Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed (1968)

[Music] of black black history lost stolen or spray [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] no I could never fit in that I never get in that at all this is more like it now what's the whitest thing you know whiter than the driven snow whiter than the whites of your eyes sugar non-integrated none black sweet sugar what you see there is a black man in your sugar his name is Norbit really Norbit really in eighteen and 1846 invented a vacuum pan that revolutionized the sugar refining industry now you have to dig to find that fact I mean it's not much history but it's still history now uh what do you stand in in your shoes now there's just you and your shoes isn't it nope see there's a black man standing in your Oxford's with you sharing your soul and your heel is a man whose name is Jan aren't metas elegant and in 1863 this is a drawing by the kids med Celica invented the machine that made mass-produced shoes possible now you have to dig around for that fact to and again it's not much history but its history am i coming in clear to California I mean is this TV signal driving through a pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains and slip it into San Francisco okay well I want to thank you Jim Beckworth Jim backwards out of st. Louis hunter Trapper and honorary chief of the Crow tribe of Indians we had trouble finding you Jim though you helped open the West who didn't make the books Chicago right here where the Wrigley building is young fella by the name of Jean Baptiste desaad Jean Baptiste he founded you Chicago when he traded with the Indians and of course there it is right there that particular time it was called as Chicago or stinking onion by the Indians and to sob he didn't even change the name at all now you take the Lewis and Clark expedition here right in there you'll find a black man named York helping to open the West those men are trying to wash the black out of York that's what you might call historically significant because a lot of people think we are to wash white but we ain't gonna you see Texas come in to you Texas right down the Chisholm Trail right here right down there with 5,000 black Cowboys who never made it to the Hollywood Western did you know that huh in the same group there was one black outlaw his name was Deadwood dick who claims his soul brothers for Bat Masterson Billy the Kid and Jesse James Deadwood dick used to ride into the saloon or two drinks one for himself and one for horse and here's his horse a drink in the shadow red eye with straw and how about 186,000 blacks who fought on the Union side during the Civil War 38,000 died how about Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill wasn't just the Rough Riders who made it for black regiments went right up with Teddy they didn't get lost going up the hill they got lost in the history books how about the North Pole Snow White while the first man there was black Matthew Henson they spoke Eskimo and he was Admiral Perry's navigator and although he made it first to the pole I've never quite made it to the history books and how about you Hart can we get there alright Daniel Hale Williams first performed open-heart surgery successfully this list could go on forever blacks who made it blacks who made history but who didn't get into the history texts at all and the strange thing is how little there is about us in the textbooks Napoleon once said history is a fable agreed upon and the fable agreed upon up to now is that American history is white on white sometimes we did get into the history books all wrong now you take this one the growth of the American Republic 1942 edition Samuel Eliot Morrison Henry Steele coming quote as for this has to do with slavery as for [ __ ] sample professor marcin sambal professor komyoji as for sample whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to Wrath and tears there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the south from its peculiar institution peculiar institution means slavery although brought to America by force the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country and devoted to his white folks unquote those lines were written by two Pulitzer Prize winning white northern professors [Music] slavery that's the place everybody likes to start Negro History yeah I'm ignorant black men being brought over from Africa and change terrible things flavoured with this way slavery is taught it sort of takes the sting out of because the way it's usually taught people think and we are for Americans started with nothing but little grass skirts like the kids of the Tarzan movies and though America gave our slavery America kindly gave us religion and a link or two of Education and when we get more jobs and more education up from slavery we had something before we left Africa something more than rhythm I mean we had a high culture culture was so high that great artists in the world are still borrowing from it and here's a sculpture by an unknown African artist and here's what Paul clay took from him and here's the work by an unknown black African and Pablo Picasso liked what he saw another African design and Modigliani swiped it or he was influenced by it or whatever polite word you want to use another black African artist and Picasso didn't change it very much I mean when you look at this copying you gotta give us a little more then rid of them you gotta give us style now if you tell the history of slavery right you got a big problem on your hands a slave trader didn't take some savage out of Africa he took a human being sold him like an animal and separated him from his family America invented the cruelest slavery in the history of speed broke up black families after slavery was over America kept breaking up the black man's family that's the more for history to teach you want to look history right straight in the eye you're gonna get a black eye because it isn't important whether a few black heroes got lost to stolen or strayed in America's history textbooks what's important is why they got left out now this country has got a psychological history there was a master race there was a slave race and though there isn't any political slavery anymore those same old attitudes have hung around green be burning part of burn baby burn is right here in this classroom we want to thank mrs. lovely Billups and our old gang here at fourth grade for the brilliant that it tells you in art work that they've done here to make this whole broadcast sing I want you guys to keep pretending that I'm not here you're doing a great job and just keep on drawing and reading and writing doing what you have to do because I'm gonna talk about some other kids not you married John and Bob these are kids from other schools did you know in some states it used to be against the law to teach blacks to read or write nowadays we're getting these integrated schools and most people think that if we get enough teaching and enough jobs everything is going to take care of itself well there is a scar of history running right through kids as young as these it tears you up if you know how to look at drawings kids makes because kids shouldn't know much about history and anything about discrimination I mean nobody hates little black kids but why do some of them cause so much trouble and if you ask black and white children to draw themselves or trees or houses some strange things happen we asked some ordinary white kids from ordinary families to make some drawings for us like well let's call him John John's white we asked him to draw himself this is John this is his house and this is his tree then we asked a black kid let's call him Ralph to do the same thing this is Ralph's drawing of himself this is his tree now why should two kids of the same age draw so differently into the expert this is dr.

Emmanuel hammer psychiatrist specializing in killed Rijn stare feet oh let me illustrate it for you let's take these drawings no matter what a child draws he's really picturing himself asked a secured child to draw a tree and he's likely to draw a bountiful spreading tree a black child drew this tree cut off in its growth stark bare ungratified it works the same way with drawings of people normal children average drawings the mood is happy the child feels capable the drawings are complete and the arms are developed to emphasize strength these children were old enough to draw complete figures the significant fact is what they left out arms hands a charm a sense that a situation in life is so powerless that he himself is equivalent to an armless man my own study reveals that armless people appear 3 times more frequently in the drawings by black children than those by white the faceless beings suggest that these youngsters not only feel themselves to be less than they might be they don't even feel themselves to be the black child who is forced to live in a hostile world may disappear in self-defense he drifts through life feeling like a shadow he stops caring and he stops trying a child who has this on his mind cannot be a child a child who has this on his mind could want to burn down cities when he gets older the whole confusion was summed up by a black nine-year-old in these two paintings this is a 9 year old boy draws a white man Robin Hood maybe and this is how the same boy draws himself and this is the consequence of deformed history Linda close the curtains Brian lower than 3 Bonnie likely in the past 50 years 33,000 feature films have been made in the United States and about 6,000 of them have had parts for black actors for the most part the black portraits have been drawn by white writers white producers and white directors for a white audience most black parts were the way white Americans wanted them to be the black male was consistently shown as nobody nothing he had no qualities that could be admired by any man or more particularly any woman white people didn't like to thank much about them sort of like a relative you get in the rest way I mean happy [ __ ] dancing and singing there's all they wanted to hear about being good Christians the whites out front like to think the blacks out back what kind of huncle Tom's cavern was one of the first movies made I tried to say anything about black people uncle time was changed a little each time it was put on a stage and all the parts were played by white actors and by the time they made a movie of it in 1903 Uncle Tom was just the white man's idea of a good [ __ ] you might say he was one H rat Brown ain't they made this picture five times by the time they finished with it Mickey Rooney couldn't play it Uncle Tom principle shows started as a black man's entertainment for himself and the plantation owners when they were filmed though they were done by a white cast and you figured that out they were done as sort of a joke and the black entertainer couldn't even get a job making fun of himself the first really vicious anti-negro film was called The Birth of a Nation and it was a honey and