Issues of race and ideas of racial hierarchies informed the movie censorship debates as they did with most issues in 1920s Virginia. As chapter 2 will show, white, elite officials of the commonwealth constructed African Americans as one major element of Virginia’s “vulnerable” citizenry. Such “vulnerability,” according to white officials, required state action to control what images African Americans could see at the movies and what images of African Americans could be viewed on screen and by whom. Under the guise of “protection,” this reasoning led censors to forbid any representations of African Americans that might offend white audiences. The heavily censored portrayals o f African Americans on-screen and censors’ refusal to allow films produced by African Americans to be shown uncensored in Virginia worked to maintain a facade of
“amicable” relationships between the races in Virginia. White officials used similar arguments to uphold segregation, deny African Americans frill citizenship rights, and to heavily regulate their presence on screen and behind the camera.
While censors maintained an active agenda to prohibit any non-subservient portrayals of African Americans on-screen, they made few efforts to censor films showcasing racist caricatures of African American characters. In February 1922, a few months before the censorship board began its operation, revival showings of The Birth o f a Nation, an infamously racist film originally released in 1915 that has been credited with fueling the revival of a nativist Klan in the late 1910s and the 1920s, reappeared in
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Virginia’s capital.10 The white press focused on the art of the film rather than its overtly racist and sexist plot lines, which it never openly acknowledged. As leaders and citizens of the commonwealth debated the pros and cons of censorship, a movie that had been heavily censored in other parts of the nation and vigorously denounced by African American citizens again opened to uncritical white fanfare in Richmond. At the film’s final showing in Richmond at the Academy of Music on February 10, forty-two “white- robed and silent” Klansmen attended the show.11 The Klansmen entered the Academy in street clothes, emerged in the theater’s boxes in their white KKK regalia, and left in their robes while wearing their hoods. Other moviegoers noted that three times during the movie, the men “arose as one man and stood motionless with their left arms pointed to the screen.”12 While proponents and opponents o f film censorship alike did not directly discuss the racial components of censorship, the immediate work o f the censorship board shows that race functioned as a critical, frequent subtext throughout the censorship debates. When proponents of censorship spoke about the need for the state to police popular culture, they saw this policing as a mechanism to maintain strictly raced,
gendered, and classed boundaries. Miscegenation, as mentioned earlier, was also at issue here, and censors stated that no miscegenation could be shown on-screen in the state since such portrayals would support criminal behavior.13 Evidence suggests that the
10 Maxim Simcovitch, “The Impact of Griffith’s Birth o f a Nation in the Modem Ku Klux Klan.” Journal
o f Popular Film (1972): 48. As the Klan reemerged in this time period, it focused on the “virtues” of
motherhood, chastity, temperance, and “clean” movies and literature, much like moral reformers. Yet Kenneth Jackson argues that the fear of change motivated the Klan to be most concerned by issues of ethnicity and race, rather than new technologies such as the movies. Kenneth Jackson, The KKK in the
City, 1915-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 81,243.
11 Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 February 1922. 12 Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 February 1922. 13VBMP. Box 53.
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regulation o f “deviant” racial and sexual portrayals on-screen went hand-in-hand from the board’s inception.
Klan demonstrators marked their supremacy as white men by staging such an exhibition during a time when Virginia officials increasingly undertook the maintenance o f white supremacy and white “purity” as a state project, which simultaneously suggests their tenuous hold on white supremacy. In 1924, Virginia’s lawmakers passed what historian Peggy Pascoe calls “the most draconian miscegenation law in American history,”14 under which citizens could claim whiteness only if they contained not one drop of non-Caucasian blood, with the exception of up to 1/16 Native American blood. Furthermore, whites could only marry other whites, which fiirther promoted the ideal of a “pure,” white civilization and worked to constrict the ability o f people of color to “pass” as white.
The movie censorship debates must be situated within the constricting parameters of “whiteness” in Virginia and state attempts to police increasingly strict boundaries to further entrench white supremacy. Historians such as Peter Bardaglio argue that State intrusion upon the private life of citizens began long before the early twentieth-century. His study of southern miscegenation laws suggests that before the Civil War, states instituted miscegenation laws “not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them.”15 Lawmakers designed miscegenation laws to keep black men and women “in their place” and to protect the “purity” of white women. The rise of laws
14 Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies o f ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America.” In Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 474.
15 Peter Bardaglio, “ ‘Shamefull Matches:’ The Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900.” In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Martha Hodes, ed. New York: NYU Press, 1999.
