try to make it, I suppose the best example of what I'm saying is what happened to Jackie Robinson when he went in baseball, all of that pathological nonsense that they're directed against him. You have to imagine this happening where you don't have as Robinson had a ball field with thousands of Blacks out there to give him support. Carlton Moss: So this kind of thing, it gave us the stimulus. I remember that one of the things that that Edmonds taught us was this, that, "Look, you have a head, you can think, go on and do this on your own. Don't worry about what those folks are doing. Do your own." And he developed what he called the Negro Theater. And this gave rise to dramatic departments on Black campuses. Prior to that time, you had somebody who put on a play, but you did not have an organized theater. And he, more than any other person in our time brought this to the Black campus, a place where you could formally study the theater. Carlton Moss: And from that, we got our inspiration, which took us into other films. And since we all know other fields, films are an extension of the theater. We came with the background, but not only with the background, with the security, with the roots that one has to have, if you to function in any one of these fields of endeavor. We came with that, and this is the thing that those Black films awkward as they were underpaid, overworked, and sometimes sloppy, but they still gave us the audience I mean, the gave us the opportunity. Carlton Moss: Now, we come to this avalanche of Black films where everywhere you turn around now there's a new one. The significant thing that very few of these films have been written by Black writers, perhaps the most notable are, or rather is the Sounder. Most of them been written by white writers. It's necessary to explain a little something now about the film industry so that you understand how this happens. Briefly, the industry started with a businessman, the man who got up, who thought up the machine. Then came the projector. Then they said, we've got to find somebody to make something to go on this thing. Then it was the artist. Carlton Moss: The artist was limited in the very beginning because all he was needed for was to record because most of the early films were travel logs. And then when they began to see that this couldn't hold people, they discovered that you had to put something on the screen with which the audience could identify audience identification, a protagonist, a story. Somebody wants something, somebody else doesn't want him to have it. You want him to have it. And therefore you'll sit and see how, what the outcome is. This gave rise to the story. Carlton Moss: Interestingly, the first stories were written by women. Why? Because the established writers didn't want to be bothered with motion pictures. The women were the secretaries who had been taking down what the directors were saying. And they decided that some of these women said, "Well, hell we can write these stories." There's a Francis Marion and a woman named Anita Loos. I think Marion recently died. Loos is still alive, who started this. This developed the storytelling in motion pictures. Carlton Moss: Now, throughout the industry, the writer has been relegated to a back door or a back of the bus seat. So he's been kind of hidden. I doubt if any of you could name a writer of a film, you can name a writer of a novel of a history book, but few of you can name the author of a motion picture. Few of you have had a course in the literature of films where you study the writers. There's been little written on the problems of the writers, as opposed to what's been written on the problems of the director and the story of the actor. The writer has held a backseat in the motion pictures. Carlton Moss: Now, this shows itself in this way, that pictures are made in a collective fashion: a producer, a director, and a writer. The producer gets the money or the production company gets the money and they dictate the policy what the story is going to be about. The star may shape the story to illustrate that one of the very popular writers, he was telling me by popular I mean, he's paid a lot of money $1,000, $2,000 a week. Was telling me about writing a story and it included in the cast, Olivier, Kirk Douglas, Charles Laughton, and Ustinov. Four big names. Each came to the writer and said, "It's a great script you've written. Best script I've ever read. I'd like to make one suggestion. Do you mind if I take mine home and add three lines?" Then he comes back with three pages. Carlton Moss: So each writer does that. One star goes to the rider and says, "Listen, I don't want any scenes where I play opposite Olivier." So, write it so that doesn't happen. A star goes to the writer and says, "I don't want anything that shows I'm afraid." So when your question about in depth comes up, this is what you have. Now. This is the general structure now to that comes this new thing about the Black motion picture. Now we have to examine why did it come as a result of the NACP knocking on the door saying we got to have better Black films. Did it come because the motion picture industry sat down and said, "We haven't been doing right by this section of the population, let's change." Carlton Moss: No, it came about because of the change of the real estate. You know what that means? They moved out, we moved in. And you had these enormous motion picture palaces with their broken down equipment and worn out air conditioning apparatus. You had to find a way to fill them. And somebody got the bright idea of, let's put some Blacks on the screen, and by God it worked. What we could do, we could make the picture for less money, but charge more money for the admission. And now you've had in the community, hundreds and hundreds of Blacks attending these motion pictures. Now we're not here to criticize them because there is a strong identification element taking place here. I've seen your own image on the screen. I've seen what you have been seeing all your life, seeing yourself involved in it. Carlton Moss: And we're in a culture where everybody wants to acquire all of these material things. I remember getting back to this guest who's coming to dinner. I ran this picture at Fisk for the Black students. And