The Cinematic Underrepresentation of Black Women from the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

[eng] Cinematic representations of the civil rights movement are taken as sources of historical information. Although black women were actively involved in the fight, they have certainly been underrepresented in these films. This paper scrutinizes four movies about the movement (Malcolm X (Lee 1992), The Rosa Parks Story (Dash 2002), The Help (Taylor 2011), and One Night in Miami (King 2020)) with two objectives: to examine how women are presented when they are not the center of the story and how they are depicted when they are the protagonists. The analysis considers the roles and the environment that women occupy in the films, and it reveals that black women are cinematically nullified as activist members of their community, which translates into a supposed lack of participation. In contrast with male figures, the representation of black women marginalizes them from the movement by relegating them to the family environment, romanticizing their lives, and highlighting the negative outcomes of their actions instead of recognizing their accomplishments.