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prohibiting interracial sex and marriage presented “a notable exception to the general hesitancy about monitoring the private lives of individual whites.” 16
Even in the antebellum period, Bardaglio suggests state regulation of mixed marriages “stood in sharp juxtaposition to other areas of antebellum marriage law in the North and the South, which usually encouraged hands-off approach.” In the late
nineteenth century, advocates supported miscegenation statutes with arguments concerning the social and biological effects mixed marriages could have. Bardaglio characterizes this prohibition within “a broader judicial trend in the post-war period to promote more rigorous tests of marital fitness that supposedly protected the well-being and safety of the public.”17
Virginia’s historical reluctance to intrude upon “private” issues faded when the potential for interracial liaisons was at issue. The widening of State power to regulate individual behavior, even within the home, was firmly in place by the time of the censorship debates, as was the idea of the State as protector of the home. Censorship legislation of a popular new medium followed in this vein and fits within Bardaglio’s conclusion that “the new reliance on the state to define and protect the public welfare . . . eventually resulted in the legal transformation o f the southern household.”18
Black Virginians, including editors of black newspapers and members of the NAACP, resisted state attempts to promote white supremacy through legislation, by protesting not only the state regulation of popular entertainment’s content but also the regulation of theater spaces. On February 4, 1922, writers at the Norfolk Journal and Guide, an African American weekly, drew their readers’ attention to letters written by
16 Bardaglio, 118. 17 Bardaglio, 118. 18 Bardaglio, 128.
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NAACP officials to movie producers concerning a proposed statute in South Carolina’s legislature which would prohibit the showing of motion pictures exhibiting women of one race in movie theaters of another race. Passed by the House and awaiting Senate action at the time of publication, NAACP activists called this Moon Bill, named after its legislative sponsor, a “vicious and dangerous precedent in legislation.”19 This proposed law again revealed the tension surrounding both race and gender in the new space of the motion picture, both physically within the theater and visually on screen. South
Carolina’s legislators attempted to stave off perceived social disorder by regulating representations of women, whose supposed racial, sexual, or social deviance they sought to control through such bills and to thwart the “deviant” use of “innocent” images. Virginia’s leaders likewise sought to displace the complex ambiguities surrounding the movies and inscribe the racially and sexually “deviant” upon working-class white women and people o f color.20 If successfiil, these legislators could cement their power as white men at a time when newly mobile groups challenged white, middle-class, male positions of authority. Thus state officials attempted to bolster and to protect their own power as white, heterosexual men by preventing certain “dangerous” on-screen bodies from being viewed by raced, classed, and gendered communities of individuals they considered to be equally precarious spectators.21
Terrorist-oriented organizations such as the Klan had made clear what they believed the stakes were in terms of regulating cultural spaces, and they tried to maintain
19 Norfolk Journal and Guide, 4 February 1922.
20 “Devianf ’ women referred to prostitutes, women who had sex outside of marriage, or white women who had sex with or married men of color. Racial “deviance” typically referred to white individuals who chose to have some type of sexual relationship with people of color, most often white women who “threatened” the very existence of the white race by having sexual relations with black men and potentially bearing “non-white” cbildrea
strict racial boundaries through the use of threats of violence. In 1922, the play Emperor Jones, starring African American actor Charles Gilpin along with a supporting cast of white actors, was set to start touring in Virginia when Gilpin received a letter with the Ku Klux Klan’s signature advising him not to extend the tour further South with a mixed company of players. The play’s management took this “advice” and headed north. According to a reporter at the Journal and Guide, “the warning was too tenuous . . . to be an avowed social expression, but as a portent it was powerful and the South has missed a great play . . . because the actor is black. Probably not only the fact that he is black but that being black he is the star made him undesirable.”22 This writer argued that the play itself would not have challenged Southern social conventions concerning race because it adhered to the principle “that the white does and must rule when the races are thrown together.”23 This incident showed an attempt by the Klan to (reorganize society along the racial boundaries it promoted—white, male supremacy. The Klan may have cared little for how the play spoke to race relations within the context of the stoiy. It did, however, care deeply about the interaction of black and white actors on stage and that interaction being viewed by spectators. Touring play companies featuring both black and white actors differed little from on-screen black and white interaction in raising the furor of white supremacists, and even if not regulated by law, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, yet another “community filter,” used violence to rid the state of such “threats.” Movie censorship legislation had the potential, through the subjective censorship of film, to institutionalize such racism by forbidding the same sort of films from exhibition in Virginia.
22 Norfolk Journal and Guide, 4 February 1922. 23 Norfolk Journal and Guide, 4 February 1922.