A great number of movies have been made about race relations, or with a strong racial theme over the last century, from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Marvel Studios' Black Panther (2018).[1]
D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation set the precedent for heavily racialized stereotypes of African Americans (many played by white actors in blackface) as clowns or predators, and cast the Ku Klux Klan as the saviours of white America.[2] Later films, such as Dark Command (1940),[3] Song of the South and Gone With the Wind (1939), repeated some of those stereotypes.[4]
Other films such as the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races and Hellzapoppin' showcased early black performers including Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and Slim and Slam.[5] With Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959), Hollywood put George Gershwin's and Oscar Hammerstein II's Broadway shows – that reworked Jazz performances for white audiences – on screen with stars Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge.[6]
Race films marketed to black audiences included Hi-De-Ho featuring Jazz performer Cab Calloway.[7]
The quintessential American film, the western was often about implicitly about race, since it described the westward journey of colonists into the lands of Native Americans.[8]
With the growth of the Civil Rights Movement Hollywood was on the whole on the liberal side, with films such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), West Side Story (1961), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) looking at race prejudice critically.[9]
With the rise of the Black Panther Party, Hollywood tried to stay relevant with Black Power-themed films such as Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972) and Foxy Brown (1974), which became known as Blaxploitation films. However, the new genre was an opportunity for director Melvin van Peebles and actors including Richard Rountree, Pam Grier and also for musician Curtis Mayfield whose sound track accompanied the 1972 hit Superfly.[10]
Though Blaxploitation genre is in the past, filmmakers have excited black and white audiences with stories of gangs and crime that tread a fine line between glorifying and vilifying gangsters, such as New Jack City (1991), South Central (1992) and Juice (1992). Rap music, too, has given a new dimension to black gang films, with All Eyez on Me (2017) about the life and death of Tupac Shakur, and Notorious (2009) about the killing of Notorious B.I.G.[11]
In the 1970s and 1980s a backlash against Civil Rights was met by more films about black criminality threatening white communities. In Sudden Impact (1983), Clint Eastwood's character Harry Callahan goads a black rapist holding a woman hostage, "Go ahead, make my day" – meaning, "Shoot her, so I can shoot you."[12] The Dirty Harry series of films, like the Death Wish one, appealed to a reaction against Civil Rights with fantasy violence against black and other criminals.
Another way that films titillated white audiences was with fantasies of black people rising up against white society. The British film Zulu (1964) showed a small platoon of Redcoats fighting against thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke's Drift at the end of the 19th century. Later John Carpenter achieved a similar effect surrounding a police station with a coalescence of Puerto Rican gangs in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).[13]
By the 1990s American attitudes on race were becoming more liberal and a new wave of films looked back at the Civil Rights Movement as history, beginning with Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning of 1989, right through to Ghosts of Mississippi in 1996.[14] More recently, Ava DuVernay's 2014 film Selma has shown there is much more in the civil rights era.The Civil War also got a different historical treatment in the 1989 film Glory, about black Union troops.[15] Civil War dramas like Lincoln (2012) and Free State of Jones (2016).Historical dramas proved a rich seam for Hollywood which went on to deal with slavery in Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) and Steven McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013).[16] More radical black leaders, such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, had their story told in films by Spike Lee and Mario Van Peebles in 1992 and 1995.[17]
