With the build up and buzz around the Cohen brothers’ movie True Grit, it’s obvious that the American movie psyche still has a tast for a well made American Western. There’s something about the mythic unknown of the American push out west. Of course reality knows that the expansion included some pretty nasty attempts at genocide against the indigenous population, but for some reason everyone likes to gloss over that part… or if it’s addressed at all, Native Americans are usually on the losing team.

Even though we know that the Old West wasn’t all butter and cream, there are some thoughtful, well made stories surrounding it. Ever since Spaghetti Westerns and Peckinpah epics rewrote the western on screen we’ve been fascinated about the violence, outlaw characters, and the underdog.

There have been a number of westerns featuring Blacks, but many have been forgotten.

Black Westerns in the 1930′s

According to film historian Donald Bogle’s book Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood
there were westerns featuring  –and often directed and produced by– African American stars as early as the 1930′s. These films included Bronze Buckaroo, Harlem Rides The Range, and Harlem on the Prairie , to name a few. (The word “Harlem” wasn’t just a location in New York, but it was also a euphemism for someone “Black” to easily designate it as race film.)

Black Westerns Become Less Popular

The Black western lost popularity as Sunday serials waned in movie theaters. Films that came out during the 1940′s and 1950′s and featured actors like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper and James Stewart, became more complex in their views of American West. The characters were written as flawed humans, but they still kept the manifest destiny ethos in their roles as anti-heroes. Westerns were costly to make and required stunt people, animals, new sets and period costumes, that many Black filmmakers didn’t have available. During the 1950′s, Black films veered into another popular film genre during this time period: Musicals.

Black Western Revival & Civil Rights

It wasn’t until the 1960′s and 1970′s when the anti-hero Western character began to incorporate real images of the old west, namely, violence, the subjugation of women, realistic Mexican characters that were heroes and villains, discrimination against Native Americans and government mistrust. Film historians note that this change in focus was mainly due to the introduction of “foreign” films from Japan that featured samurai heroes and villains who used violence to underscore the violent era. (The Magnificent Seven, Seven Samurai starring Yul Brenner was a direct western translation from Akira Kurosawa’s  . The quintessential Spaghetti Western movie A Fistful of Dollars starring  Clint Eastwood was a direct western [albeit Italian] remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.)

Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai

Now that stories in the western genre were being retold with more historical references –such as Little Big Man starring Dustin Hoffman– Black actors and screenwriters saw an opportunity to tell their own stories from the wild west. The 1960′s and 1970′s were also seeing an upswing in films featuring Black people due to the efforts of civil rights and Black empowerment organizations who put pressure on Hollywood to show more Black representation in movies.

Actor Sidney Poitier had seen westerns while growing up in Nassau. Even though he wasn’t born anywhere near the American west, he was “transfixed” by actors such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. It wasn’t until he did more research about the real American west that he understood the impact and achievements of Blacks in the old west, especially such African Americans as Nat Love (better known by his cowboy nickname of Deadwood Dick), frontier woman Mary “Stagecoach Mary” Fields, Cherokee Bill, and others.

In 1972, Sidney Poitier directed and starred in the film Buck and the Preacher, which also starred Ruby Dee and Harry Belafonte. Buck and the Preacher was remarkable for audience goers because the last time they’d seen a western starring Black actors was during the 1930′s …and those films were in segregated theaters and targeted to a very specific audience. This film was the first time that integrated movie goers had experienced the Old West from a Black viewpoint, and one in which the Black characters weren’t shuffling buffoons and used as comedy relief for the “real” white hero or heroine.

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Sidney Poitier’s film also introduced a gun slinging Black heroine (in the role of Ruby Dee) and hinted at the results of miscegenation through Harry Belafonte’s character. The main character (played by Poitier) was a leader, a diplomat who had contact with surrounding Indian tribes, and was vengeful against his oppressors. None of these features had been so blatantly portrayed by a Black actor in the history of Blacks in westerns.

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Buck and the Preacher spurred other stories about Blacks in the west, including Thomasine & Bushrod (starring Vonetta McGee and Max Julien), the television series “The Biography of Miss Jane Pittman” (starring Cicely Tyson), and others. Many of the Black westerns following Buck and the Preacher got caught up in the Blaxploitation era of films and lost their impact –and opportunity– to tell an accurate or truthful story of Blacks in the West.

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Black Westerns Back in Decline

Later films in the 1980′s and 1990′s took on the Black western theme, but none had the impact of Buck and the Preacher. Many of the characters were sensationalized, inaccurate and buffoon-ized.

Since Hollywood thinks that True Grit is worth remaking, I am putting my hat in the ring to push for a remake of Buck and the Preacher.

You’re welcome.