Race, Gender, and Film Censorship in Virginia, 1922–1965 by Ooten Melissa;

Author:Ooten, Melissa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Burning Cross in Virginia

The regulation of both the movies and the space of the theater fell into these regulatory actions of both Hollywood and the government. Before World War II, African Americans had attempted to desegregate theater spaces around the country, including in Virginia’s capital, Richmond. Also, individual African Americans, along with activists working through formal organizations such as the NAACP, increasingly protested against censors’ decisions. They criticized the board for banning positive depictions of African American characters and portrayals of white violence against black individuals and communities from the screen while simultaneously never censoring depictions of African American violence against whites or portrayals of African Americans as villainous, such as those found in The Birth of a Nation.

By 1934, Hollywood’s own censorship board had prohibited miscegenation on film, so Virginia censors no longer had to worry about images of miscegenation slipping by them in Hollywood productions. In fact, it would only be after the Second World War that Hollywood producers and industry censors again began expanding what could be shown on film. Censors had turned their concerns in the 1920s and 1930s to regulating depictions of African Americans on-screen as Virginia legislators constricted the legal definition of whiteness and the physical spaces citizens of color could occupy in the state. In post-World War II Virginia, African Americans began to more publicly and vocally press for expanded civil rights. Thus it remained a top priority for censors to continue to maintain the boundaries of white supremacy by actively regulating out of films any depictions that might question or threaten the state’s racial order, which still firmly placed white, elite men at its head. Immediately following World War II, when the censors still retained the power to regulate the movie screen and African American civil rights protests had not yet become as visible, the board severely curtailed on-screen depictions that challenged white hierarchies. One such film that received full condemnation from the censors was the The Burning Cross, which applied to Virginia’s censors for an exhibition license in 1947.

Some white citizens and many African Americans hailed The Burning Cross as a searing response to the racism of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The movie showcased the horrors of a white, Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan exacting unwarranted vigilante violence on innocent citizens in the South, specifically African Americans. Unlike The Birth of a Nation, however, The Burning Cross was initially banned from exhibition throughout Virginia. Furthermore, when compared with the board’s dealings with Oscar Micheaux beginning over two decades earlier, the censors’ positions had seemingly changed little. Board members still used the rationale of maintaining racial harmony to censor films focused on mistreatment of African Americans and to maintain their authority in prohibiting any images on-screen that might call into question the value of white supremacy. However, between the early 1920s and the late 1940s, one very important change had occurred. In the mid-1920s, the board’s dealings with Micheaux were primarily private. There are no accounts of the many controversies between Micheaux and the censorship board in either the local black or white press.

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