The moving image as an instrument of oppression and resistance in Jim Crow Era Jacksonville, Florida, 1907–1917

Abstract

This paper will examine the contrasts in racial representations in films produced in Jacksonville at the cusp of the segregation era. These tensions will be examined by exploring how motion picture consumption factored into the politics of race in one of the largest cities in the New South during cinema’s silent era. This will be accomplished by exploring how the marginalized and disenfranchised attempted to assert agency in public and private spaces despite living in an environment of white supremacy and social inequities. By tracing the lived experiences of African American moviegoers in a Southern city at the onset of the Jim Crow Era, a broader comprehension of the early American film industry’s dismissiveness of–and at times outright insensitivity toward–acts of political terror against African Americans can be better understood.