the second worst thing about it was that technically in 1918 it was the best movie that had ever been made cat named DW Griffith produced it nee knew how C [Music] Birth of a Nation pretended to tell the story of the Civil War and what happened afterwards when the slaves were freed white woman couldn't walk her own sidewalk if you believe the picture and the South Negros got the right to vote and the movie showed black vote collectors refusing to accept white votes and black people sneaking in extra votes and if these black bad guys don't look very bad to you it's probably because they're white actors wearing burnt court negro legislators took over in the south and in the film they were made to look like Apes and this was the movie version of how it looked in the southern state legislature they drank whiskey they made chicken with their hands in the State House and they put their feet up on the table with the shoes off and of course they passed all sorts of crazy laws according to the film like anybody could marry anybody they wanted to it was obvious to anyone who saw this picture that Negroes weren't fit to govern themselves or anyone else because they really weren't people this film is 50 years old and it may look silly and out-of-date now but it didn't look silly when it was made and seen several million Americans who saw it were propagandized to believe that this is the way things would be if they weren't careful so they've been pretty careful colonel Cameron a former officer in the Confederate Army is all upset over the way northerners and the freed slaves are changing his South taking a mint julep right out of his mouth [Music] they takes a walk one day while he's worrying about it and he sees two white kids playing and then four black kids come along being hardly human and naturally afraid of ghosts black kids run well Cameron sees the whole scene gets his great idea and with this that great white all-american organization the KKK was born cavalry and the bedsheets come to the rescue the South is saved in this picture the Ku Klux Klan was a good boy who saved South most Hollywood films though even the early ones weren't really nasty nobody was sitting around saying hey let's take care of [ __ ] what producers were doing was making money and to make money they made pictures that white ticket buyers would enjoy they showed Negroes the way most Americans like to think of them to blame Hollywood is like throwing a rock at the mirror because you don't like what you see in it Burt Williams was one of the great vaudeville performers he couldn't get parts in white pictures so he made a lot of short comedies he played the part most Americans considered typical Negro it wasn't bad really just lazy stupid and happy the way was and his feet hurt I was afraid of most everything when he was scared he shook and his teeth chattered unlike a scared white man the black man's eyes could pop out of his head when he was scared he was so scared he couldn't talk I was also so scared he couldn't run black women on the other hand were steady and in pattern they stood like a rock on the face of things that scared black men another strange physical characteristic was when they were really very scared the guys turned white we look back on these old films the patterns come jumping out at you the most consistent thing about them was the attack on the black man he was never even given the privilege of being a man he was a boy as in you know here boy they had a lot of other great qualities besides being cowardly for instance they stole chickens they shot craps dice your Papa talking to you now that's fun just just hit them one more time [Applause] and lions weren't the only thing they were afraid of either they were afraid of gorillas what's wrong is that you next to me they're also afraid of ghosts and skeletons yeah unless you scratch in my head [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] what's your hurry boys even when they were little boys they had these characteristics Farina and our gang was the boy boy the tradition of the lazy stupid crap shooting chicken-stealing idiot was popularized by an actor named Lincoln Theodore Monroe and drew Perry cat made two million dollars in five years in the Army it's too bad he was as good at it as he was the character he played was planted in a lot of people's head and they remember it the rest of their lives as clear as an auto accident what's that are you an ending [Applause] [Music] Cherokee wait a minute Hiawatha was a woman he played in movies with other actors who were as American as moms raspberry jello if they accepted the stereotype how wrong could it be baby yeah you sure get did you heard what's his name well of course I appreciate the honor yes I suppose the compliment and I ought to do something for you come over to my place tomorrow and I'll give you a job yeah break and leave all-american little Shirley Temple played a lot of parts that involved her with black actors she was always real nice to them this is an imitation step-in Fetchit named Willie best for Shirley the cute little white girl was brave and strong in the face of danger and the big black man was stupid and cowardly what are you afraid of him for Oh John dummy anchor this mighty power digging even change the weather what will he come around I never know what is one of someone I'm shooting and sweating at the same time I'm Timmy [Music] Serbia's cookies to match your help and like a kid yes ma'am is Bert she was good to them and they were good to her