Nina Mae Mckinney

Nina Mae McKinney has been described as Hollywood's first Black movie star, and yet her name is often missing from film histories and encyclopedias. In The Black Garbo Stephen Bourne celebrates the highs and lows of Nina's life and career, and offers an affectionate portrait of one of Hollywood's most talented, charismatic and forgotten stars.

From the first synchronized sound films of the late 1920s through the end of World War II, African American music and dance styles were ubiquitous in films. Black performers, however, were marginalized, mostly limited to appearing in "specialty acts" and various types of short films, whereas stardom was reserved for Whites. Jumping the Color Line discusses vernacular jazz dance in film as a focal point of American race relations. Looking at intersections of race, gender, and class, the book examines how the racialized and gendered body in film performs, challenges, and negotiates identities and stereotypes. Arguing for the transformative and subversive potential of jazz dance performance onscreen, the six chapters address a variety of films and performers, including many that have received little attention to date. Topics include Hollywood's first Black female star (Nina Mae McKinney), male tap dance "class acts" in Black-cast short films of the early 1930s, the film career of Black tap soloist Jeni LeGon, the role of dance in the Soundies jukebox shorts of the 1940s, cinematic images of the Lindy hop, and a series of teen films from the early 1940s that appealed primarily to young White fans of swing culture. With a majority of examples taken from marginal film forms, such as shorts and B movies, the book highlights their role in disseminating alternative images of racial and gender identities as embodied by dancers – images that were at least partly at odds with those typically found in major Hollywood productions.

This book uses a black/white interracial lens to examine the lives and careers of eight prominent American-born actresses from the silent age through the studio era, New Hollywood, and into the present century: Josephine Baker, Nina Mae McKinney, Fredi Washington, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Lonette McKee, Jennifer Beals and Halle Berry. Combining biography with detailed film readings, the author fleshes out the tragic mulatto stereotype, while at the same time exploring concepts and themes such as racial identity, the one-drop rule, passing, skin color, transracial adoption, interracial romance, and more. With a wealth of background information, this study also places these actresses in historical context, providing insight into the construction of race, both onscreen and off.

Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns. To Turn the Whole World Over examines these and other issues with a collection of cutting-edge essays on black women's internationalism in this pivotal era and beyond. Analyzing the contours of gender within black internationalism, scholars examine the range and complexity of black women's global engagements. At the same time, they focus on these women's remarkable experiences in shaping internationalist movements and dialogues. The essays explore the travels and migrations of black women; the internationalist writings of women from Paris to Chicago to Spain; black women advocating for internationalism through art and performance; and the involvement of black women in politics, activism, and global freedom struggles. Contributors: Nicole Anae, Keisha N. Blain, Brandon R. Byrd, Stephanie Beck Cohen, Anne Donlon, Tiffany N. Florvil, Kim Gallon, Dayo F. Gore, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Grace V. Leslie, Michael O. West, and Julia Erin Wood

Nina Mae McKinney has been described as Hollywood's first Black movie star, and yet her name is often missing from film histories and encyclopedias. In The Black Garbo Stephen Bourne celebrates the highs and lows of Nina's life and career, and offers an affectionate portrait of one of Hollywood's most talented, charismatic and forgotten stars.

Nine actresses, from Madame Sul-Te-Wan in Birth of a Nation (1915) to Ethel Waters in Member of the Wedding (1952), are profiled in African American Actresses. Charlene Regester poses questions about prevailing racial politics, on-screen and off-screen identities, and black stardom and white stardom. She reveals how these women fought for their roles as well as what they compromised (or didn't compromise). Regester repositions these actresses to highlight their contributions to cinema in the first half of the 20th century, taking an informed theoretical, historical, and critical approach.

Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force. Petty focuses on five performers whose Hollywood film careers flourished during this period—Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Hattie McDaniel—to reveal the “problematic stardom” and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color. She maps how these actors—though regularly cast in stereotyped and marginalized roles—employed various strategies of cinematic and extracinematic performance to negotiate their complex positions in Hollywood and to ultimately “steal the show.” Drawing on a variety of source materials, Petty explores these stars’ reception among Black audiences and theorizes African American viewership in the early twentieth century. Her book is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on the movies.

