(excerpt)

Orphaned at age seven, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson began his career as a bootblack dancing for change on the streets of post-Reconstruction Richmond, Virginia. At twelve, he was selected to tour the country playing pickaninny roles in minstrel shows like The South Before the War (1891) and In Old Kentucky (1900). After a long-running double act on the vaudeville circuit and a stint as a high-profile dance instructor, he would eventually become one of the most famous entertainers on the American stage.

In the 1930s, Robinson made the leap to the silver screen as one of the first Black film stars, appearing in fifteen movies from 1930 – 1943. At the height of his career he earned a staggering $6,600 per week, making him the highest paid Black performer in the nation.

In early films, Robinson starred in all-Black cast pictures distributed only to Black movie theaters. But the majority of his films were led by white actors with white filmmakers at the helm. Here, he was relegated to subservient roles rooted in Uncle Tom stereotypes, and often cut from a feature altogether to appease southern audiences.

For nearly a century, his image has been equally celebrated and maligned. Upon closer inspection, Robinson’s performances can be read as self-defining artistic conceits. Even in some of the most objectionable films, the combined grace and force of his dancing resulted in profound moments of resistance. In nearly every role, he managed to subvert the racism inherent in Hollywood’s cinematic climate by way of the very talent that defined his legacy—tap.

From minstrelsy through the jazz age, Black performance became central to American theater and music, and the film industry was eager to capitalize on rising talents who had proven their popularity in other mediums. The advent of sound created new possibilities for Hollywood, including a new medium for tap; studios quickly began to adapt popular stage acts to the big screen. Performers associated with Harlem such as Cab Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers, and Robinson had been in many of the Black-cast films and Broadway musicals, but bringing acts so closely tied to Harlem left studios struggling to structure films in ways that would appeal to white audiences.

Performers like Robinson were appealing precisely because they evoked the sophistication associated with Harlem, but the cultural and social mixing Harlem represented also provoked fears about the stability of America’s racial status. Studios turned to methods that would capitalize on the performers’ talents while managing to avoid the provocation of such fears. One technique for incorporating Black characters into films that would remain appealing to southern audiences was to limit Black entertainers to broad stereotypical roles that had been established through nineteenth century minstrelsy and the ubiquitous Tom show. But Robinson posed a unique challenge. Chiefly identified by the precision and elegance of his tap dancing, as well as a sophisticated air of grace and self-control, his brand was not easily adaptable to racial stereotypes.

Fox’s solution was to infantilize this persona, pairing Robinson with another screen sensation in the form of America’s sweetheart, Shirley Temple. The pairing of Robinson and Temple highlights a wider concern in contemporary film and cultural studies, namely, the ways in which the interplay between Hollywood production values, audience subjectivities, and a performer’s own interpretation of their role implicitly challenges the rigidity of cultural boundaries. As one of the most famous Black performers in Hollywood in the 1930s, Robinson highlights the reductive nature of African American performances while also revealing their subversive and humanizing potential.

His combined physical dexterity, sense of rhythm, and easygoing, upbeat air conveyed a palpable optimism and enthusiasm during each performance. Especially for Black audiences, “a Robinson performance was never about what his character had to say as in what he came to represent” (Bogle).

Robinson further complicated associations with Black performance by suggesting that contemporary Black audiences were receptive to his artistry and identified with his achievements as a Black performer. Both recognized by and better than the rest of the movie, he is deservedly in but not of the film. Robinson’s signature dance style was always on full display; making little use of his hands and arms and holding himself upright, his dancing was principally from the waist down, with a precision and intricacy to each step that defied imitation. Each performance included jokes, stories, and imitations, “a mosquito’s hum, a trombone—his comedic timing as perfect as his tapping” (Haskins). At five foot seven, he often hunched up his shoulders to appear more vulnerable, while his faced remained open, good natured, full of mirth. As colleague Charles Coles remarked, “Bo’s face was about forty percent of his appeal.”

Although he occasionally leapt upward, his performances would not be called acrobatic (in the vein of the Nicholas Brothers or Cab Calloway); instead, they concentrated on close rhythms, his feet coming only an inch above the floor. Such a stark contrast between Black entertainers of the time calls dominant assumptions about African American performance into question:

“Sandwiched between a Buck or Time Step, Robinson might use a little skating step to stop-time; or a Scoot step, a cross-over tap, which looked like a jig: hands on hips, tapping as he went, while one foot kicked up and over the other; or a double tap, one hand on hip, one arm extended, with eyes blinking, head shaking, and derby cocked; or a tap to the melody of a tune such as “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers;” or a broken-legged or old man’s dance, one leg short and wobbling with the beat; or an exit step, tapping with a Chaplin-esque waddle” (Stearns and Stearns).

Instead of the metropolitan present in Black-cast films, in most Hollywood roles Robinson was confined to a mythic white southern rural past, one in which every Black person was either formally or practically enslaved. Stripped of prestige, power, and belonging, his characters sustained a smile and sunny disposition in the midst of every mundane task, perpetually under the watchful eye of a white supervisor. Perhaps most difficult for Robinson was that his lavish wardrobe from Harlem became a butler’s uniform, farm overalls, or a mechanic’s jumpsuit. For decades, he was most particular about the way he dressed on stage, insisting on performing in a top hat and tails when given creative control (Haskins).

Robinson’s firm placement in stereotypical roles in white-led films during the 1930s was not a rarity given the cinematic climate. Scholars Donald Bogle, James Snead, Thomas Cripps, Daniel Leab, Jacqui Jones, and Jim Pines have examined how preexisting stereotypes, such as the jiving sharpster and the shuffling stage Sambo were transferred from antecedent media into 1930s Hollywood films. Hollywood’s vision of the antebellum South in films like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind actively occlude human abuses at the heart of slavery. Films set in the plantation genre during the Depression years reassured audiences through denial and escapism, functioning to contain and structure race relations. Bogle explores representations of Black performers in Hollywood cinema in his book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes Mammies, and Bucks (1994), especially foregrounding the unequal struggle between Black performers and the stereotypical roles offered them by Hollywood.

He outlines five major stereotypes in Hollywood at the time:

The servile “Tom,” referencing Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
The “Coon,” a type subdivided into the pickaninny, a harmless eye-popping clown figure, and the Uncle Remus, a naïve, congenial folk philosopher
The “Tragic Mulatto,” normally female, who tries to pass for white in films such as Imitation of Life (1959) and Pinky (1949); or the demonized mulatto man, ambitious and devious, as evidenced by Silas Lynch in Birth of a Nation
The “Buck,” hypersexualized, brutal man; figure of menace whose most famous incarnation is perhaps Gus in Birth of a Nation.
The “Mammy,” cantankerous, ultimately sympathetic female servant/cook, most famously embodied by Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind.

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