Blaxploitation Films

The Black Persona of the 1960s

By the late 1960s, Hollywood had begun to respond to the desire of black audiences for a more assertive black film star, and Jim Brown, a former all-star football player with an appealing personality and arresting physical presence, proved to be exactly what Hollywood was looking for. Though black audiences initially welcomed Brown's aggressive film persona, they grew increasingly weary of the way in which his characters' emerging militancy was continually undermined by their support of the white power structure. Eventually, it became clear that Hollywood's typecasting of Brown in roles that required physical strength rather than emotional depth merely signaled a return to the caricature of the black buck popularized in early American cinema.

Hollywood's increasing interest in black-oriented films in the 1970s was the result of a financial crisis that left the industry on the verge of economic collapse. The advent of television and the expansion of the foreign film market after World War II steadily cut into the studios' profit margin. At the same time, middle-class whites were vacating urban areas for the developing suburbs, leaving cities to their black citizens. Though blacks made up only 11% of the population in 1970, they accounted for 30% of movie audiences in the urban areas where theaters were traditionally located. Studio executives had begun to notice this shift in racial demographics several years earlier, and they came to believe that the key to their financial solvency was the production and distribution of a film product specifically geared to the black community.

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