In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters
By KATE MASUR
November 12, 2012- nytimes.com
THE latest film by Steven Spielberg, “Lincoln,” which opens nationwide
on Friday, has the makings of an Oscar shoo-in, particularly for Daniel
Day-Lewis’s performance in the title role. The first scene is arresting:
Two black soldiers speak with the president about their experiences in
combat. One, a corporal, raises the problem of unequal promotions and
pay in the Union Army. Two white soldiers join them, and the scene
concludes as the corporal walks away, movingly reciting the final lines
of the Gettysburg Address.
Unfortunately it is all downhill from there, at least as far as black
characters are concerned. As a historian who watched the film on
Saturday night in Chicago, I was not surprised to find that Mr.
Spielberg took liberties with the historical record. As in “Schindler’s
List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” his purpose is more to entertain and
inspire than to educate.
But it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the
abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters
do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them. For
some 30 years, historians have been demonstrating that slaves were
crucial agents in their emancipation; however imperfectly, Ken Burns’s
1990 documentary “The Civil War” brought aspects of that interpretation
to the American public. Yet Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gives us only
faithful servants, patiently waiting for the day of Jubilee.
This is not mere nit-picking. Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” helps perpetuate
the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to
their own liberation. While the film largely avoids the noxious
stereotypes of subservient African-Americans for which movies like “Gone
With the Wind” have become notorious, it reinforces, even if
inadvertently, the outdated assumption that white men are the primary
movers of history and the main sources of social progress.
Unknown Brother Soldier of the Civil War. You know he was not passive!
The nation’s capital was transformed by the migration of fugitive slaves
from the South during the war, but you’d never know it from this film.
By 1865 — Mr. Spielberg’s film takes place from January to April — these
fugitives had transformed Washington’s streets, markets and
neighborhoods. Had the filmmakers cared to portray African-Americans as
meaningful actors in the drama of emancipation, they might have shown
Lincoln interacting with black passers-by in the District of Columbia.
Black oral tradition held that Lincoln visited at least one of the
capital’s government-run “contraband camps,” (see foto below) where many of the fugitives
lived, and was moved by the singing and prayer he witnessed there. One
of the president’s assistants, William O. Stoddard, remembered Lincoln
stopping to shake hands with a black woman he encountered on the street
near the White House.
In fact, the capital was also home to an organized and highly
politicized community of free African-Americans, in which the White
House servants Elizabeth Keckley and William Slade were leaders.
Keckley, who published a memoir in 1868, organized other black women to
raise money and donations of clothing and food for the fugitives who’d
sought refuge in Washington.
Slade was a leader in the Social, Civil and
Statistical Association, a black organization that tried to advance
arguments for freedom and civil rights by collecting data on black
economic and social successes.
One Definitively NONPASSIVE SISTER! Born
in Georgia, Susie King Taylor escaped to Union lines in South Carolina,
and became a teacher and nurse with the 1st South Carolina Infantry
(later designated the 33rd USCI). Taylor wrote a book on her
experiences during the war entitled Reminiscences of My Life in Camp,
published in 1902. She wrote, “I learned to handle a musket very well
while in the regiment, and could shoot straight and often hit the
target.”
The film conveys none of this, opting instead for generic, archetypal
characters. Keckley (played by Gloria Reuben) is frequently seen sitting
with the first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Sally Field), in the
balcony of the House of Representatives, silently serving as a moral
beacon for any legislator who looks her way. Arguably her most
significant scene is an awkward dialogue with Lincoln in which he says
bluntly, “I don’t know you,” meaning not just her but all black people.
Keckley replies, as a representative of her race, that she has no idea
what her people will do once freed. As if one archetype were not enough,
she adds that her son has died for the Union cause, making her grief
the grief of all bereaved mothers.
Meanwhile, Slade (Stephen Henderson) is portrayed as an avuncular
butler, a black servant out of central casting, who watches in prescient
sorrow as his beloved boss departs for the theater on a fateful April
evening.
It would not have been much of a stretch — particularly given other
liberties taken by the filmmakers — to do things differently. Keckley
and Slade might have been shown leaving the White House to attend their
own meetings, for example. Keckley could have discussed with Mrs.
Lincoln the relief work that, in reality, she organized and the first
lady contributed to. Slade could have talked with Lincoln about the 13th
Amendment. Indeed, his daughter later recalled that Lincoln had
confided in Slade, particularly on the nights when he suffered from
insomnia.
Even more unsettling is the brief cameo of Lydia Smith (played by S.
Epatha Merkerson), housekeeper and supposed lover of the Pennsylvania
congressman and Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens,
played by Tommy Lee Jones. Stevens’s relationship with his “mulatto”
housekeeper is the subject of notoriously racist scenes in D. W.
Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.”
Thaddeus Stevens
Though Mr. Spielberg’s film
looks upon the pair with far more sympathy, the sudden revelation of
their relationship — Stevens literally hands the official copy of the
13th Amendment to Smith, before the two head into bed together —
reveals, once again, the film’s determination to see emancipation as a
gift from white people to black people, not as a social transformation
in which African-Americans themselves played a role.
The screenplay, written by Tony Kushner, is attentive to the language of
the period and features verbal jousting among white men who take
pleasure in jabs and insults. By contrast, the black characters —
earnest and dignified — are given few interesting or humorous lines,
even though verbal sparring and one-upmanship is a recognized aspect of
black vernacular culture that has long shaped the American mainstream.
Meanwhile, perhaps the greatest rhetorician of the 19th century,
Frederick Douglass, who in fact attended the White House reception after
Lincoln’s second inauguration in March 1865, is nowhere to be seen or
heard.
It is a well-known pastime of historians to quibble with Hollywood over
details. Here, however, the issue is not factual accuracy but
interpretive choice. A stronger African-American presence, even at the
margins of Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” would have suggested that another
dynamic of emancipation was occurring just outside the frame — a world
of black political debate, of civic engagement and of monumental effort
for the liberation of body and spirit.
That, too, is the history of abolition; “Lincoln” is an opportunity squandered.
Kate Masur,
an associate professor of history at Northwestern, is the author of “An
Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality
in Washington, D.C.”
Contraband Sisters and Brothers in Virginia just outside of Washington 1862- FREE and definitely not passive!
=======================================
We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
by Akinyele Omowale Umoja336 pages 18 halftones April, 2013 ISBN: 9780814725245
$40.00 Cloth
=======================================
...And Even More NonPassivity Coming from BlackFolks!
by Akinyele Omowale Umoja336 pages 18 halftones April, 2013 ISBN: 9780814725245
$40.00 Cloth
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