The films, the stars, the filmmakers-all get their due in Hollywood Black, a sweeping overview of blacks in film from the silent era through Black Panther, with striking photos and an engrossing history by award-winning author Donald Bogle. The story opens in the silent film era, when white actors in blackface often played black characters, but also saw the rise of independent African American filmmakers, including the remarkable Oscar Micheaux. It follows the changes in the film industry with the arrival of sound motion pictures and the Great Depression, when black performers such as Stepin Fetchit and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson began finding a place in Hollywood. More often than not, they were saddled with rigidly stereotyped roles, but some gifted performers, most notably Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind (1939), were able to turn in significant performances. In the coming decades, more black talents would light up the screen. Dorothy Dandridge became the first African American to earn a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Carmen Jones (1954), and Sidney Poitier broke ground in films like The Defiant Ones and1963's Lilies of the Field. Hollywood Black reveals the changes in images that came about with the evolving social and political atmosphere of the US, from the Civil Rights era to the Black Power movement. The story takes readers through Blaxploitation, with movies like Shaft and Super Fly, to the emergence of such stars as Cicely Tyson, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg, and of directors Spike Lee and John Singleton. The history comes into the new millennium with filmmakers Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Ava Du Vernay (Selma),and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther); megastars such as Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Morgan Freeman; as well as Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, and a glorious gallery of others. Filled with evocative photographs and stories of stars and filmmakers on set and off, Hollywood Black tells an underappreciated history as it's never before been told.

The career of Nina Mae McKinney and the appearance of Chick in Hallelujah mark the beginning of a significant rebellion against Hollywood's expectations for black actors and black characters in terms of agency and racial representation. Indeed, McKinney's groundbreaking role as Chick established her as the prototype for black female actors who would enjoy greater Hollywood success later, from Dorothy Dandridge to Halle Berry. Furthermore, McKinney's performance as Chick would not only effect opportunities for other black actresses, it would predicate black stardom in Hollywood. Inasmuch, this study investigates the career trajectory of Nina Mae McKinney, a popular early twentieth-century African American actor whose brief achievements in film and entertainment poised her to become a major archetype whose potentiality as an actor would have promised to leave a legacy on par with her contemporaneous white peers, if not for her race. I contend that an examination of the stringent and myriad forms of institutionalized racism as well as socioeconomic and gender oppression facing McKinney throughout and beyond her career marginalized McKinney's professional achievements, and moreover, contributed to McKinney's resulting negative personal image that subsequently erased or mitigated her professional achievements and effectively erased her from the historical artistic public imagination. Although critics such as Donald Bogle downplay the significance of McKinney and her role as Chick or even, at times, demonize McKinney, this study interrogates such critical views to establish a connection between McKinney's established talents and the sociohistorical factors against which she battled. Specifically, through a comparative analysis of McKinney and her contemporaries against the specific historical/narrative framework informing the realities of African American actors, I argue that McKinney was the earliest precursor to black stardom in Hollywood. McKinney's Southern background and the mechanisms that were in place at the major film studios illustrate the challenges of an early twentieth-century society in which institutionalized racism was deeply rooted and upheld at all costs. Even in light of Hollywood's discrimination after her appearance in Hallelujah, McKinney was not content to simply find work in race films; in her attempt at agency, she chose strong, non-stereotypical, or at least balanced, leading roles in race films. Despite McKinney's struggle to maintain her career after Hallelujah, her role as Chick was groundbreaking and remains influential. This study's biographical approach to Nina Mae McKinney includes the following chapters: McKinney's Southern Background, Mechanisms in Place at the Major Film Studios, McKinney's Race Film Choices, The Press and McKinney's Personal Struggles, McKinney's Groundbreaking Role as Chick in Hallelujah, The Earliest Precursor to Black Stardom, and McKinney's Rightful Place in History. -- Abstract.

Cover features three images of McKinney, including one in which she is directing a band.