The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 106, July 2002 - April, 2003 Page: 537
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Black Texans and Theater Craft Unionism
ed as an issue, and many blacks refused to occupy their time and energy
with it, particularly during World War II when most workers balanced
their labor struggles with the call for patriotism. Black IATSE workers re-
sponded to an appeal to fight America's enemies through the Office of
War Information (OWI), an agency formed in June 1942 to, among oth-
er things, disseminate wartime propaganda. The OWI mobilized black
theater workers by contracting neighborhood theaters to show govern-
ment films designed in part to bolster the American war effort by mini-
mizing racial consciousness and counteracting the distorted images of
black Americans as portrayed by film makers and the theater community.
The romanticized film versions of cordial and harmonious race relations
were as exaggerated as the depiction of black Americans in two of the
most popular black musicals of the 1940s, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy
Weather, which portrayed blacks as simple, ignorant, and superstitious
sambo-like people, capable of performing only menial tasks.8
Black unionists from Local 279-A came together to protest various
forms of workplace inequities at a time when many blacks across the na-
tion-and especially in the South- reluctantly accepted racial separation
as a fact of life. Under the banner of the NAACP, from its inception in
1937 Local 279-A's workforce eschewed the traditional black intellectu-
al's goal of separate equality, and favored instead a direct assault on the
Jim Crow culture. While the NAACP did not directly challenge the sepa-
rate-but-equal dictum, it did provide an example for black activists and
unionists as they set out to eradicate discrimination within the IATSE. De-
spite the NAACP's best efforts, however, Local 279-A could not rely solely
on that organization's meager resources and its limited staff to resolve the
vast issues confronting them. Government intercession, particularly the
investigative actions of federal agencies into the racial labor affairs of
their industry, provided perhaps the most viable prospect for change.'
"Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, "Blacks, Loyalty, and Motion-Picture Propaganda in
World War II," Journal of American History, 73 (Sept., 1986), 383-406. For additional studies on
blacks in American film, see Manthia Dlawara (ed.), Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge,
1993); G. William Jones, Black Cinema Treasures Lost and Found (Denton- University of North
Texas Press, 1991) ;John Kisch, A Separate Cinema. Fzfty Years of Black-Cast Posters (New York Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1992); John Gray, Blacks in Film and Television. A Pan-African Bibliography of
Flms, Filmmakers, and Performers (New York Greenwood Press, 199o).
' Amllcar Shabazz, "An Ideological Shootout in Texas Separate Equality versus Racial Integra-
tion, 1940-1950" (paper presented at the Southern History Conference, Birmingham, Ala.,
1998). Jim Crow here refers to the racial discrimination resulting from a system of laws that seg-
regated the races and sanctioned the social, political, and economic domination of whites over
blacks See James Martin Sorelle, "The Darker side of Heaven: The Black Community in Houston,
Texas, 1917-1945" (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 198o), James Melvin Banks, "The Pursuit
of Equahty: The Movement for First Class Citizenship Among Negroes in Texas (Ph.D. diss., Syra-
cuse, 1962); Michael L. Gillette, "The NAACP m Texas, 1937-1957" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas, 1984); Steven A. Reich, "Soldiers for Democracy: Black Texans and the Fight for Citizen-
ship, 1917-1921," Journal of American Hstory, 82 (Mar., 1996), 1478-1504; Howard N. Rabi-
nowitz, The New South, 1865-192o (Arlington, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992), Neil McMillen, Dark537
20oo03
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 106, July 2002 - April, 2003, periodical, 2003; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101223/m1/615/: accessed March 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.