Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

272 // THOMAS CRIPPS
11. Tony Langston to George P. Johnson, Nov. 24, 1916, in George P. Johnson
Collection, Special Collections Library, UCLA; Johnson to Robert L. Vann, Pittsburgh
Courier publisher, March 27, 1920, ibid.
12. Variety, Aug. 22, 1928, 7, on Vidor; on Connelly, see Thomas Cripps,
"Introduction" to Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures (Madison, WI, 1979), passim.
13. See Leonard J. Leff and Jerrold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono:
Hollywood, Censorship, & the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York,
1990), 3—54, for a brief institutional history.
14. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 108; and interviews with Muse.
15. Neal Gabler, An Empire of 'Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New
York, 1988), Chaps. 6, 7.
16. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 139, on Love is an Awful Thing', Variety, April 22,
1925, 44, on The Toll of Justice; April 27, 1927, 20, on "housemaids"; Amsterdam News,
April 2, 1936, onPorgy; Afro--American, Aug. 29, 1925; and. Amsterdam News, Sept. 15,
1926.
17. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (New Yotk, 1993), 4, for his goal: "I am after some sense of how precariously
nineteenth-century white working people lived theit whiteness." Michael Rogin,
"Making America Home: Racial Masquerade and Ethnic Assimilation in the
Transition to Talking Pictures," Jour rial of A merican History, 79, 3 (Dec. 1992), 1052,
quoted. See also his "Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His
Voice," Critical Inquiry, 18, 3 (Spring 1992), 417-53.
18. Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 29, 1923 and Amsterdam News, July 9, 1930.
19. Variety, May 8, 1929, 23.
20. On Antonio Gramsci, see Stuart Hall, "Gtamsci's Relevance for the Study of
Race and Ethnicity," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 (Summer 1986), 5—27; on
Galbraith's notion of "countervailing powers" as a force for change, see his American
Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston, 1972), passim; and on
Feibleman's idea that crises such as wars draw antagonists togethet in common cause,
see his The Theory of Culture (New York, 1946, 1968), 7, 43, 96; and on my own
notion of "conscience-liberalism," see my Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message
Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York, 1993), x-xi.
21. Interview between John Krimsky and the author, New Brunswick, NJ,
spring 1976.
22. Foster to Johnson, n.d.; Johnson to Mary Ruta, May 7, 1932; Van Vechten to
Johnson, Sept. 27, 1935, all in James Weldon Johnson collection, Beineke Library,
Yale University, all cited in Cripps, Slow Pade to Black.