I moved around during in the audience, during the running of the film. And as the first scene comes on, no one heard the dialogue. I heard them saying, "Man, look at that pad." Carlton Moss: Now, what are they responding to? They're responding to the material things on the screen, and there's nothing wrong with this. That nobody likes comfort any more than I do. The first thing I asked when I arrived here, "Is this place air conditioned?" Well, it shows that I want comfort the same as anybody else. So the crawl is not with the audience being attracted to these things because they do have this quality, this identification element. And above this, they have what I found in the early Black films, an instrument on the screen that says directly to them that, "I can do something about this." And we don't under estimate the power of this. Carlton Moss: Now as to whether or not these films reflect this strong strain of culture that I've been talking about. This resistance culture that I've been talking about. The answer, in our opinion, is no, they do not. For the most part, they are rehashes of the old white films, films done in blackface. The general attitude in the distributors and the exhibitors and of the businesses, make a Black film, the Black support, anything that's got a Black in it, put it in the theater, take the money and run. Now you measure that by the fact that wherever these pictures are played, none of you can report having gone to one of those modern mini theaters that has been built in the Black community. They're not there. They're in the shopping centers. You're still going to those old houses that the real estate interests are debating, "What are we going to do with, are we going to put high rise apartments here? Or are we going to put what do they call it? Slum clearance, redevelopment. Or we going to put residences here." Carlton Moss: In the meantime, we can make these pictures for far less money. As a matter of fact, some of the successful ones, of these Black pictures, some of the actors still have not been paid. Despite the fact that the variety which gives you the box office take for the week has indicated that many of them have made millions and millions of dollars. But this is again the way this industry is structured as to why they haven't been paid. And a lot of them have been made on, we're doing this for the cause. We have an expression we call batter up. In other words, I go into your office and I say, "Listen, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to loan me a thousand dollars worth of equipment. And if it hits you're in." And the guy says "batter up," that's what it means. If you get a hit, then you're going to get paid. Carlton Moss: So this is a friend that goes with the independent industry that is responsible for a lot of these Black films. On Sounder, I want to point out two things, it has been spoken of as the best of these Black films. And there's no question that Miss Tyson, Winfield and the youngsters bring a dimension to the film that is not inherent in the story. They bring a quality to it, which comes out of their own personality or their own dignity, which is super imposed on the story itself. Carlton Moss: And when we think of the story, then we have to think of the strain that I've been talking about, this cultural strain, this resistance strain. Then you have to really examine the whole question of Blacks in relation to the sharecrop landlords. And then when you do that, you begin to see in what direction Sounder becomes a sentimental tale and not a tale based on a realistic situation. And it has nothing to do with the fact that it was in the 30s. It's been argued that while it was in the 30s, which suggests that Blacks didn't think in the 30s. But what I want to say in connection with that is this, in which comes in this whole question about frame of reference, cultural identity and resistance. Carlton Moss: Radnitz, I think his name is, the man who produced it, wrote a long article in a Los Angeles paper, some two, three months ago, telling what he went through in conceiving this film. Now we don't call with what he went through. He apparently has a deep interest in making films about children, which is very healthy. And making positive films about children, not something like Paper Moon, but something that is an affirmation of light. This seems to be his philosophy. And he talks about this in relation to Sounder, but he goes through the whole article and nowhere does he mention the role of his writer, Lonne Elder. Carlton Moss: The next week Elder's evidently having read what his producer said, wrote a letter to the times and said, "I wrote this film. I'm not even mentioned." The editorial writer then wrote a little box, those tiny little two line boxes they put in after you've been insulted, they put a two line little box and said, "I'm sorry. I really didn't mean that." Well, there's a two line explanation that says, "Oh, of course he mentioned Lonne Elder. He's very proud of what Lonne Elder did in the writing of the script. Now this shows the relationship between the writer and the producer and the director. And it suggests that it is the producer, director who make the policy unless the writer brings the money himself. And this is very rare. Carlton Moss: Now, the other thing about this in a recent interview in American Film Institute magazine, Lonne Elder in writing about the script, tells about some of the problems that he had and he was trying to do. And then he says, there's one scene in the film, he can't understand why they put it in there. Now get this. The writer says there's a scene in the film. He, the writer can't understand why it was put in there. Those of you who have seen the film will remember that there is a scene where the father is arrested and he's thrown in the back of the truck. And in a moment of spontaneous protest, he kicks the rifle out of the hand of the white sheriff. Where upon the white sheriff takes the gun and shoots the dog. Now Elder says, and in my opinion correctly, "That would have been the signal for the sheriff to shoot, not the dog, but you know who now." Now Elder says, he doesn't know why they put it in there. Carlton Moss: Now I'm pointing this out to show you the relationship between