In 1926, a man named Robert Thomas and a male friend, both Black, had to fight off a white female usher, white manager, and six riot officers to be allowed to take the orchestra seats they had purchased rather than be banished to the balcony at Harlem\u2019s Loew\u2019s Victoria Theatre. This was just one of many incidents in the early 20th century in which Black New Yorkers, no strangers to racist treatment, endured discrimination and violence while trying to attend one of the city\u2019s theaters. In this well-written work, Lopez \u201ctraces Black film culture in New York City from its origins in the early twentieth century to its firm establishment in the 1930s,\u201d defining Black film culture as \u201cBlack New Yorkers\u2019 interactions with cinema and surrounding institutions, not necessarily the cinematic output itself.\u201d In illuminating chapters, she describes the alternative venues Black audiences had to locate when established theaters proved inhospitable; the \u201cyoung Black girls\u2019 and women\u2019s moviegoing experiences\u201d and the fear that their attendance led to \u201cpromiscuity, criminality, and incorrigibility\u201d; the battles that Oscar Micheaux, \u201cthe most successful Black filmmaker in the first half of the twentieth century,\u201d had to wage to get his \u201cracially charged\u201d films approved by censors; the attempts by film operators to unionize; and the pioneering reporting of Black journalists, particularly at the New York Age, to call attention to the \u201cconnections between racist cinema and its proprietors and the debilitating effects of racism on Black New Yorkers.\u201d The writing is sometimes dry, but Lopez brings this sorry period to life by recounting memorable moments, as when she notes the 1930 incident of the projection booth at the Renaissance Theatre crashing down onto the patrons below, a tragedy that would have been worse if the projectionists hadn\u2019t turned off the projector first and prevented a fire.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1926, a man named Robert Thomas and a male friend, both Black, had to fight off a white female usher, white manager, and six riot officers to be allowed to take the orchestra seats they had purchased rather than be banished to the balcony at Harlem\u2019s Loew\u2019s Victoria Theatre. This was just one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}