Envisioning Freedom: Introduction
In this introduction to Envisioning Freedom, Caddoo brings together a series of seemingly unrelated, but deeply connected events in order to illustrate how multiple events danced across the lives of Blanche Jarvis and her daughter Everline. These events, beginning in 1896 and moving into the twentieth century, highlight the deep differences between the general movements of the nation, both across the country and in Mississippi locally, and the more private choices of the Jarvis’, their pains and their triumphs. But also, that in the end, through their connections to the African American community and “efforts by African Americans to better their lives through collective racial progress” (4), Everline, now Evelyn, became central to the promotion of “racial uplift” (5) through the race film industry.
In this book, Caddoo intends to focus on three main aspects of life in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century: “the migration of America’s black population from rural locations to urban spaces, the emergence of mass leisure in the United States, and the growth of industrial capitalism” (5). These aspects all work together to form a new sort of identity in this time period. An urban populace, free, but segregated, and devoted to finding their own voices outside of the meager jobs they were allowed. Furthermore, Caddoo does not want to limit this transition to the more often studied period of 1910-1930, but states that an earlier migration, from 1890, also played a significant role in the development of African American recreation. But film was not only a place for leisure, but was deeply connected to, and even propelled, racial development into the mid-twentieth century.
Caddoo does a good job of building this introduction from a series of primary source newspapers and then filling out the argument through secondary research and analysis. What I find interesting, however, is her choice of Blanche and Evelyn Jarvis as central figures, without personal sources from their lives (i.e. diaries). While these may not exist, and that is actually quite likely, it still struck me. In any case, this piece seems well researched and outlines the forthcoming book with great detail and organization–commenting on history, but also the shortcomings of the existing secondary literature, as she sees it. Not a simple description of facts, but a well-thought-out analogy of upheaval as defined both by the great earthquake and the social pressures of the time.
Envisioning Freedom: The Fight Over Fight Pictures
Jack Johnson became the first black Heavyweight Campion in boxing in 1910, upsetting the status quo by knocking out his opponent in the 15th round. Immediately a sensation, both for his achievement and his personality, Johnson’s actions had bloody impact around the country. Caddoo introduces this piece of history as a way to narrate the continuation of African Americans to break through the glass ceiling, but then to be folded into the existing racialized institutions in order to protect white power and racial supremacy. Film, re-categorized as commercialism instead of art, was legislated and restricted on a national and state level.
Caddoo brings together several aspects of this example in order to show a world-wide, and certainly country-wide, reaction to the increasing interest in film and boxing during the 1910s. Not only was a violent sport now a national interest, black men could dominate it. This was dealt with as a moral issue, in newspapers and in the legislators’ assemblies. Caddoo uses newspapers and legislative materials to powerful effect, showing the various, but largely troubled, responses to Johnson’s victory and the attempt as film rights recollection by the African American populace. Boxing was unsettling enough to some. A black man knocking out a white man enough for others. A black boxing champion and a white actress enough for still more. But the combination during the Progressive Era, when morality was up for national legislation, created a powder keg that Caddoo has illustrated in clear, but not overwhelming, detail.
I think one of her most important statements, however, is: ” Black Americans would never agree on the meaning of Johnson’s image. Yet, paradoxically, in the aftermath of these controversies, a commonality was slowly emerging in the black public’s conception of the cinema. They had begun to link the meaning of blackness itself to the screen. This new way of thinking would continue to evolve, developing in dialogue with desperate efforts to establish white order over this uncharted landscape of racial meaning” (129). Too often, depictions of certain groups come with a unitary vision. People think similarly in history because only one voice or two voices in agreement survive. Caddoo is careful not to compress the experience of black lives, but while crafting her narrative to show that “black” was an important identifier for a group, but not the only one. Economic status, region, and even parenting style gave great variance to the group, which she teases out throughout this chapter. Another compelling chapter on “fair representation and visual self- determination” (138).