Pinky

Pinky, a popular 1949 Twentieth Century-Fox film, grapples with issues of southern racism and racial identity in the postwar United States through the story of its protagonist, Patricia (Pinky) Johnson, a light-skinned, mixed-race woman who has passed as white. At the film's opening, Pinky has returned to Mississippi after attending nursing school for several years in Boston. While in the north, she has passed as white and has become engaged to the white Dr. Thomas Adams. Her impending marriage spurs Pinky's visit to her poor, darker-skinned, African American grandmother (“Aunt” Dicey), who has presumably raised Pinky and is her only living relative.

Dicey condemns Pinky's passing, conceptualizing it as a betrayal both of her efforts to educate Pinky and of God. When Pinky visits the local town, she is involved in several incidents that highlight the community's racism, including an unwarranted arrest by white police officers. Later, she narrowly escapes being sexually assaulted by two white men. These encounters, which arise partly from confusion over her racial identity, cement her decision to leave the south immediately and to return to Tom, who has discovered her racial identity and has dismissed it as a part of her past that can be overcome. They can still marry, he argues, and she will become the white Pat Adams.

On the eve of Pinky's departure, Dicey asks her to nurse a white southern aristocrat, Miss Em, who is dying from a heart ailment. Pinky reluctantly agrees out of loyalty to Dicey. Over the following few days, the bedridden Miss Em becomes a surrogate maternal figure for Pinky, urging her always to “be herself.” After Miss Em dies, her newly written will reveals that she has left the bulk of her estate to Pinky. The will is challenged by Miss Em's white [Page 1705]relatives. Against Tom's pleas to walk away from the lawsuit and the property, Pinky decides to go to court. The judge, after a brief trial, delivers an unexpected speech about the role of justice in the United States and upholds the will. Despite her love for Tom, Pinky chooses to embrace a black identity and to remain in Mississippi to fulfill Miss Em's belief that she will make “good use” of the estate. The film closes with Pinky at Miss Em's Clinic and Nursery School for black children, which she has opened on the property.

Pinky stars Jeanne Crain (Pinky), Ethel Barrymore (Miss Em), Ethel Waters (Dicey), and William Lundagin (Tom). Dudley Nichols and Philip Dunne adapted the story from the 1946 novel Quality, written by the white Mississippi author Cid Ricketts Sumner and first serialized in Ladies’ Home Journal. The film, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Elia Kazan, had a production budget of over $1.5 million. During production, Zanuck brought in black activist Walter White (longtime secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] and his daughter, Jane White, as consultants. The Whites pushed for a more aggressive stand on race issues, but Zanuck had the final word, and the film's potential for offering a more progressive anti-racist statement was tempered.

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