the writer and the producer and the director. And I'm also pointing it out to say to you that in concept, in the policy of these films, these films are conceived to reflect the position of the dominant group in the United States, which is to say in effect that we have a question or a problem with a section of our population. And that is the Black section of the population. And we are trying to solve that problem. Carlton Moss: The decision making roles, understand me now, the decision making roles in these films are always in the hands or in the mouth or in the characters portrayed by the white characters. Whereas in reality, when we examine the history, the extent to which you have democracy in the United States today is due in a large part to this tremendous role that the Black thinking, Black conception, Black strength, Black struggle, has brought to the American way of life. Carlton Moss: The story of Malcolm X is popular literature. An attempt was made to make a film on Malcolm X, who was called to write the film? One of the most distinguished writers of the century, unquestionably a fine writer, James Baldwin, with him came the widow of Malcolm X. At his suggestion, so that she could see and be a part of the conception to make sure that it reflected Malcolm X. Carlton Moss: And what happened, what happened? The film came out as a documentary. They did not make the James Baldwin script of Malcolm X. No one can argue that he didn't write the script because the script is published. Go to a bookstore and you'll see that the Malcolm X script as prepared by James Baldwin with the approval of the widow was completed. But when you examine the content of it, the content of it challenges, the status quo. The content of it takes the opposite turn of Superfly. Carlton Moss: Malcolm X admit that he was a victim of drugs, but what is the resolution? The resolution is not that he will sell one more shipment of drugs and put $80 million in his pocket and open a YMCA. The message is that he recognizes what drugs have done to not only to himself, but also to his people. And what kind of system has created this. And it is his responsibility to work, to change this system. This is why we say it is the responsibility of the writer to reflect life as it is, and not as it appears. To reflect life in the affirmative. To reflect life with a knowledge of your heritage, the heritage that brought forth this little limerick, this little verse that I read that the great, great grandparents sang, wrote and sang on the slavery. This is the kind of thing. Carlton Moss: Now you may ask, what can we do about it? Well, the precedent for it has been set by a member of our diaspora. And that is the Black filmmaker in Senegal, Ousmane Sembène, he had a problem, he had and has a problem similar to our problem here, perhaps much more severe, in that the industry, the European industry controls the African film industry. And they're very jealous of their control. The Africans have not been allowed to develop the film on African soil, they have to take it to France, so it's expensive. Carlton Moss: But nevertheless, Sembène has set out to make a pattern of film that reflects the life of his people, of his community and articulate their aspirations in the tradition that we have suggested here. He finishes his films and he takes them wherever he can find an audience and he shows them. They don't make millions of dollars. And he's so poor that he does not shoot anything inside. If you see a, Sembène film, there are no interior shots because he can't afford the lighting equipment that it takes to go inside to shoot. So he conceives his stories to all be shot outside. He conceives his stories in a non star system. We have a star system, you even have a Black star system now. And I'll tell you some of these Black stars are mighty rough. There is no star system. He goes into the community and he says, "We want to make a film. And I want you brothers to join me." And he gets the people. So he makes a fiction film in a documentary fashion. Carlton Moss: Now, the other thing in this trend is what we're attempting to do at Fisk. We are attempting in our film program there to develop, as I had the opportunity to be exposed to when I was in school, a Black, regional type film program, where the films will come out of the region and where they will in no way have anything to do with the commercial industry. Now, this is going to be difficult, and we can only make short films, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes at the longest, but none of our people are exposed to this pattern of corruption that you get in the commercial industry, because the tinsel is there to pull you away from your ideals. The atmosphere is there, the environment, the kind of living, the people you associate with, the press reports about you, all are calculated to pull you away from your roots. We are trying to develop a kind of film making that is rooted in the experience of the community. And out of this, we hope to eventually develop the kind of thing that Brother Sembène has developed on the other side of the world. Carlton Moss: And likewise the time will come, out of all of this, the time will come when some young Black filmmaker will pattern himself after, let us say De Sica, who started off with Bicycle Thief and made it for peanuts, peanuts in terms of a small amount of money, and then built up into a big filmmaker. And incidentally, he is going back to where he started. He now has a film that they've made in the neighborhood of $50,000, a complete film, because he was tired of the rat race, tired of the corruption. And this will eventually come. Someone's going to be inspired to do this out of this type of meeting or out of the type of class that we're trying to conduct. Carlton Moss: Now, let's me go back to where we started, and that is the responsibility of the writer, drawing on this heritage that we have, to build a film making company, to build film writers that will reflect the true experiences in an artistic way, so as to inspire, to move people to an action in the direction of the total reform movement, revolution, or progressive movement or forward movement that runs through and has run through the Black experience since it came here. Thank you.