Hollywood’s African American Films: The Transition to Sound

In 1929 and 1930, during the Hollywood studios’ conversion to synchronized-sound film production, white-controlled trade magazines and African American newspapers celebrated a
vogue
for
Negro films.

Hollywood’s African American Films
argues that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of
talking pictures
and, at the same time, to appeal to the white
Broadway
audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white
slumming
in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and
natural
acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Ryan Jay Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies–arising most clearly in the movies’ treatment of African American characters’ decisions to migrate. Regardless of how the films represent these choices, they all prompt elaborate visual and narrative structures of containment that tend to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.