Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

385 Pages·2015·13.153 MB·English

by  Julia Lee

Our Gang
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TAh Rea Lcitiatlle H Riastsocrayls of
Julia Lee
foreword by
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis | London
This book is dedicated to Michael and B Hoskins and Lucy and Bobby
Sonneborn.
The publication of this book was assisted by a bequest from Josiah H. Chase
to honor his parents, Ellen Rankin Chase and Josiah Hook Chase, Minnesota
territorial pioneers.
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance
for the publication of this book from the College of Liberal Arts, University of
Nevada, Las Vegas.
“Tableau” by Countee Cullen, reprinted in chapter 6, was originally published
in Color by Countee Cullen. Copyright 1925 by Harper & Bros.; renewed
1954 by Ida Cullen. Copyrights held by the Amistad Research Center, Tulane
University. “One Today,” by Richard Blanco, quoted in the epigraph to
the Epilogue, was the inaugural poem read at the second inauguration of
President Barack Obama in January 2013.
Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lee, Julia.
Our Gang : a racial history of The Little Rascals / Julia Lee.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8166-9821-9 ( hc) | isbn 978-0-8166-9822-6 ( pb)
1. Our Gang films—History and criticism. 2. African Americans in the motion
picture industry—History—20th century. 3. African Americans in motion
pictures. 4. Racism in motion pictures. 5. Race relations in motion pictures.
6. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in motion pictures. I. Title.
pn1995.9.o8l44 2016
791.43'75—dc23                                         2015031957
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword vii
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Introduction All of Us xiii
1. The Eternal Boy 1
2. A Boy and His Gang 22
3. 100 Percent American 45
4. Sambo’s Awakening 68
5. Everyman 91
6. The New Negro 113
7. Movie- Made Children 138
8. The Good Soldier 166
9. The Little Rascals 190
10. The Good Old Days 213
Epilogue Coming Home 238
Acknowledgments 243
Film Appendix 247
Notes 251
Bibliographic Essay 309
Index 319
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Foreword
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Our Gang, known to my generation as The Little Rascals, en-
tered television syndication in 1955, less than a year after the
U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools. I
was four years old, and life was about to change in my hometown
of Piedmont, West Virginia. Integration was the promise of our
democracy and its essential ingredient, we were told, even if melt-
ing what was in the pot was a messy, often violent affair.
The Little Rascals was a metaphor for that change. It was
impossible to ignore the frequently cringe-w orthy stereotyping
that marked the humor of creator Hal Roach’s rag-t ag gang. Yet,
at the same time, The Little Rascals was a model of harmonious,
localized integration, with a revolving cast of children— black,
white, skinny, freckled, fat—m ore at ease in one another’s com-
pany than would have been found in most American classrooms
pledging allegiance to the same flag. And let’s be honest: it was
funny, in the same vein as Roach’s other slapstick acts, Harold
Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy, only The Little Rascals also was lay-
ered with the charms that can be mined only in the misadventures
of childhood. It was straight out of a Mark Twain novel.
Then it hit us (at least those of us too young to know). The
magic reaching us through the tube wasn’t 1950s America at all.
What we were watching were reruns—a ctually, old cinematic
one- reels adapted for reuse by a technology that wasn’t even in
existence when the bulk of them were produced in the 1920s and
vii
viii Foreword
1930s. Doing the math, this meant that the kids we were watching
on our living room screens, black and white in black and white,
had twenty years or more on us and the kids starring in Leave It
to Beaver and Lassie. As shocking, unlike those “current” shows
that were lily- white and custom- cast for the suburban, post–
World War II boom, The Little Rascals was our parents’ “gang,”
conceived in the Jazz Age and hitting their stride when those
wearied by the Great Depression needed them most. Thus, if the
integrationist style of The Little Rascals was a step ahead of its
time in 1955, for those growing up with them in the 1920s and
1930s, when the lynching of black bodies seemed like an everyday
occurrence, it was downright radical. For all its twisted contra-
dictions, America loved it, in both silent and “talkie” form. With
our eyes and ears as wide open as one of Stymie’s favorite facial
expressions, we did, too.
The same is true of Professor Julia Lee, who was mesmer-
ized by The Little Rascals as a child of Korean immigrants in the
Los Angeles of the 1980s and 1990s, when the headlines of the day
had shifted from Thurgood Marshall and Emmett Till to Rodney
King and the L.A. Riots, West Coast rap, and AIDS. In the book
that follows, Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals,”
Lee works her own magic, penning an absorbing, highly read-
able tale of an American screen treasure through the eyes of a
childhood fan turned scholar. The result is the definitive cultural
history of Our Gang. In wrestling with the series’ racial represen-
tations against a broader backdrop of society, from the turn of the
nineteenth century to today, Lee’s book offers a major contribu-
tion to American and African American cultural studies. Like the
series it traces, Lee’s book is a gem.
Few franchises impacted American life, especially child-
hood, more than Our Gang, and through successive generations,
the white and black cast reflected and helped shape perceptions
within and across the color line at the high point of Jim Crow
segregation— a time in Hollywood, just after “the nadir” of black–
white racial relations, as the historian Rayford W. Logan named
the period, when films like The Birth of a Nation (1915), with
their stereotypic portrayals of a set of tropes we might call “the
African American grotesque,” could inspire thousands of hooded
Klansmen to march brazenly down Pennsylvania Avenue in de-
Foreword ix
fense of the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” much to the cheers even
of Northerners suddenly amnesiac about what the Civil War had
been all about and for which side their own ancestors had fought
and died.
Because the deceptively subtle yet extraordinarily sophisti-
cated performances of Our Gang’s black characters— from Er-
nie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison to Allen “Farina” Hoskins Jr.
to Matthew “Stymie” Beard and Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas—
signified on received, base stereotypes, they invited subversive
readings that helped galvanize the assault on Jim Crow. For many,
Our Gang was a touchstone of our youth, popular but unexam-
ined in the American imagination. Now, for the first time, Julia
Lee gives the show the serious scholarly explication it deserves,
with unique access to personal archives and a keen sense of the
broader historical canvas in which the series unfolded.
As I recall from my era of viewing in the 1950s, white and
black kids alike, who knew so little of each other beyond the color
line, wished the Our Gang gang lived down the street. For white
kids my age in particular, many of whom grew up never laying
eyes on a black person outside television and the movies, charac-
ters like Sunshine Sammy, Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat were
the first black pals they had (and, I’ve heard, some even felt jeal-
ous they couldn’t hang out with them for real ). In that way, the
black rascals’ uniqueness, and elusiveness, only reinforced their
hold on the popular imagination. Whatever the scripts said, these
child actors brought it in ways that captivated audiences, with a
gravitational force that pulled us toward them, much as Louis
Armstrong could do on the musical stage or Jesse Owens in the
Olympic arena.
As a sign of its success, The Little Rascals, when it made its
television “debut,” quickly became the “leading afternoon enter-
tainment for children” in New York City, J. P. Shanley wrote for
the New York Times on May 8, 1955. Similar results were regis-
tered in forty- five other American cities, with a “waiting list of
sponsors.” “It is difficult to determine what makes the old films
so appealing,” Shanley wondered, before speculating, “Perhaps
modern children, like those of another generation, find elaborate-
ly organized mischief appealing.” ( No kidding, Einstein!) But its
appeal, for me at least, also stemmed from The Little Rascals’