As well as a great rise in the number of historical dramas around the issues of slavery, civil rights and historical racism, more social comment films about race relations have been made since the 1990s. Spike Lee's breakout movie Do the Right Thing (1989) opened up the field for a lot more searching examination of race in the present day. Films such as Justin Simien's 2014 comedy Dear White People, the Academy award-winning Moonlight (2016) and Jordan Peele's 2017 horror film Get Out show that film audiences continue to be gripped by racial conflict.[18]
| Year | Film | Director | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Harriet | Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn, and Janelle Monáe star in this biopic about Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery and the subsequent, dangerous missions she led to liberate hundreds of slaves through the Underground Railroad. | ||
| 2018 | Yardie | Aml Ameen and Stephen Graham in a film of Victor Headley's novel about West Indian gangs in London. | ||
| 2018 | Crazy Rich Asians | Constance Wu and Henry Golding star in a comedy/drama based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Kevin Kwan. | ||
| 2018 | Whitney | Documentary on the life of Whitney Houston. | ||
| 2018 | Black Panther | Chadwick Boseman stars as the Marvel Comics character in a film that grossed $1.345 billion. | ||
| 2018 | Superfly | Trevor Jackson stars as Youngblood Priest in the remake of Super Fly. | ||
| 2017 | Detroit | Shocking depiction of police brutality in the Algiers Motel incident during riots in Detroit in 1967. | ||
| 2017 | Get Out | Sci-fi horror about a predatory white conspiracy to implant their consciousnesses into black bodies grossed $252 million | ||
| 2017 | Kings | A South Central recluse helps a working-class mother during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, with Halle Berry and Daniel Craig. | ||
| 2017 | All Eyez on Me | The biopic of rapper Tupac Shakur. | ||
| 2017 | Mudbound | Tragic drama of two farming families one white and one black, based on the novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan. | ||
| 2017 | Gook | Two Korean-American brothers in the midst of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. | ||
| 2016 | Zootopia | A cop solves a case about predators turning savage, led by a prey supremacist organisation who is known for a hatred against predator species. | ||
| 2016 | The Birth of a Nation | Nate Parker | Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. | |
| 2016 | Moonlight | Barry Jenkins | Tarell Alvin McCraney's story of growing up black and gay in America grossed over $65 million worldwide against a budget of $4 million. | |
| 2016 | Loving | Jeff Nichols | The story of Richard and Mildred Loving's marriage and the 1967 Supreme Court judgment against the State of Virginia's outlawing of interracial marriage, with Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton. | |
| 2016 | Hidden Figures | Theodore Melfi | Taraji P. Henson is Katherine Goble leading a section of black women mathematicians working at NASA to computerise the Mercury Seven space mission. | |
| 2016 | I Am Not Your Negro | Raoul Peck | The story of writer and activist James Baldwin told through contemporaneous footage. | |
| 2016 | Fences | Denzel Washington | The film of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a father, frustrated at the stymying of his baseball career, and taking it out on his son. | |
| 2016 | A United Kingdom | Amma Asante | Based on the true-life romance between Sir Seretse Khama and his wife Ruth Williams Khama in Bechuanaland and the imperial authorities' attempts to prevent it. | |
| 2016 | Free State of Jones | Gary Ross | The story of Newton Knight's revolt against the Confederacy during the American Civil War. | |
| 2016 | Nina | Cynthia Mort | Biopic of jazz singer Nina Simone starring Zoe Saldana. | |
| 2015 | Straight Outta Compton | F. Gary Gray | The story of rappers N.W.A, which grossed over $200 million, four times its budget. | |
| 2015 | Stanley Nelson Jr. | Documentary on the Black Panther Party and their repression under the FBI's Cointelpro program. | ||
| 2014 | Selma | Ava DuVernay | About Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's arguments and preparations for the momentous 1967 Civil Rights march from Selma, Alabama, to Washington. | |
| 2014 | Dear White People | Justin Simien | A comedy about members of a black fraternity house negotiating the racial assumptions of their white counterparts at college. | |
| 2013 | 12 Years a Slave | Steve McQueen | The English director's film of Solomon Northrup's memoir of the same name (1853) about a free man being abducted from the North to serve as a slave in the American South. | |
