John Henry goes to Carnegie Hall: Motion picture production at southern black agricultural and industrial institutes (1909-13)

Abstract

Drawing on surviving accounts of screening and extant photographic materials, this essay focuses on the formal compositions of the films created for southern black agricultural and industrial institutes' publicity campaigns before and after the incendiary release of The Birth of a Nation. To date, there has been no sustained study of the role of film in the publicity projects of Hampton or Tuskegee. However, this is a crucial moment in the history of black filmmaking and spectatorship as it is the locus of debates over representations of "uplift" that would occupy African American public discourse throughout the Harlem Renaissance and after. Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications.