Christian Martyr or Grateful Slave

In the beginning, there was Uncle Tom.” So writes Donald Bogle concerning the representation of blacks in American cinema (3). Bogle comments specifically on the first black character in the movies (albeit one played by a white actor in blackface), the title role in a 1903 version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Bogle’s statement resonates, as well, with the ubiquitousness of the “Tom” portrayal throughout the history of cinema—that of the saintly, self-sacrificing black man whose primary concern in life is the well-being of his white masters, even when that concern translates into suffering for Tom himself, for his family, or for African Americans in general. One assumes, of course, that since the era of the civil rights movement and the concomitant awareness of how such images of African Americans in film foster pernicious racial stereotyping, the Uncle Tom character would necessarily go the way of blackface minstrelsy itself. After all, as Linda Williams emphasizes in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, “the ‘Tom lens,’ for all its romantic racialist sympathy for the suffering African, is undeniably white supremacist and deeply violent” (xv–xvi).