| 2013 | The Butler | Lee Daniels | Forest Whitaker plays Cecil Gaines (drawn from Wil Haygood's Washington Post article "A Butler Well Served by This Election" about Eugene Allen) who works as a butler at the White House through successive presidencies. | |
| 2013 | Belle | Amma Asante | Loosely based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lord Mansfield's ruling on the Zong massacre in Georgian England. | |
| 2013 | Justin Chadwick | Biopic of South African anti-Apartheid leader and President Nelson Mandela starring Idris Elba. | ||
| 2012 | Django Unchained | Quentin Tarantino | Controversial western with a slave revenge theme, starring Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson. | |
| 2011 | Winnie Mandela | Darrell Roodt | Sympathetic biopic of anti-Apartheid leader Winnie Mandela. | |
| 2011 | The Help | Tate Taylor | Based on Kathryn Stockett's book of the same name about a black maids standing up to their white mistresses, with the help of an aspiring writer. | |
| 2009 | Precious | Lee Daniels | Grim story of parental rape and neglect in a deprived neighbourhood. | |
| 2009 | Invictus | Clint Eastwood | About the struggle to re-launch the Springboks rugby team in post-Apartheid South Africa. | |
| 2009 | Notorious | George Tillman Jr. | The life and murder of rap star Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G. | |
| 2008 | Gran Torino | Clint Eastwood | The unlikely friendship between Korean War veteran and a Hmong family in Los Angeles. | |
| 2005 | American Gangster | Ridley Scott | Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) works his way up from sidekick to gang leader, pursued by Russell Crowe's lawman. | |
| 2004 | Manderlay | Lars von Trier | A disturbing allegory of slavery from the Danish avant garde director. | |
| 2004 | Crash | Paul Haggis | Multi-plotted state of the nation film with Don Cheadle's character harassed by a policeman, and other stories of the challenges of different migrants and citizens of Los Angeles. | |
| 2002 | Dirty Pretty Things | Stephen Frears | The struggles of migrants in London. | |
| 2001 | Ali | Michael Mann | Will Smith stars as the legendary heavyweight boxing champion Muhammed Ali. | |
| 1999 | Introducing Dorothy Dandridge | Martha Coolidge | Biopic of the actress Dorothy Dandridge with Halle Berry made for television. | |
| 1999 | The Hurricane | Norman Jewison | Biopic of boxing champion Rubin Carter falsely accused and imprisoned for a triple murder, starring Denzel Washington. | |
| 1998 | Beloved | Jonathan Demme | Horror-drama film based on Toni Morrison's 1987 novel of the same name. | |
| 1997 | Amistad | Steven Spielberg | The trial over the mutiny of the enslaved Mende people on board the Amistad in 1839. | |
| 1997 | Miss Evers' Boys | Joseph Sargent | HBO television film based on David Feldshuh's play about a U.S. federal government experiment that led to men being left untreated for syphilis. | |
| 1996 | Ghosts of Mississippi | Rob Reiner | Courtroom drama based on the trial of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. | |
| 1996 | When We Were Kings | Leon Gast | Documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. | |
| 1995 | Panther | Mario van Peebles | Dramatization of the Black Panthers' struggle against racism, based on Melvin van Peebles' book. | |
| 1995 | Jefferson in Paris | James Ivory | On US President-to-be Thomas Jefferson's affairs as ambassador in Paris, and his relationship with Sally Hemings (played by Thandie Newton). | |
| 1994 | Corrina, Corrina | Jessie Nelson | Interracial love story in 1950s America with Whoopi Goldberg and Ray Liotta. | |
| 1992 | Sarafina! | Darrell Roodt | A coming-of-age story in the midst of the Soweto riots, filmed in South Africa. | |
| 1992 | Malcolm X | Spike Lee | Biopic of the inspirational Black Muslim leader starring Denzel Washington. | |
| 1992 | Juice | Ernest R. Dickerson | With Tupac Shakur and Omar Epps. | |
| 1992 | South Central | Stephen Milburn Anderson | Father and son learn to break ties with a street gang, an adaptation of the 1987 novel Crips by Donald Bakeer. | |
| 1991 | Boyz n the Hood | John Singleton | Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ice Cube star in this story of gang life in Los Angeles. | |
| 1991 | New Jack City | Mario Van Peebles | Wesley Snipes stars as Nino Brown, leader of a ruthless drug gang in the midst of New York's crack epidemic. | |
| 1990 | The Long Walk Home | Richard Pearce | A drama with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 as a background, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek. | |
| 1989 | Driving Miss Daisy | Bruce Beresford | Gentle comedy based on Alfred Uhry's play of the same name set in the Civil Rights era. | |
| 1989 | Mississippi Burning | Alan Parker | Parker's film of the Civil Rights era contest over desegregation. | |
| 1989 | Do the Right Thing | Spike Lee | Acclaimed comedy-drama of racial tensions and rioting in Brooklyn. | |
| 1989 | Glory | Edward Zwick | Matthew Broderick stars as the anxious white commander of an experimental all-black troop of the Union Army in the American Civil War. | |
| 1989 | For Queen and Country | Martin Stellman | Denzel Washington stars as a Falklands War veteran returning to riot-torn Tottenham, England. | |
| 1988 | I'm Gonna Git You Sucka | Keenan Ivory Wayans | A parody version of a Blaxploitation film. | |
| 1987 | Cry Freedom | Richard Attenborough | The story of Steve Biko's detention and murder, and his friendship with the journalist Donald Woods. | |
| 1986 | Absolute Beginners | Julien Temple | Based on Colin MacInnes' novel of the same name, the film revolves around the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and features Slim Gaillard and Steven Berkoff's impersonation of Oswald Mosley. | |
| 1985 | The Color Purple | Steven Spielberg | Based on Alice Walker's novel of the same name and starring Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey in a story of pre-civil rights Georgia. | |
| 1978 | The Wiz | Sidney Lumet | A black cast re-make of The Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross. | |
| 1977 | Roots | Marvin J. Chomsky | ABC-TV miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel , starring Levar Burton. | |
| 1976 | The Last Supper | Tomás Gutiérrez Alea | Cuban drama about a pious planter inviting his slaves to a Christian dinner, only to encourage them to revolt. | |
| 1975 | Mandingo | Richard Fleischer | Ken Norton is a slave put to exhibition fighting by planters, with illicit sex between slaves and masters driving a lot of the action. | |
| 1972 | The Harder They Come | Perry Henzell | Jamaica-based story of an embattled reggae star, played by Jimmy Cliff considered a breakthrough for reggae in the United States.[19] | |
| 1974 | Foxy Brown | Jack Hill | Pam Grier stars in this Blaxploitation film as a woman fighting back against exploitation. | |
| 1973 | Cleopatra Jones | Jack Starrett | Tamara Dobson stars in this Blaxploitation film as an undercover agent exposing the drugs industry. | |
| 1972 | Superfly | Gordon Parks, Jr. | Ron O'Neal stars in this Blaxploitation film as a drug dealer trying to get out of the business – notable for its Curtis Mayfield soundtrack | |
| 1971 | Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song | Melvin van Peebles | A kaleidoscopic journey through race-torn America. | |
| 1971 | Shaft | Gordon Parks | Private detective John Shaft (Richard Rountree) is hired by a Harlem gangster to rescue his kidnapped daughter in a film that highlights black power, with a strong Isaac Hayes soundtrack. | |
| 1970 | Little Big Man | Arthur Penn | Dustin Hoffman stars as a boy who goes to live amongst the Cheyenne, witnessing the massacres carried out by Custer's Seventh Cavalry. | |
| 1970 | Soldier Blue | Ralph Nelson | Candice Bergen stars as a Cheyenne captured in the midst of a massacre of Native Americans. | |
| 1970 | Watermelon Man | Melvin van Peebles | An inveterate racist wakes up to find he has turned black in a caustic comedy inspired as much by Kafka's Metamorphosis as by John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. | |
| 1970 | The Landlord | Hal Ashby | This Norman Jewison-produced film stars Beau Bridges as heir to a slum landlord, whose feelings for his black tenants – in particular Lanie (Marki Bey), a dancer at a local black club – run away with him.. | |
| 1969 | Slaves | Herbert J. Biberman | Dionne Warwick and Ossie Davis in a lurid tale of plantation slavery. | |
| 1969 | Burn! | Gillo Pontecorvo | Marlon Brando plays a political agent who foments a slave revolt in a Caribbean island, only to help reinstate an oppressive wage-slavery in its place. | |
| 1967 | To Sir With Love | James Clavell | Sidney Poitier plays a teacher arrived from the Caribbean to teach in a run-down school in London, based on E. R. Braithwaite's 1959 autobiographical novel of the same name. | |
| 1967 | Guess Who's Coming to Dinner | Stanley Kramer | Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star in this comedy of manners about liberal parents confronted by their daughter's black boyfriend. | |
