The 1930s and 1940s were also the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, with the coming of talking pictures. In the standard film-history accounts, urban, Americanizing immigrants watched mass- produced, studio-made, genre films purveying the quintessential national narratives--gangster pictures, musicals, screwball comedies, domestic melodramas, westerns. The 1930s left its mark on the genre mix, from this point of view, bringing together the urban milieu of gangster films and screwball comedy's class reconciliation--the movies of Frank Capra celebrating populist politics, on the one hand, and the cinema of escapist entertainment allowing moviegoers to flee the Depression, on the other.

Some of the most important and popular films of the period are missing from this picture: films grounded in race. As the Jazz Age came to an end, Al Jolson's blackface The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928) broke all existing box office records. At the same time that Jolson was the top Hollywood box office star, Amos 'n' Andy was the most popular radio show. The Motion Picture Exhibitors' coveted top ten list of stars was headed in 1934 by Will Rogers, who put on Stepin Fetchit's black voice in the "southern" Judge Priest (1934); from 1935 through 1938 by Shirley Temple, who starred in a series of Civil War southerns with Bojangles Robinson (and put on blackface in one of them); and in 1939 by Mickey Rooney, who led a blackface minstrel show that year in Babes in Arms. Far from being a blockbuster exception to New Deal cinema, David 0. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939), the most popular film in Hollywood's first half century, proves the rule.

Michael Rogin, “Democracy and Burnt Cork": The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights,” Representations, No. 46 (Spring, 1994), 1-34 [1]