Ellen Scott. Film History. Volume 26, Issue 4, October 2014.
During a time when the word nigger was casually used behind the scenes in Hollywood, the industry was deciding whether or not the term could be used onscreen. The MPPDA’s shifting policy on antiblack epithets was driven less by respectful considerationof Black spectators than by concern about state censors and the specter of Black revolt. It tells us much about how industry self-censors sought to mask American race relations through encoded textual signification. Thus, the industry’s limited conception of Black humanity can be seen not only in its onscreen stereotypes but also in its inconsistent attempts to acknowledge Black spectators’ offense as it did with other groups.
The ready use of the word nigger in 1930s Hollywood comes as a shock to modern ears: production crews commonly referred to the black reflector on the set as a “nigger”; trade publications called movie theater balconies “nigger heaven”; fan periodicals like New Movie Magazine and Boy’s Cinema casually called Black characters “niggers” in plot synopses; and Hollywood glamour columnists referred to the deep brown fabrics worn by Vivien Leigh or Myrna Loy as “nigger-brown.” As Randall Kennedy has shown, the word nigger has been uttered variously as a provocation or compliment and with internalized antiblack prejudice or as an intraracial term of endearment, with deadly seriousness, or through the protective veil of satire or irony. But to many Black people, nigger is always an invective—one that symbolically encapsulates the force of American racism. This article examines classical Hollywood’s struggle over whether the word could be used onscreen, a battle centered at the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), an organization the film industry formed in 1922 to fend off public outcry against its controversies.
While it would have been logical for the MPPDA to simply ban the word nigger—ostensibly the most direct insult to Black people—the industry’s surprisingly variable regulatory policy more closely mirrored the generative censorship strategies used with sexuality and was only sometimes motivated by concern about Black spectators. The studios’ practice of regulating this explosive insult—their shifting policies, their motivations, and how these affected cinematic textuality—is essential to understanding Hollywood’s evolving racial policy, one which took shape amid mounting civil rights mobilization and changing national discourses on race, racial inclusion, and racial naming.
From an Unwritten Code: Epithets and the Studio Relations Committee, 1926 to Mid-1934
The MPPDA established the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) in 1926, dispatching Jason Joy to Hollywood as the primary liaison with studio production heads. At first, Joy’s role was informal, and he only reviewed finished films. But by the late 1920s, most studios submitted some scripts to Joy so that they could avoid costly cuts required by state and municipal censors. The document governing this early censorship was a list of eleven “Don’ts” and twenty-five “Be Carefuls” for producers, one Joy had compiled based on censors’ standards and his interviews with them. The eleventh “Don’t” was “willful offense to any nation, race, or creed.” The Production Code supplanted the “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls” in 1930. And though Joy and MPPDA-head Will Hays went into the meeting to create the Code intending to bar willful offense to races, this provision ended up on the cutting-room floor (though the Code did mention race in its ban on miscegenation). Thus, in the transition from the “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls” to the Code in 1930, the MPPDA went from official prohibition of “willful offense of any … race” to official silence on the issue.
Even without Code support, Joy and his successor James Wingate sought to reduce offense to foreign nationals. State censor cuts and protests from national consuls led Joy to recruit foreign dignitaries as advisors. By contrast, the MPPDA was slow to acknowledge Black spectators’ offense (as with the film Hallelujah [1929]). And its early policy on the word nigger was highly inconsistent. Joy raised no questions about using nigger in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927). By contrast, with Hallelujah, Joy recommended its elimination though only Black characters ever used it: “As a precautionary measure, I think I ought to call your attention to the fact that censors invariably eliminate the word ‘nigger.'” Since the SRC levied no sanctions and the Code had no provision against epithets, producers could ignore these warnings or avoid the SRC altogether. The newly formed 20th Century Productions never even showed Wingate a script before completing The Bowery (1933), for example. The film, which raucously showcased the “liveliest mile on the face of the globe,” began with a shot of a bar called Nigger Joe’s, whose proprietor is called a “coon” by the character Chuck Connors (Wallace Beery). Connors’s child pal, Swipes (Jackie Cooper), defends the joint, saying that he and his “guinea” friends frequent it. Shortly thereafter, Connors scolds Swipes for always “throwing rocks at the Chinks.” Swipes’s habit later starts a fire that kills a houseful of Chinese people, an episode that the film treats comically. After seeing the finished film, Wingate called it “clean and free from objectionable features.”
Black protests against racial epithets came to a head in 1933 and 1934 when both radio and film producers permitted the term’s casual and frequent use. Sizeable Black protest greeted United Artists’ Emperor Jones (1933), where both white and Black men use the term nigger over twenty times in less than ninety minutes. Not only does Brutus Jones (Paul Robeson) call Black island natives “niggers” in conversation with white Smithers (Dudley Diggs) in lines like “do you think I ain’t still got these niggers like that? You think when I cracks the whip they don’t jump through?”, but Smithers is the first to say “nigger” when he offers to buy Jones (then a prisoner) from the island’s reigning leader. “I’ll take this bloomin’ nigger off your hands, your highness,” Smithers says. “Here: five silver dollars.” Shortly thereafter, Smithers calls Jones a “bad nigger” to his face. The word is also spewed in a heated confrontation: Jones dubs the island’s leader a “bush nigger” while pushing him. Strikingly, there is no evidence that Wingate’s SRC raised any concern about the word nigger in Emperor Jones, despite its previous stance on Hallelujah and the scenes’ racially charged confrontations. Perhaps its status as an independently produced, pretested property and that the term is most often used between Black people influenced SRC and state censors to uniformly accept it.
Though censors accepted Emperor Jones’s screen use of nigger, Black critics did not, most often criticizing its frequency and seeming irrelevance to the plot. The word was “shouted” from the screen “for the delectation of white folks,” one critic argued, emphasizing the aural shrillness of the insult in the newly sonic cinematic environment as well as the normalizing force of its national distribution to whites. While cinema’s images were light and shadow, its sounds poured—lifelike—out into the space of exhibition. Other Black reviewers suggested that only those Black intellectuals too bourgeois to know when they were being called “nigger” praised the film. As one Chicago Defender columnist noted, “‘Nigger’ in those cases was all right it seemed. Indeed it was accepted as an indication of awakening sophistication on the part of dark brethren and sisters who heard it without flinching.” Often, the word nigger was the starting point for critique of the film’s larger racial ills, like its “boastful, cowardly, superstitious, avidly greedy, ignorant, and servile” Blacks whose “defeat and pessimism … is not true of the Negro.”
These protests had an impact, though not with the MPPDA. Abe Lichtman, the white owner of a Black theater chain, petitioned United Artists for a nigger-free print of Emperor Jones after his test screening revealed widespread resentment. Though the company refused Lichtman’s request for nationwide cuts, it did purge 199 feet from the Lichtman print (one that Film Daily claims circulated throughout the South), a censorship effort that some Black audiences cheered as progress. Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), disagreed. While he generally opposed radio announcers’ use of nigger or darky to describe the race, White felt that in certain dramatic contexts, nigger provided the realism necessary for commentary on racism. In a telegrammed response to Louis Lautier printed in the Afro-American, White broke with Emperor Jones’s protestors, calling the epithet’s use in that context “logical, as that is precisely language which characters in those circumstances would have used.”
Emperor Jones’s insult had not yet faded when screen actor Will Rogers spoke of “nigger spirituals” on his NBC radio show Gulf Headliners. After a flood of protests, Rogers explained that having been “raised with darkies,” he had the right to use the term and later that he never cracked “jokes with the intent to offend races, creeds or mother-in-laws.” Both sponsor and network were insensitive to and defensive about Black protest. NBC claimed it was “powerless” against Rogers’s freedom of speech. This was poor appeasement when two weeks later NBC censored the words lynching, segregation, and race riots from a speech by NAACP President J. E. Spingarn, indicating that epithets were acceptable but speech directly mentioning core civil rights issues would be halted. Black leaders, including the NAACP, demanded a retraction and others, a Black boycott of Gulf Oil. Washington’s Black-patronized Howard Theater and the Harlem Opera House refused to show Will Rogers films, delivering the antiepithet message to Hollywood.
1933’s controversies over the word nigger set the stage for a major incident in 1934. That year in Hollywood, the MPPDA replaced the SRC with the Production Code Administration (PCA), a stronger regulatory unit empowered to impose sanctions, run by Joseph Breen, an Irish Catholic with a reputation for his strong moral backbone. The MPPDA also amended the Production Code, adding a section curtailing offense to “foreign” nations without protecting African or ethnic Americans. The industry likely regretted this oversight when, in February 1934, African Americans threw bricks at the screen in five cities during showings of Carolina when the word nigger was uttered. This incident never appeared in the press but became a part of industry lore.
White liberal Paul Green’s play The House of Connelly, on which the film was based, was intended to satirize white southerners’ race prejudice and inconsistencies on miscegenation. But Hollywood’s plantation-friendly adaptation contained several hostile master-servant sequences. In one, Bob Connelly (Lionel Barrymore) not only promises gifts to Black servant Essie (Anita Brown), whom he flirts with (suggesting white southerners’ miscegenational privilege) but tells her to respect the fallen southern generals who upheld her people’s cause “when you were decent colored folks, before you were turned into cheap black trash by those psalm-singing Yankees.” Will Connelly (Robert Young) later calls Blacks “destructive thieving brutes” and “wretched Negroes.”
The word nigger is spoken in a scene without racial encounter or the heat of argument. It is uttered privately between Bob Connelly and his son, Will, when he remarks that their new tenant farmer has “got some niggers scratching a bit of ground and a nigger bossing the job.” Very little except the word nigger in this understated line of dialogue would seem likely to arouse Black protest on the scale that greeted the film. In the context, however, of Will Rogers’s and Emperor Jones’s insults and the racial animosity throughout Carolina (satirical though it may have been), we can better understand Black spectators’ mounting offense.
During Carolina’s production in 1933, James Wingate had strongly advised Fox to substitute “nigger” (and “negro wench”) “with some other term that will not be offensive to the colored race.” When the film landed on Breen’s desk in early 1934, he approved it though the studio had not omitted the word nigger and even congratulated Fox that it contained “nothing reasonably censorable.” However, by March, Fox and the Ohio Division of Film Censorship were reporting difficulties with the word nigger in Carolina. This early misstep sent Breen on a vigorous campaign of sanitization: the company had to remove the word nigger from Carolina, he told Fox in successive letters, and it would be “necessary to check” all prints.
Before 1934, the MPPDA phrased its warnings about the word nigger as suggestions. But this would change. In Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life, where two struggling single mothers, one black, one white, raise their daughters together, racial trouble begins when the white daughter, Jessie, calls the light-skinned Black daughter a “nigger”: “Nigger! No fair! You pushed! You’re a little nigger and you’ve got no half-moons on your fingernails. Nig-nig-nig—ger!” Given the year’s epithet controversy, it is not surprising that the Hays office intervened, instructing Breen that the word “nigger … would be objectionable” even when “it is put in the mouth of a colored person” who “refers always to one of her own race.” Universal’s scriptwriters replaced the word nigger with black which also had negative connotations at the time. And though the plot’s racial discord still hinges on the moment when Jessie calls Peola “black,” onscreen it is only Peola who utters the word, tearfully saying “I’m not black. Jessie called me ‘black,'” and later, to her mother “You! It’s because you’re black. You make me black! I won’t—I won’t—I won’t be ‘black.'” In the novel the word nigger provides Peola’s first recognition of her degraded place in the white racial order. In the film, the implication of racism is obscured by the ambiguity in the word black, one that only Peola uses onscreen. When Jessie is scolded for calling Peola “such a mean, cruel thing” as “black,” it becomes clear that, rather than being simply a racial designation, “black” is standing in for “nigger” as a term of derision. Peola’s self-hate is blended with the racial hate implied in the invective (one we never hear a white character use). Thus, the blow of the racial insult is softened and transferred into the safer, melodramatic realm of Peola’s unending refrain of disdain for her mother and her own race.
At this point, in the mid-1930s, Breen and Hays began to discuss the word nigger as a “matter of industry policy.” Though the MPPDA did not amend the Code in 1935, Hays included the term on a list of words that were “unacceptable” onscreen that was circulated to Carolina-producer Fox studios in August. The following month the Association of Motion Picture Producers released to its members a list of “phrases, which must be excluded from all talking motion pictures” that included “nigger,” “frog,” “kike,” and “dago” (emphasis added). Accordingly, in 1935 Breen offered much stronger official warnings against the word nigger in studio correspondence. In the case of Show Boat (1936), Breen couched his objection in the epithet’s “proven” offense to “the colored race” rather than state censors’ objections. And he recommended it be “deleted entirely from this production,” even, ultimately, from the song “Ol’ Man River” (emphasis added). When Paramount’s John Hammell claimed Breen was over-stepping the bounds of any “sane censor authority” by eliminating a southern general telling a Black man to “come here, you no account baboon” in Mississippi (1935), Breen conferred with the studio, finally getting Hammell to agree to the change “for racial reasons.” With So Red the Rose (1935), which, like Carolina, featured interracial tension on a southern plantation, Breen said the phrases “poor niggers without any sense” and “filthy ape” “should be changed” along with “any use of the word ‘niggers’ at any time, as this is very offensive to the colored race and should be eliminated as a matter of policy.” But Breen’s praxis remained inconsistent, which is strange in the wake of Black resistance and official reproof. In the mid- to late 1930s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927) and Emperor Jones were both reissued; though Breen demanded nigger be removed from the former film, he did not request its excision from the latter, whose frequent use of the term had been greeted with hearty Black disdain.
In the main, however, from 1934 until the late 1940s, Breen persuaded producers to omit the word nigger from major Hollywood productions. But there was a qualitative difference between how Breen treated African American spectators and white nationalities and constituencies. Breen’s omission of the word nigger was not based on gentlemanly deference to a social equal but rather on fear of “irrational” Black rage (apparently proved by Carolina) and negative publicity. By contrast, in dealing with white southerners, the MPPDA was governed less by fear than by the earnest performance of respect. There was no “resident African American” at the MPPDA. Instead, the MPPDA’s white southern consultants fielded Black issues. For example, the MPPDA’s resident southerner, Lamar Trotti, wanted references to mulatto men as “gentlemen” removed from plantation story Cabin in the Cotton (1932) because white southern audiences would “resent” it. While Black people “should not,” Breen increasingly opined, be called “nigger” onscreen, names denoting racial equality, on the other hand, were equally, if not more, problematic. Thus, in cases like So Red the Rose, Breen suggested the omission of the word nigger to avoid overt insults to African Americans as well as other changes to please white southerners: “we have … a great many complaints from the South regarding the excessive exhibition of mint julep drinking by representative Southern characters…. We wish to caution you about it as a matter of policy.” The way Breen equates black offense at the use of the term nigger with southern offense at mint-julep drinking makes evident the MPPDA’s contrasting regard for the two groups.
Softening the Racial Angle Through Language
Cutting nigger was part of a broader design to use restraint of language to control a film’s racial meanings. If language was a source of threat and disruption in the newly sonic cinema, Breen sought through censorship to convert it into a tool of order and control. Breen used the careful marshaling of words to dull and diffuse films’ racial tensions. In this connection, he limited use of both the words nigger and white. In Barbary Coast (1936), Breen softened the racial angle by removing the words greasers and Chinks (“offensive” to Mexicans and Chinese) and the “repetition of the expression ‘white woman,'” while expunging “dark-skinned women” from white-frequented brothels. He again sought to eliminate the words white woman and nigger in Paramount’s Souls at Sea (1937), where a white woman was scripted to share a cargo hold with Black slaves (an element he also wanted removed). In both these cases, the phrases white woman and niggers (and especially their combination) put too fine a point on the very racial tensions that fueled the ban on miscegenation, and thus Breen sought their substitution or removal.
Breen’s efforts to reduce the obviousness of onscreen racism by eliminating the word nigger are evident in the file on The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936). The film made a sympathetic victim of Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter), the country doctor who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after Lincoln’s assassination and was later convicted of conspiracy in the president’s murder. The sectional divisiveness and the incessant references to slavery, as well as “the word nigger” used at least five times in the script, “should be deleted,” Breen warned in his first letter, shuddering particularly at the terms “black niggers” and “black fools” used in derision. In his second letter, several months later, Breen insisted more strongly: “the use of the word ‘nigger’ must be dropped” (emphasis added). In this letter, he never mentioned that nigger was offensive to Black people but instead cited the industry’s policy on racial prejudice: “it has been our policy to suggest that any picture prepared for general distribution should avoid the use of any material which tends to bring up racial differences and prejudices between the black and white races. We suggest, therefore, that all such material be deleted or changed.” But Breen’s claim of desire to omit racial prejudice seems disingenuous in light of the finished film’s obvious racial insults. Eliminating the word nigger did not remove the film’s racial prejudice; rather, it made antiblack sentiment more nebulous and indistinct. In the film, several signifiers stand in for the word nigger. Most obvious is the word “nigra,” a term that retained the mark of southernness and, in Mudd’s venomous utterance, some offense. Second, the word nigger lingers behind the unsympathetic rendering of Black union soldiers as frightened, bug-eyed lackeys who are restored to their place in the antebellum racial order when Mudd describes how these “boys” will be brutally hanged until their eyes pop out if they don’t work for him. In this representation, the filmmakers transformed nigger from word into image. Thus, though Breen had nigger removed from screen dialogue, the word’s sentiment was disseminated in all its ugliness into Black characterization. Hollywood was learning that Breen found it acceptable to show rather than say “nigger.”
But in this era, Breen used language to do more than dull the racial angle. He used it to soften commentary on American racism. In Of Mice and Men (1939), Crooks (Leigh Whipper), who is maligned and beaten because of his race, plainly tells Lenny (Lon Chaney Jr.) that he is excluded from the bunkhouse “because I’m black.” When Candy (Roman Bohnen) patronizingly remarks that it must be nice for Crooks to have a room all to himself, Crooks sarcastically—bitterly—replies, “sure, and a dung heap under my window all to myself,” giving lie to the myth of separate but equal. Crooks invokes the voice of the white racist man in his mordant use of the word black to describe himself. Breen sensed strong stuff in Crooks’s speech. But he focused his energies on the word black: “To avoid offense, we advise that the three uses of the word ‘black’ be changed to ‘colored,'” thus weakening the antiblack sentiment on display. Since black was not on any list of prohibited words, however, producers preserved the original language.
The Gradual Expansion of the Lexicon of Racial Offense, 1936-1948
Though Breen was concerned about the use of black in Of Mice and Men, he was generally not concerned about antiblack epithets other than nigger. We can see this in Can This Be Dixie? (1936), a film written by Lamar Trotti lampooning the Old South, where Breen left unquestioned repeated use of “pickaninny” in “satirical” minstrel songs: “Pick-Pick-Pickaninny-Pick Dat Cotton” and “Does You Wanna Go to Heaven?” An even more ironic example is Fritz Lang’s anti-lynching film Fury (1936). Lang, a recent emigre, claimed in an interview that he deliberately included Black bit players to suggest the racist lynching that the studios forbade. But Lang boasted most of a scene where a Black washerwoman (Edna Mae Harris) sings of a time when “there’s no more trouble for me … and all the darkies are free,” a line from Stephen Foster’s minstrel song “Oh Boys Carry Me ‘Long.” Lang wanted to celebrate the possibility of Black freedom but could not see how the word darky might hamper this moment’s note of racial triumph. Breen never told the studio that darky might be offensive in Lang’s film. So while Breen recognized the cost of using the word nigger after Carolina, he had not developed a more expansive or informed definition of racial offense.
Breen’s refusal to recognize that anything more than nigger was offensive to Black audiences was atypical of his treatment of other nationalities. With persecuted Greeks in anti-lynching films like Black Legion (1936), Breen counseled Jack Warner that it would be necessary to avoid offense borne in “dialogue),] … casting and characterization),] … [and] the accent.” At the same time, Breen initially pushed him and other anti-lynching film producers, upon pain of rejection, to avoid Jewish, Catholic, or Black victims and the theme of “racial and religious prejudice.” Thus, in films about lynching, African Americans could not be visible, but Greeks had to be characterized impeccably, presumably to serve the industry’s diplomatic interest and its standard concern for foreign markets.
Francis Harmon and Racial Offense
Breen’s desire to limit the PCA’s accountability in governing Black offense is evidenced further by his treatment of MPPDA newcomer Francis Harmon, who earnestly if incompletely sought to expand the PCA’s regard for Black spectators.
In late 1937, the Pittsburgh Courier and theater owner Abe Lichtman protested MGM’s proposal to film The Prancing Nigger, based on Ronald Firbank’s 1924 novel. In November 1937, Breen asked Harmon for a statement on “what should not be approved in motion pictures dealing with Negroes and whites.” Harmon was a liberal southerner who had lived in New York City and was chairman of the International Commission of the YMCA as well as a member of Morningside Heights’ social justice-oriented, racially liberal Riverside Church. He was more moderate than the PCA’s existing resident southerner, Lamar Trotti, who told the SRC that Black perspectives on Hallelujah and the sound version of The Birth of a Nation did not matter and who had called some Black characters “niggers” in internal memos.
Responding to Breen’s request, Harmon issued a report entitled “Guiding Principles in Connection with Motion Pictures Dealing with Negroes and Whites,” which in twelve points envisioned a new racial policy for the PCA. Racial epithets (including “boy” referring to Black men and “boss” referring to whites) should be banned, and “psychological ‘Jim Crowism’ should be avoided in action and dialogue.” Harmon suggested that the MPPDA extend the Code’s stipulation that people of other nations be “represented fairly” to include American racial groups. With racial liberalism bold for its time and context, Harmon wanted the PCA to help show that “the two races are not perpetually in opposition but as a general rule are working together.” Harmon broke with conservative southerners who believed that whites and Blacks could not appear together in the same film scenes: “this industry must seek to formulate principles … on a national rather than sectional basis.” Breen thought Harmon’s suggestions “a great service” but considered it “inadvisable” to adopt any resolution directly pertaining to “Negroes” and drafted a resolution (one missing from extant records) that he claimed solved racial problems without mentioning race. Despite Harmon’s efforts, the PCA’s major tactic in responding to the Black community would remain the omission of epithets.
By excluding the word nigger, the PCA could seem responsive to Black lobbyists without dealing with their complex critiques. This is demonstrated clearly by Gone with the Wind (1939). In a resolution sent to Will Hays, Minnie Johnson, of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, DC, claimed the story “failed to show repentance for selling people as cattle.” Rather than reviling epithets alone, Johnson detailed specific “offensive words, statements and scenes” and theorized their effects:
The scene in which Scarlett O’Hara is attacked by freed Negroes as she drives alone through the colored quarters might engender race hatred and prejudice in many people; the one in which the Negro help at the mill is depicted as lazy and shiftless might make many feel that such qualities are common characteristics of all Negroes. We would be quite relieved to know that you do not plan to reproduce either of the above-mentioned scenes.
But the PCA ignored or felt itself incapable of correcting such compound concerns as race prejudice and stereotypes. Breen was more concerned about the film’s rape, prostitution, and childbirth scenes. He only mentioned race twice in his initial letter: first, asking Selznick to cut Melanie’s line “I hope I’ll be like one of the darkies” (which connoted perhaps the social equality southerners often found offensive) and, second, that “none of the white characters refer to the darkies as ‘niggers'” (although it was “acceptable” for Black characters). Eventually, Breen barred nigger completely because it was “highly offensive to Negroes throughout the United States and will be quite forcefully resented by them … We suggest that you find some other word—possibly the word ‘darkie’ in its stead.” Not only did the PCA ignore the substantive and well-reasoned critiques of folks like Minnie Johnson, but Breen’s substitution—”darkies”—was way out of step with African American desires. Black critics protested its use in Gone with the Wind screen tests. In internal staff memos, Selznick, who fought to retain the word nigger, spoke of “increasing … regret” at the loss of the racial epithet. “All the uses [of “nigger”] I would have liked to retain do nothing but glorify the negroes … such as in references by Mammy, Port, Big Sam, etc.” Following Black protests and Selznick’s ardent demands of his right to use the term, the MPPDA’s board of directors amended the Code, advising the studios that the PCA “may take cognizance of … the obvious offense” of the words “Chink, Dago, Frog, Greaser, Hun, Hunkie, Kike, Nigger, Spig, Wop, Yid” to patrons in the United States and “more particularly … those in foreign nations.” This broadened the association’s power to censor the word.
1944 and the Expansion of Racial Industry Policy
As Koppes and Black relate, during World War II, the Office of War Information (OWI) pressured Hollywood to avoid “caricatures” of menials or zoot-suited Harlemites and to omit racial epithets because they were incongruous with America’s democratic rhetoric. We might expect that this would move the MPPDA to a broader policy on antiblack offense. Breen did sporadically expand his lexicon of derogatory terms. With The Spoilers (1942), Breen strongly recommended against calling a Black maid (Marietta Canty) “tar barrel,” a term that would “undoubtedly give offense to negroes generally” and “should be modified.” However, he also permitted the phrase zip coon in Dixie (1943), a nostalgic celebration of blackface minstrel Dan Emmett; he permitted unchallenged references to a Black steward (Canada Lee) as “charcoal” in Lifeboat (1944), and he failed to comment on the offensiveness of the word shine in Cabin in the Sky (1943).
In 1944, ten years after the PCA’s inauguration and Carolina’s explosive premiere, Breen was again challenged and ultimately moved to modify industry policy in the face of four sizable Black protests. The objects of Black discontent were the elimination of Black soldiers from studio newsreels, MGM’s proposed production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the use of language in The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), and antebellum stereotypes in the initial scripts of Song of the South (1946). While mild-mannered NAACP head Walter White bided his time, the Black press spearheaded the strike against Hollywood, showcasing its precision not only in theorizing the cinema, as Anna Everett has argued, but also its capacity for film activism. First, the Pittsburgh Courier, the national office of the NAACP, and its Petersburg, Virginia, branch protested the splicing out of Black soldiers from footage of President Roosevelt’s visit to Tehran. Between January and February alone, the MPPDA received letters and petitions with over one thousand signatures. The flow of letters to the studios was so great that Paramount executive Russell Holman told the company’s publicity director that it was “impossible to keep up with all of them” and that A. J. Balaban had instructed him to bring in the MPPDA.
At the same time, Black newspapers protested MGM’s proposed remake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Editor Almena Davis of the Los Angeles Tribune wrote an open letter to Louis B. Mayer claiming that the term “Uncle Tom … is next to an epithet” and the film would “start … riots up and down the length and breadth of the United States…. The riots would break out, Mr. Mayer, in first run houses in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chicago and St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland, wherever Negroes sat and heard whites snicker.” Tribune publisher Lucius Lomax Jr. sent Breen Davis’s editorial and a protest letter.
Most germane to the epithet question was the protest of The Adventures of Mark Twain in July. It was organized under the banner of the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest circulating Black newspaper in the United States and member of the National Negro Publisher’s Association (NNPA), a group of Black publishers who claimed the right to name the race—and to defend its public image. In the film, Twain (Fredric March) repeatedly calls black folks “darky” and “pickaninny” and, on one of his speaking tours, jokes that he “had an old colored woman who fell in the fire and burned” and put on her tombstone “well done good and faithful servant,” a story onscreen white audiences meet with roaring laughter. In response, the Courier wrote all of the major studios calling for a ban on the term darky and pressured Warner Bros. into a conference to lay out their demands.
In fielding the protest, Breen falsely told the Courier that he could only recommend changes based on “morality and the Production Code,” effacing the existence of industry policy and abjuring the 1939 Code’s advisement against certain racial epithets. “Such practices as those of using words which might be offensive to your group would not come within our responsibility … If it is your thought that the use of the word ‘darky’ in motion pictures or the business of ‘telling of the story of the “old colored woman”‘ which you mention in your letter are offensive, I think you should endeavor to bring that to the attention of the producers,” which, as Breen knew, the Courier had already done. Ironically, Breen had enforced the antioffense policy he disavowed on that very script, removing the term nigger and the image of a Chinese man wearing pigtails. But he refused to bow to Black pressure to broaden the industry’s notion of offense or to acknowledge the existence of racial industry policy. The Black press, however, won a partial victory. Executives at RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Universal pledged to avoid the use of offensive words, though it is unclear how the studios defined offense or how eagerly they practiced the policy.
Given the rising tide of Black protest, in 1944 Breen was finally ready to alter industry policy on race. However, at first he could only muster a limp reconsideration of whether darky was an epithet. Breen proactively wrote Walter White asking whether darky was a term of endearment. In White’s absence, acting NAACP head Roy Wilkins responded that Black people “resent the use of this term and in particular the explanation that it is one of ‘affection.” In private correspondence, Breen lamented that “we shall no longer be able to sing the Old Kentucky Home—except with variations!” Nevertheless, Breen was-had to be—responsive to increasing Black protests, as the PCA file on Song of the South (1946) evinces.
A full two years before Song of the South’s completion, the MPPDA knew of its Black detractors, among them the NNPA’s Motion Picture Committee chairman Leon H. Washington, editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel, who had picketed LA theaters showing Tales of Manhattan (1942). In the midst of the year’s Black protests, Breen’s first letter to Walt Disney focused almost solely on race. With Song of the South, Breen applied hands-on, detailed script doctoring. Breen counseled both narrative and visual fixes. He reasoned that setting the film after the close of the Civil War would allow Disney to show cheerful, singing Black people on a plantation without offending Black patrons. He emphasized the necessity of dialogue changes indicating that Remus “and his kind belong to a bygone day.” To avoid offending “negro leaders,” Breen recommended that the “negroes singing happily” whether in group shots or individual close-ups “not be played for comedy [and] that their clothes be plain and reasonably clean, rather than having them dressed in rags.” The scenes had to ” depend upon the singing of the groups to hold audience interest, rather than funny business which is certain to be resented by some negroes.” When it came to the script’s language, Breen opined that “old man” should replace the epithet- and dialect-ridden expression “ole darkey” and that the term “mister John” replace the appellation “Marse Jawn.” Although Breen still focused on language, the epithet became a part of a broader concern:
It might be well from the standpoint of our negro patrons, to eliminate the expression “darkey” where ever it appears in your dialogue … These good people, in recent months, have become most critical regarding the portrayal on the motion picture screen of the members of their race, and it will be well for you to take counsel with some responsible leaders among the negroes.
Here, as he had never done before, Breen made Black leaders the driving force behind his recommendations. Song of the South was a departure in that Breen expressed generalized concern over African American offense outside of a religious context and the word nigger.
By the end of 1945, Breen had shifted his policy on racial offense and began treating darky as he did the word nigger by strongly discouraging its use-even in song—in films like The Dolly Sisters (1945). Even more interesting is his reaction to The Scarlet Clue (1945), where he, with seeming self-righteousness, not only prescribed that Birmingham (Mantan Moreland) “will be played in such a fashion so as not to offend Negroes” but further noted Black preference for the term “Negro boy” rather than “colored boy.” Nevertheless, the film’s early sequence of Birmingham flipping through police mug shots and encountering many family members, and ultimately himself, undercuts any dignity.
The shift in Breen’s praxis was met by changes in official policy. On June 15, 1945, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, a renamed MPPDA) passed a resolution changing the Code’s statement that “the history, institutions and prominent people of foreign nations shall be represented fairly” to read that the people of “all nations shall be represented fairly” and authorizing a committee to study this issue (emphasis added). The resolution, which harkened back to Harmon’s 1937 memo, stated that while it was the “continued purpose of the members of this Association to exercise the greatest possible care in the film treatment of foreign nations and peoples,” it was their “further purpose … to exercise proper care regarding motion pictures which treat importantly the life, customs, habits and national characteristics of our own people to the end that these too be ‘represented fairly.” Coming as it did in the midst of government scrutiny of the industry’s treatment of Black characters, the MPAA likely intended this change to appease Black spectators and their supporters.
However, Breen’s recognition of the offense of racial epithets did not mean that he was suddenly aligned with the NAACP. Breen’s modifications were designed to help arguably racist films like Song of the South avoid criticism without substantially changing their content. And in a startling wartime memo, Breen said he could not approve leftist screenwriter Emmet Lavery’s adaptation of Pearl Buck’s China Sky (1945) with its Black pilot, interracial blood transfusion, and Sino-European romance because it was “frankly … a plea for complete racial equality. Hays concurred and the script was buried for over a year and even then rewritten to remove the racially “provocative” equality. So while Breen’s definition of offense had expanded slightly, his racial politics had not.
Realism, Responsibility, and Epithets in the Postwar Problem Film
In the late 1940s, a very different kind of film would seek to use the word nigger. As mainstream Hollywood films began to present intense racial themes through a white liberal aesthetic, scripts now featured the word nigger as a way to defame its users and to call attention to racism. At first, Breen cut these epithets. He banished nigger from Crossfire (1947) and compelled the removal of the term shine from The Burning Cross (1947) and even certain disparaging references to blacks from The Foxes of Harrow (1947). But once productions backed by the majors began using epithets in this way, the PCA policy shifted. In Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), the white protagonist says “words like yid, and kike, and kikey and nigger and coon make me sick,” though no discussion of this is evident in its PCA file.
The pivotal mainstreaming of nigger into interracial dialogue seems to have come with United Artists’ Home of the Brave (1949). The film depicts Peter Moss (James Edwards), a Black World War II veteran suffering from psychosomatic paralysis and amnesia. During the war, Moss is one of a select group of soldiers sent on a dangerous mission with Finch (Lloyd Bridges), Sergeant Mingo (Frank Lovejoy), Major Robinson (Douglas Dick), and T. J. (Steve Brodie). T. J., a racist tin soldier, continually refers to Moss using epithets. But worse, Finch, who is Moss’s close childhood friend, nearly calls him a “nigger.” Moss’s rage at his friend’s racism—and the need to get certain maps back to the captain—causes him to leave the wounded Finch behind to die a painful death at the hands of the enemy. Later, he feels responsible for Finch’s death and loses use of his legs as a symptom of guilt. In the course of the film, the word nigger is used in a number of key instances as a signifier of racial trauma. In flashback, Moss describes that, as a teen at a white school, he was called “nigger,” a shock that prompted him to separate himself from whites. At the end of the film, Moss’s doctor “therapeutically” calls him “nigger,” driving the Black soldier to rise and walk for the first time since the mission. Ultimately, the word nigger stands more for racial trauma than racial oppression or discrimination and prompts audience pity for Moss rather than anger at racism. Nevertheless, for its time, the film showed progress.
Breen and producer George Glass of United Artists had an extended and weighty correspondence about the use of the word nigger in the film. While Breen argued that the term was offensive, Glass argued that the film needed the term because of its offense and the realism it brought. While Glass was willing to omit all racial epithets in other places, he argued that the scene where “Mossy” describes his experience of being called “nigger” during high school was absolutely vital to the story’s meaning, psychological and motivational structure, and racial message:
Without this speech in strong form, there can be no rhyme or reason to the play script as a whole. Moreover … this is in accordance with the character, the theme or the story[,] and … these experiences are directly responsible for the character’s neuroses on which our entire story hangs … Should this speech be suspect, we not only would have no play—we would have no business.
In the case of this film, which began as a Broadway hit, Glass managed to convince the PCA that the word was necessary, a landmark decision; after this, the PCA would regularly leave the word nigger uncommented upon in its official letters in narratives where African Americans were sympathetically depicted. The decision both opened the door to more realism in the depiction of racial oppression and, simultaneously, in its limitedness, overstressed the term, allowing it to become the main harbinger of racial discrimination in certain films. It also opened the door for overuse of the term in plots where there is little racial content and where the term serves mostly to augment the exploitation aesthetics.
As Breen’s letter to Glass regarding Home of the Brave suggests, the word nigger could now be used—but only when the speaker was an unsympathetic character. Breen recognized and accepted, if reluctantly, United Artists’ argument that these “derogatory references to Negroes … were essential to a proper telling of this story.” Nevertheless, Breen still urged “while it is necessary that you build properly for the psychological climax, it is likewise important that you not offend by the quantity of insults.” In addition, Breen wanted more condemnation to fall upon the users of the word: “We further suggest that it might be well for Mingo to back up a little more strongly Finch’s condemnation of T. J.” In the late 1940s, nigger had to be treated with “compensating moral values”—the same censorship system that made gangsters evil and prostitutes tragic so audiences wouldn’t imitate or identify with them. Thus, industry censorship marked and segregated racist whites even as it hesitantly integrated certain Blacks. The PCA’s selective omissions of some terms of racial derision and its allowance of others with less historical baggage demonstrates the nuanced nature of this new policy; although Breen argued against the use of jigaboo and yellow-bellied shine, he allowed the term black boy. He also did not discourage Mossy’s use of the word nigger in his remembrance of what others have called him. And as it had done with Song of the South, with Home of the Brave the PCA also admitted its own limitations, suggesting that the studio get a “competent” Black counselor on the probable Black reaction.
Screenwriters structured a place for the word nigger through the conceit of Black masculine humiliation. White men force Black men through a masochistic gauntlet made up of epithets and acts of racial servitude. Crucial is the reaction of the Black man—psychosis, embarrassment, sadness, or disciplined restraint but never the unthrottled rage the industry so feared. This showed nigger was hurtful but not a fighting word. Its application mostly to Black men-not women—reflects the homosocial toughness of postwar racial discourse that enabled discussing integration and the healing of racial wounds without suggesting miscegenation, the industry’s other racial fear.
Although the PCA was sure that producers had noble intentions, some African Americans were more cynical about the possibility of reversing the implications of the term’s use and about granting authority to the (white) studios to use it. Spearheading efforts to censor nigger was Carl Murphy, who edited the Baltimore Afro-American and worked with the Maryland NAACP and was also the leader of the NNPA, which helped protest darky after The Adventures of Mark Twain. The year 1949, to Murphy’s mind, had seen shocking extensions of epithet use in national media. The Missouri legislature adopted Stephen Foster’s “Missouri Waltz” as the state song—complete with the line “when I was a pickaninny on my mammy’s knee and the darkies were a hummin’, their banjos a strummin’.” When the networks aired the song, Murphy’s NNPA protested and, failing to affect their policy, threatened to involve the FCC. Ultimately, the networks changed their policy though “slip-ups” were common.
To Murphy’s mind, the public acceptance of the word nigger reached its apex with No Way Out (1950), in which no fewer than thirty epithets could be heard. Sidney Poitier starred as Black doctor Luther Brooks, whose first days as a resident are disrupted when his right to be a doctor is challenged by two rabidly racist white criminals in the prison ward (Richard Widmark’s Ray Biddle and Dick Paxon’s Johnny Biddle). When Johnny dies under Dr. Brooks’s care, Ray believes, erroneously, that Brooks intentionally killed him because of race-baiting. In retaliation, Ray orchestrates a white mob attack on the town’s Black community. But before the mob can strike, African Americans learn of Biddle’s plans and preemptively ambush the gathering white mob in a junkyard.
The film’s most prominent and insistent signifier of racism is the use of epithets. The grating, offensive sound of the word nigger is meant to stand in for violence that cannot be shown. Similarly, white racist words percussively spoken or dramatically spat become the means for discussing civil rights abuses but without the verisimilitude that might produce audience action. Zanuck’s No Way Out team minimized the use of nigger as a fighting word by avoiding having white people calling specific Black people “niggers” to their faces and instead had them talk about “niggers” in the abstract, thus lessening the edge. As the word ceases to be used in social exchange, it becomes merely a figment of the white racist interracial imagination and psychosis.
Mixed-cast movies like No Way Out featuring Black characters in prominent, nonstereotyped roles held, for many Black press critics, the best promise of screen dignity. But for Murphy, screen epithets marred any semblance of equality. In response to No Way Out, Murphy, along with the NNPA, served the MPAA notice of the NNPA’s antiepithet resolution:
Racial [e]pithets have already been banned by voluntary agreement of the broadcasting systems, news services and major metropolitan dailies. The Negro Publishers Association wishes to hasten the day when they shall be prohibited on stage and screen. The Association protests the use of epithets in all motion pictures and particularly the excessive employment of these epithets in the motion picture No Way Out. This play is admirable in its intent to expose the effect of bigotry and racial prejudice. Its authors err in their belief that in order to make the villain thoroughly contemptible, he and others, on thirty-five different occasions),] utter indecent epithets applied to the colored race. Some of these terms … have never been heard or used by millions of Americans of both races. Their employment in [sic] the motion picture screens throughout the country builds up a vocabulary of undesirable expression which should not be spoken in decent society.
This response gives us a sense of the logic of African American opposition to the use of the term in films—even mixed films with “admirable” racial messages. In a four-page letter of response, the MPAA stated that “it is … the idea, and hope, that such epithets will be shown to be so wrong, so unjust, and so un-American that their very presentation on the screen will greatly tend to discourage their use in American life.” It was the desire to be “as forceful and dramatic” as possible that had motivated the inclusion, and, they hastened to add that “the use of these epithets has been clearly restricted to the unsympathetic characters” (emphasis in original). They also pointed out the variability and lack of unity in Black positions on the film, noting that Walter White had approved the use of the term in No Way Out.
But Murphy strongly rejoined: “I note what you said about Mr. Walter White. I am a member of the national Board of Directors of the NAACP, which hired Mr. White as its secretary, and I disagree with him thoroughly on this subject.” Regarding the epithet, Murphy held his position strongly: “You and I both know of many expressions which are not permissible under any circumstances. We prefer to place racial epithets in that category. We feel playwrights and dramatists can and should achieve the desired effects by some other means.” Suggesting that the Code’s enforcers adopt the same sort of elaborate textual mechanisms for connoting discrimination that they had with other subjects like sexuality and violence, Murphy’s letter offers a creative challenge to the PCA and the studios, encouraging them to think beyond the word nigger in their dramatic representation of racism and their figuration of Black rage. Murphy used the logic of morality to define racial epithets as dirty language. However, the PCA seems to have attended little to Murphy’s advice.
Murphy’s response also raises the valid question of whether Hollywood could so suddenly earn the right to use the word nigger. The studios’ move toward inclusion of the word nigger was based not on shifts in African American permission but rather in white liberal filmmakers’ reappropriation. If neither the Black press nor Black audiences had control over the uses of that word and the definitions and proscriptions of offense, then what kind of cultural or regulatory autonomy could they have even over their own self-definition?
In the wake of strong dissent from several NAACP officials and the continued threat of state censorship, the PCA treaded cautiously with the word in the early 1950s. For example, Mark Robson’s Bright Victory (1951) also sought to employ the epithet. In it a blind white veteran befriends a blind Black veteran in an army hospital. Not knowing his friend is Black, the white man disparagingly refers to “niggers,” to the Black man’s shame. The PCA mentioned that all uses of nigger were offensive but took special interest that Sergeant Masterson, the film’s highest-ranking army official, used the term. They urged Universal to eliminate his use of the word nigger, calling for a rephrasing of his line “to read, ‘Maybe he thought you were colored, too'” (original emphasis). Universal changed the Masterson scene. The PCA eventually passed the film with the blind veteran’s dramatically framed epithet intact. And Breen said nothing about darky in the song “Take Me Back to Old Virginny” on the soundtrack.
The word nigger had a role to play in 1950s anticommunism. Red-baiting films like Big Jim McClain (1952) and Bamboo Prison (1954) put the word nigger in the mouth of communists without generating a single warning from Breen. Conversely, though only a handful of films prompted Breen to prohibit the word nigger, he disproportionately did so with left-leaning scripts (e.g., Among the Living [1941], The Burning Cross [1947], The Underworld Story [1950], and Let No Man Write My Epitaph [1960]). In eliminating these invectives, Breen softened the obvious revelation of American racism—and its links to capitalism—that leftist writers forged. In The Underworld Story, a wealthy white man frames his black maid for a murder he has committed, displaying both racism and class privilege. Breen used strong language to call for the removal of the word nigger. However, the studio—an independent called FilmCraft Productions—preserved the word nigger and with it the murderer’s racism. Though Breen acquiesced and gave the film a seal, he continued to put pressure on the racial angle of left-leaning films. Thus, it appears that the word nigger, with its imputed villainy, had a role to play in the industry’s antileftist agenda of the 1950s.
In sum, while it is dangerous to suggest that the PCA regulated films by genre, it seems that following Home of the Brave, the PCA suggested the removal of antiblack epithets from historical films, particularly those of the southern past like Show Boat, but generally did not recommend their deletion in contemporary racial problem films, like Intruder in the Dust (1950), Pinky (1949), No Way Out (1950), and The Well (1951), where the term stood in the place of cultural or institutional violence against Black people and where its users could be punished and reformed.
Hollywood Shock Cinema and the Word Nigger in the Shurlock Era (1954-1968)
In 1952, after more than thirty-seven years of film censorship, the Supreme Court recognized film as protected under the First Amendment. Breen retired from the PCA in October 1954 and was replaced by longtime staffer Geoffrey Shurlock. Shurlock had his work cut out for him. In the wake of these changes, producers began to challenge the PCA’s authority, most famously in cases like The Moon Is Blue (1953), where, for the first time, a studio film went without a PCA seal. In competition with television and foreign films, Hollywood producers and directors were progressively embracing aesthetic modes once relegated to B, foreign, independent, and exploitation films. How would the new chairman react to racial epithets? With The Phenix City Story (1955), a semidocumentary/ exploitation film condemning corruption in a southern town, Shurlock allowed a policeman to call a Black child brutally murdered by white men a “nigger kid” to his fellow officer. This suggests that Shurlock was initially softer on the word than his predecessor.
Ironically, several years after the PCA acknowledged that there was a place for the screen representation of the invective nigger, the MPAA modified the Production Code to strengthen its official reproof. A 1956 code amendment stipulated that “no picture shall be produced that tends to incite bigotry or hatred among peoples of differing races, religions, or national origins. The use of such offensive words as Chink, Dago, Greaser, Hunkie, Kike, Nigger, Spig, Wop, Yid should be avoided” (emphasis added). This strengthened the Code’s earlier encouragement, issued in 1939, that the PCA “may take cognizance” of these terms’ offensiveness. Under this revised code, Shurlock’s style of regulation emerged: like Breen, he judged the acceptability of the word nigger in terms of its “dramatic validity,” whether it was strongly answered and condemned, and consistently railed against its repetition. In relatively standardized language, he warned producers of “angry” Black audiences who responded to the “inflammatory” word “nigger,” even when it was dramatically appropriate and narratively condemned. Ironically it may be that the generally less censored decade from 1955-1965 hosted a more sustained PCA battle against the word than prior decades, largely because of the mounting civil rights struggle to which Shurlock may have been gesturing with repeated warnings about “angry” black audiences.
Despite the increasing complexity of American race relations and the persistence of stereotypes, removal of the word nigger was still the PCA’s major defensive move in managing onscreen race relations. Rather than outright refusal or total complicity, most producers agreed to soften the racial blow of the word nigger, through either reducing the number of times it was repeated in a given film or through indirection. For example, in Band of Angels (1957), Shurlock convinced Warner Bros. to limit the use of the word nigger to one scene where the seemingly white protagonist discovers at her father’s funeral that she is Black and will be sold in slavery. In Fraulein (1958), where Shurlock disapproved of Nazi sympathizers calling a Black soldier (James Edwards) a “nigger,” the studio skirted regulation by having the utterer say it in German, thus lessening the impact on American audiences. In The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the term comes up when Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) reminds the white woman he is falling in love with of what he is: “If you’re squeamish about words, I’m colored. If you face facts, I’m a negro. If you’re a polite southerner, I’m a nigra. And I’m a nigger if you’re not.” Here producers again softened the use of the word nigger by restricting its use to Belafonte rather than putting it in the mouth of a white person. In All the Young Men (1960), racial epithets are neutralized when Poitier refers consistently to white men as “boy” and the white racist refers to Poitier using other terms of derision, including “night fighter” and the now neutralized term “boy” in all but one climactic scene. These restrained uses of the word nigger allowed the industry to imagine Black rage within a diegetic cage—a protected hedge.
Shurlock’s epithet regulation sought both to ease offense and to stem Black dissent. For example, fueled by the Code’s new language barring the incitation of “bigotry or hatred … among peoples of differing races,” Shurlock wondered whether Island in the Sun (1957), which depicted a despotic, power-hungry, mulatto leader and used the word nigger in voice-of-God narration, was “an unfair portrayal of the Negro race … that could … reasonably inflame Negro people.” Often, Shurlock expressed the industry’s fear of being narrowly integrationist specifically in terms of the use of the word nigger, as we see with Intruder (1961), a film where Adam Cramer (William Shatner) plays a white racist who stirs up race hatred in towns where school integration is imminent. The PCA initially rejected this proposed film because of:
1) The repeated and offensive use of the word “nigger” and similar expressions. 2) The inflammatory nature of the story which could incite hatred toward white people on the part of negroes in the audience. With reference to the offensive use of the word “niggers” we note that it is used 43 times in this story. In our judgment we feel that it might be used a couple of times for characterization purpose. As you know, the Code specifically states that the use of the word “niggers” should be avoided because it is highly offensive to the negro race. Our concern regarding the inflammatory nature of the subject matter is based on a realization of the profound and highly explosive problem of integration which is seething in this country. There are so many imponderables in this situation involving friction between the law, inherited emotional patterns[,] and justice, that we feel our industry should be prudent in the sense that we do not unwittingly complicate the problem.
Shurlock is clear that producers should avoid the complex question of integration. But his only practical advice is the removal of the word nigger. Thus the PCA’s seemingly progressive deletion of nigger onscreen was used to keep African Americans from challenging the racial status quo offscreen. With this approach Shurlock could permit a taste of controversial material while still restraining producers from overwhelming the audience in a way that might produce revolt.
Conclusion
For a significant portion of the classical Hollywood period, regulation of the word nigger was the industry’s only consistent acknowledgment of Black spectators’ offense, one that the MPPDA kept silent and out of the Code. Even this silent MPPDA provision was only inconsistently regulated: the SRC sometimes discouraged the word nigger to please censors and sometimes ignored it. The early PCA continued this weak policy until Carolina changed Breen’s mind. Thereafter, between 1935 and the late 1940s, the PCA strongly discouraged the word nigger. However, Breen’s interest was in protecting industry property and masking racism more than reducing Black offense. Throughout this period, with rare exceptions, Breen restricted his conception of Black offense to the word nigger without restraining other racially offensive words and stereotypes or other manifestations of Hollywood racism. By the late 1940s, Breen felt Hollywood had matured racially. Throughout the years, producers had used nigger in their scripts in various ways. It was only when Hollywood invoked nigger as a quotation, placed in the degraded mouth of the evil white racist who was morally segregated from most whites, that the industry argued its acceptability. Then, not only did the PCA figure out how to make the word’s offense deniable, but nigger became essential to a new regime of racial censorship, operating as a shorthand for the racial oppression and the calls for equality that the screen refused to fully treat.
But the term could not be so easily marshaled. Throughout this period, many Black journalists refused to accept Hollywood’s strange, defensive narrative excuses for the term and instead heard nigger as they had learned it. The appropriation of the word nigger seemed of a piece with the history of white robbery and distortion of Black culture—the domestication of a savagely racist signifier. Further, in negotiations with an enduringly dismissive industry, nigger had been for Black critics a certainty—a penetratingly audible insult—in a sea of images whose auteurial intent evaded easy ascription. In the destabilized, retributive atmosphere the word nigger produced, African Americans sometimes had the opportunity to control the terms of a cultural taboo, a power most often reserved for whites. However, Hollywood, persuaded more by the abstract image of angry Black audiences than by the earnest and continuing arguments of dignified Black publishers, progressively edged out this possibility. In so doing the industry cemented its course of letting whites both define the terms of Black offense and speak for and into black representation.