Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

African Americans and Jews in Hollywood \\ 269
Americans often turned to when their collective lot improved enough to seem to
threaten their identity as a people. In moments like these they sometimes
embraced the African Zionism of Marcus Garvey or the vibrant raffishness of the
urban streetscape that always seemed most impervious to assimilation into the
centers of American life—much in the way that the journalist, Murray Kempton,
had formulated: "in bad times men cherish the elegant and in good ones they
exalt the raffish." 37 '
Almost predictably, Black urban youth rebelled against Poitier's increasingly
stuffy image and turned to, as Variety called them, "blaxploitation movies." Here
again, the trend toward making movies that focused upon or pleased African
Americans derived not so much from Jewishness as from the generality of
Americans who wished to get on with some reform that would confront endemic
racism, which was not abating even in the face of evermore deeply moving television
demonstrations of Black fortitude and Southern white intransigence.
Indeed, by the decade of the 1960s, with the civil rights movement at its most
accessible on daily television news broadcasts, one producer spoke of the medium
as "the chosen instrument of the civil rights movement." 35
The ensuing Civil Rights Acts that marked the era gave moviemen a means
of diversifying the racial makeup of both their crews and their movies—all in a
painless form defined by law rather than by the actions of a few bold pioneers. A
mandated Office of Economic Opportunity obliged studios to keep records of hiring
practices and their results. Soon, all of the studio guilds created apprenticeships
and jobs for minorities, particularly in television programs that by then constituted
a greater portion of output than did movies. The agency files soon
swelled, either with apologies for this or that show that had not met its racial
goals because "the nature of the programming did not call for negro talent," or
with boasts, as Sheldon Leonard of Bill Cosby's series, / Spy, reported, that a
"majority of the actors in this series will be from minority groups." The NAACP
through its Labor Secretary, Herbert Hill, pressed the guilds for greater voluntary
efforts by threatening them with challenges to their legitimacy before the
National Labor Relations Board. A committee of studio bosses led by Joel
Freeman, Schary, Morrie Weiner, Joseph Schenck, and Maurice Benjamin met and
heard proposals directed at "cementing the bonds of friendship" across racial
lines. 36 Finally, as work rules and membership roles changed under these pressures,
the development of "Cinemobiles" by the firm of Fouad Said gave
moviemakers a capacity to move whole units of crews out of Hollywood itself and
into locations where relaxed work rules (and lower wages) opened up still more
opportunities for African American journeymen. 37
The resulting blaxploitation movies—that is, movies made with a view to
their consumption by a narrowly defined Black audience—came to the nation's
screens in a dizzying variety that defies any generalization that a specifically
Jewish consciousness had imposed on them a conspiratorial uniformity that
"messed with" young Black minds. If anything, Blacks of the time felt they had