See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/276121435

RACE, FILM, AND COLLECTIVE DESTINY. Cara Caddoo.

Envisioning Freedom, Cinema and the Building of
Modern Black Life. Cambridge: Harv....

Article  in  Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era · April 2015

DOI: 10.1017/S1537781414000826

CITATIONS READS

0 33

1 author:

Douglas Flowe
Washington University in St. Louis
6 PUBLICATIONS   0 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Douglas Flowe on 04 March 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015), 266–277

BOOK REVIEWS
RACE, FILM, AND COLLECTIVE DESTINY
CADDOO, CARA. Envisioning Freedom, Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2014. 294 pp. $35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 0-6743-6805-3.

REVIEWED BY DOUGLAS J. FLOWE, Washington University

doi:10.1017/S1537781414000826

In Envisioning Freedom, Cara Caddoo offers a richly thorough and weighty examination of the
impact of early films on African American ideas of identity, freedom, community, and collective
destiny. Adding to existing research on unfavorable and racist depictions of blacks in film, and
studies on the counteraction of race film producers, Caddoo’s work highlights the meaning of
film to increasingly urban black populations at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so,
she deftly describes the space of movie venues as communal and collaborative and convincingly
argues that moving pictures had the capacity to synchronize the concerns of black observers, as
well as augment and convey messages of selfhood on a national scale. Mining important resources
such as the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection and a host of local newspapers, fliers, and
church records, Caddoo constructs a narrative dense with personal accounts and compelling
connections between film and historical context.
Envisioning Freedom begins by purposefully detailing the convergence of African American
legal and social circumstances in the late nineteenth century with the inception of modern
cinema. Marrying these two, Caddoo argues that migration to the North, an emerging race film in-
dustry, and the work of black religious institutions combined to define pivotal aspects of black
notions of collective racial betterment. Materially, black films produced funds for churches, frater-
nal orders, and clubs, but more significantly they brought black people together for culturally
meaningful occasions. Caddoo also complicates the main historical factors that compelled black
Americans into interaction with film as a format of entertainment. For blacks, much like many
other Americans, cinema became a constituent aspect of their movement into urban spaces, their
appropriation of public amusements and leisure in those cities and towns, and their participation
in the new mass culture of the turn of the century. However, Caddoo’s work departs from many
recent studies of black movie-going by arguing that white-owned commercial theaters did not
shape the origins of the black experience with film. She makes this argument with wonderfully de-
tailed descriptions of the patrons of black community centers, lodges, churches, and schoolhouses
where film made its most palpable initial impact. Rather than larger commercial theaters in the
North, pre-Great Migration era black institutions forged early experiences with film.
In making this point, Caddoo directs our attention to the centrality of cities of the South and West
in the production of black leisure habits and reminds us that measured “step migrations” placed
blacks into lively entertainment districts far from the cultural nexuses of districts such as Harlem
and Bronzeville. “Their paths were winding and circular, dictated by train routes, family
members, friends, labor agents, violence, and the desire for new economic and leisure opportuni-
ties” (9). Regarding film, these opportunities thrived on the “chitlin’ circuit,” a league of black the-
aters stretched across the country. One stop on the circuit, Lees’ Thirteenth Street Theatre, was
Louisville, Kentucky’s first black space for film and vaudeville. Along with many other black-
owned theaters in the city and the country, analysis of businesses like the Lees’s bolsters the con-
nection Caddoo makes between film and race progress. They supported a “skilled class of motion

© Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

 Book Reviews 267

picture professionals” with roots in the lodge and church screening rooms of the South and West,
and in their construction they strengthened community faith in the existence of a “collective racial
destiny” (65). Experiences in these theaters brought cosmopolitan involvement with modern enter-
tainment to blacks before migration, and had more to do with shaping black expectations about re-
location than Northern destinations did, Caddoo argues. Indeed, the routes of migration became
corridors of developing black ideas about modernity, and were dotted with brick and mortar testa-
ments to black claims to freedom. Hence, they acted as arteries conveying vital cultural elements
into Northern urban districts often inaccurately considered the birthplaces of black modern life.
Caddoo brings her discussion of the power of film in African American lives to a crescendo by
analyzing controversies that emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Delineating
the bifurcation between those who saw race films as indicative of progress, and those who relegated
movie watching to the status of “commercialized vice,” she explains how the interests of film pro-
ducers and church leaders diverged as they competed for the attention of black urbanites. This re-
search dovetails with a chapter on the disputation and violence accompanying the event of Jack
Johnson’s pugilistic victory over Jim Jefferies, and the subsequent showing of the fight film.
While white supremacists responded with attempts to prohibit its showing, for African American
viewers the film “established the screen as a discursive field for the production of racial knowledge”
and invited black spectators to construct their own identities through viewership (118). This is made
most apparent in the black reaction to films such as The Birth of a Nation, and The Nigger, both of
which spurred collective responses and black national simultaneity that would have been impossible
without the previous establishment of film as an aspect of black public participation.
Other works have discussed film attendance in the transformation of black life in migration. Most
recently Jacqueline Najuma Stewart’s Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity
explained movie-going as part of a network of experiences that ushered black migrants into public life.
Stewart also clarified the connection between black responses to racial stereotypes and the emergence
of race films, and delineated the disagreement between black religious leaders and proponents of film.
Regarding these elements of the story, Caddoo’s book often mirrors information found in Stewart’s
work and earlier monographs on preclassical cinema and African Americans. While this does not
take away from her distinct arguments, one must wonder whether broader attention to the internecine
connections between other black venues of leisure and moving pictures might have further distin-
guished Envisioning Freedom. Still, with great attention to detail, a wealth of information drawn
from obscure sources, and a keen eye for linkages between riveting anecdotes and historically signifi-
cant events, Caddoo has produced a crucial seven-chapter volume that will be valuable to students and
scholars of film history. Furthermore, her imaginative emphasis on the interconnection produced by
film viewing adds great context to existing literature on popular culture and migration.

‘CHOICE’: SOME GILDED AGE FEMINST ROOTS

HAMLIN, KIMBERLY. From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age
America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 238pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-
226-13461-1; $32.00 (e-book), ISBN: 978-0-226-13475-8.

REVIEWED BY JUDITH A. ALLEN, Indiana University

doi:10.1017/S1537781414000838

One of the great truths of cultural innovations is ably demonstrated in Kimberly Hamlin’s fine new
intellectual history: creators of theories, discourses, or cultural representations neither determine

View publication stats