Movietime Down South paints a portrait of Jim Crow moviegoing using stories of theaters, films, and stars, and it celebrates Black achievement in cinema's segregated spaces. Cinema and Jim Crow emerged at the same time, and this confluence extended beyond practices such as segregated seating at particular venues or racist caricatures in certain films. In everyday, often unannounced ways, cinema and race converged going all the way back to the medium's origins and significantly influenced how it developed: who could attend and what that experience was like; who could make movies and what kinds of stories were told; and who appeared on-screen and how they were represented.
Yet during the first seventy years of film history, African American entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and stars worked to reclaim cinema's segregated spaces. They opened theaters that welcomed Black audiences instead of excluding them or relegating them to balconies. They made films that spoke to Black viewers rather than ridiculing them. And they built a star culture that provided opportunities for glamour and showcases for talent when Hollywood failed to provide them.
Newsom grounds these claims through a study of one Southern town: Savannah, Georgia. Over the course of Movietime Down South, you'll encounter individuals, places, and stories that illuminate hidden aspects of Southern moviegoing, shake up established narratives of cinema history, and deserve our attention because they demonstrate what African Americans accomplished during a time when seemingly every obstacle was stacked against them. Readers will meet such notables as entrepreneur Josephine Stiles, filmmaker Spencer Williams, movie star Marilyn Kilroy, civil rights leader W. W. Law, and Hollywood legend Mamie Steele Cox and discover how their focused, steady, and deliberate actions and interventions collectively reclaimed, built, and sustained a thriving cinema culture.
