cinema was not simply a matter of box receipts predicated on, or delimited by, high ideals of aesthetic and artistic evolution. Considering popular reports that President Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed the film as ‘writing history with lightning,’ African Americans writing for the black press rightly perceived that the cinema was not merely entertainment or apolitical art.”5
Smoldering memories of Birth of a Nation informed editorial views as soon as Hollywood’s pre-production publicity wheels began touting a new big-screen tale of how the South was wronged – in Technicolor, no less. So, too, did current events as Hitler rolled through Europe in a quest to purge the continent of inferior races. But little of that deterred determined black filmgoers who could hardly wait to see the film for themselves when it arrived in cities where some of the strongest condemnations emanated from journalistic pens: the Victoria in New York’s Harlem, the Harlem in Baltimore, and the Lincoln in Washington.
The Washington Informer had been on the scene since 1921, covering political and social news in the nation’s segregated capital city. Its co-founder was William O. Walker, who after 10 years went on to become the longtime influential publisher of the
Call and Post in Cleveland and a staunch
Republican until his death in 1981. Its regular contributors included Howard University elites such as its rather conservative dean, Kelly Miller. Tolson’s biographer, Robert M. Farnsworth, has suggested that Tolson’s national popularity as a public speaker as well as his relative youth and more radical voice made him attractive to Informer editors seeking to build readership in the late 1930s. The paper’s nine-point agenda, which was published each Friday, addressed issues that ranged from unemployment to voting rights to a “comfort station” at 10th and U streets in northwest Washington.6
Tolson’s critique of Gone With the Wind in the Informer was undoubtedly among the most effective in unleashing the slow burn in the souls of many black folks weary with white supremacy and black gullibility.
“The fact that this movie has caused a red-letter day in the South should have warned Negroes. The fact that it was acclaimed by Confederate veterans who fought to keep Negroes enslaved should have warned us,” he wrote. “From Key West, Fla., to El Paso, Texas, the White South rejoiced. Margaret Mitchell who wrote the novel, is the Joan of Arc of Dixie.…The picture was praised extravagantly in Darkest Mississippi where Negro children are not permitted to read the Constitution in school. The commendation of the White South means the condemnation of the Negro.”7
Tolson did not hold back in explaining the begrudging acceptance of the film by such leaders as Roy Wilkins, a successor to Du Bois as editor of The Crisis. “The poor Negro has been kicked so often that he considers a slap a bit of a white courtesy. Since ‘Gone With the Wind’ didn’t have a big black brute raping a white virgin in a flowing white gown, most Negroes went into ecstasies. Poor Sambo!…I must give that Southern novelist and the white producer credit for one thing: they certainly fooled the Negro and at the same time put over their anti-Negro, anti-Yankee, KKK propaganda.”8
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Tolson