| 1967 | In the Heat of the Night | Norman Jewison | Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is a detective from Philadelphia investigating a murder case and confronting prejudice in small-town Mississippi. | |
| 1967 | Hurry Sundown | Otto Preminger | The complex race relations of multiple couples and community problems of the contemporary South in 1946. | |
| 1964 | Zulu | Cy Endfield | A white outpost is beset by thousands of Zulu warriors in the British Empire story of the Battle of Rorke's Drift. | |
| 1962 | To Kill A Mockingbird | Robert Mulligan | Gregory Peck stars in the film of Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the story of a black defendant falsely accused of rape. | |
| 1961 | West Side Story | Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins | Gang warfare between the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Anglo Jets in this film of the 1957 Broadway musical of the same name (itself inspired by William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet). | |
| 1959 | Porgy and Bess | Otto Preminger | Film of George and Ira Gershwin's opera of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy, starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge. | |
| 1959 | Black Orpheus | Marcel Camus | A reworking of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Brazilian carnival. | |
| 1959 | Imitation of Life | Douglas Sirk | Susan Kohner stars as a mixed race woman who passes for white, in a film adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel of the same name. | |
| 1957 | 12 Angry Men | Sidney Lumet | A jury decide the fate of a "boy" charged with murder – though the race of the accused is never stated, the film deals with prejudice as one juror denounces slum-born people, no better than animals who kill for fun. | |
| 1954 | Carmen Jones | Otto Preminger | Sidney Poitier's airman is seduced by Dorothy Dandridge in the film of the 1943 musical, itself a re-working adaptation of Bizet's Carmen. | |
| 1954 | The Salt of the Earth | Herbert J. Biberman | Hispanic American miners fight against injustice based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. | |
| 1951 | Cry, the Beloved Country | Zoltan Korda | Based on Alan Paton's 1948 novel of the same name about a black minister's journey to Johannesburg to find his son in Apartheid South Africa. | |
| 1949 | Pinky | Elia Kazan | A light-skinned black woman has been "passing" for white while at school in the North. She falls in love with a doctor who knows nothing about her black heritage. | |
| 1947 | Hi-De-Ho | Josh Binney | A race film showcasing jazz performer Cab Calloway. | |
| 1946 | Song of the South | Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson | Walt Disney's mixed live action and animation film of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories. | |
| 1941 | Hellzapoppin' | Zany musical showcasing Slim and Slam (Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart) and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. | ||
| 1940 | Dark Command | Raoul Walsh | A Union-supporting John Wayne tries to uphold the law against the Confederate hold-outs of Quantrill's Raiders. | |
| 1939 | Gone With the Wind | Victor Fleming | Historical drama of a southern family in the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel of the same name. | |
| 1937 | A Day at the Races | Sam Wood | Marx Brothers film showcasing Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. | |
| 1936 | Song of Freedom | J. Elder Wills | Paul Robeson stars as John Zinga, an African dockworker who becomes an opera singer. | |
| 1936 | Show Boat | James Whale | Irene Dunne stars in the story of the Mississippi show boat featuring music by Oscar Hammerstein II and performances by Hattie McDaniel and Paul Robeson – who sings "Ole Man River". | |
| 1935 | Sanders of the River | Zoltan Korda | Leslie Banks stars as the colonial officer who takes on Paul Robeson's African chief. | |
| 1934 | Imitation of Life | John M. Stahl | Fredi Washington stars as a mixed-race woman who passes for white, in a film adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel of the same name. | |
| 1933 | The Emperor Jones | Paul Robeson stars as Brutus Jones, a convict who escapes to make himself emperor of a Caribbean Island, based on the Eugene O'Neill play of the same title. | ||
| 1930 | Borderline | Kenneth Macpherson | An African-American couple played by Paul and Eslanda Robeson stay at a hotel in Europe with group of hedonists. An interracial love triangle shocks the townsfolk. | |
| 1915 | The Birth of a Nation | The American Civil War and Reconstruction era with the Ku Klux Klan saving the white nation from black carpetbaggers. |