sort of a master and pet relationship how would you like to see uncle Billy get [Applause] [Laughter] this is Bill Bojangles Robinson one of the great ones but if he wanted to work in dance he had to come into a picture through the servants entrance [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] Shelly was good to children they loved them real good don't worry very nice maggot thank you ever so much I suppose it might have surprised a lot of Holly to do system or seemed like that could actually make a lot of people mostly black sick to their stomach this is a lot of fun in it the newsreels that were showing along with feature films knew a good thing when they saw one they helped keep all the black cats in their place nobody black ever did anything very newsy in a newsreel [Music] they did things like eat watermelon and watermelon even contests [Music] then another favorite for the newsreel cameraman was the film people throwing things at him good sport some college football publicity man decided this was a good idea and there were a lot of very funny golf pictures if you weren't black they were funny I guess everything suggested the black man was nothing Hollywood adopted a sort of British attitude toward black natives of other countries they were always sneaking around the bushes you know carrying stuff on the head white men weren't supposed to get caught sweating it's seen a picture called Presley's stated the colonial attitude don't let it break and Rea take to him your race for a wedding gift the prestige of the white men that means everything you stand for and it is the only weapon you two will have prestige but it is enough to preserve you yeah and I'll try to remember okay even though most non-white natives of any place for savages and films had often pleased white producers to endow a few chosen blacks with the virtue of great loyalty to him the white man here's one defending in hardened to the death there was always one loyal and true black man who would do anything for his master some of them were wonderful people you know if you really get a good one mostly though Negroes were not heroes they were a big part service railroad this is your destination folks they made very good chauffeurs look dead in their caps they were great at serving all kinds of drinks that called ferule stays with you like correlation horse neighs you got them to be a trustee wherever there was a thirsty master there were they also [Music] plantain jimana I don't know fighting stretch one small chicken but as long as the waters run it will Ave supernote blobby well you can't camp stairs more salt like goo off her face one question they never answered when the negro woman was taking care of the white woman's kids who was taking care of hers they did all kinds of odd jobs around the picture like walking horses when they weren't walking horses they're out back playing craps of course recreation they met people at the station for the Masters [Music] but you know if it's expected mr. Millford yelling yells amuse which I'm looking for I'm mr. nail for the boy his boy you see yes America's the name sir did you think Murphy yes miss Murphy they called me walking murder walking back yes most of us Murphy's down here just sit our wall they make wonderful servants all kinds and pictures dumb but loyal I beg your pardon [Music] the things were getting pretty tough during the thirties a good thing for a lot of black actors was that they made a movie called the green pastures with like they say a cast of thousands he gave a lot of people work but it had all the old stereotyped characters it was clever and funny and all black but it was a white man's picture [Music] let me get them Oh Lord let me see that those are you just a little boy Yemen and sinning and chewing tobacco like you was your Pappy and you've been drinking Sonny kick mammy wine too you gamblers ought to be ashamed of yourself leading this border sin why are you the best crapshoot in town why Hollywood was turning out films radio came along and decided to get in on it too me too white fellows from Chicago invented two black characters they named Amos and Andy they played their parts on the radio for 30 years this is them doing their bit when radio moved over to let television and Amos and Andy went with it these two white cats couldn't play names from Andy where you could see them so what they did was they had a black cast cast was different but the stereotypes were the ones the white people had come to know and love there were shady characters with money Oh to each and every brother completed fiction you don't offer that thing down so you want to t the financeable come yes well then here it is you don't see them neither was still slow and lazy are you sure they are not here oh yes they told me soda and then report to our office right away I shall tell the boy their trouble with the English language misused words it was always the women who were dominant [Applause] mostly black actors aren't playing the old stereotypes anymore there are people who say they're playing a new stereotype Sidney Poitier is always helping some little old ladies across the street whether they want to go or not black people in this country got a bum deal for a long while and it won't hurt much if we see a little of that now and then Stanley Kramer has let us use some scenes from guess who's coming to dinner look at these and remember Birth of a Nation this is the opening scene when Kathryn Hartmann is bringing Sydney home for the first time dr.