In the early 1960s the majority of elementary school students, regardless of their heritage, were taught three things about African American history: that slavery started in 1619 and ended in 1865, that Harriett Tubman was the "Moses of her people" and that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter.
However truncated that history, it was actually an improvement over the negative images burned into European American minds thanks to Hollywood films. It's also intriguing that those negative film images became more prevalent, despite the fact that the person seen in what is considered by film scholars to be the very first film was African American (see below).
In Ebony Images - The African American Experience in Film D. M. Cross recounts her experiences teaching about and discussing African American life as seen through the camera lens.
