Movies and Blacks

About a year ago I purchased an Apple TV. For those of you not familiar, this is a device that allows me to view youtube on my TV. I did this because of the music. It is not easy to find the kind of music that I like in stores but on youtube there is an abundance of performances from artist like Sarah Vaughn. What I discovered were hundreds of old movies from the 30’s and 40’s. When I was growing up we did not go to that many movies so most of these I have not seen. While watching them I noticed something quite different from today’s movies and this is especially evident in crime films. The criminals are almost always white males but in today’s movies blacks are prominently represented among the bad guys. In looking further I find that blacks when the do appear are as butlers or servant types. Although black crime in the 30’s was much less than today it was still higher on a percentage basis than white crime, so why was it absent in the movies? I believe the answer to that question lies in the way cities were segregated. When I was growing up all of the black people lived in one part of town. They shopped in that part of town, went to school in that part of town and attended church and other social function in that part of town. White people were mostly unaware of what was going on in the black community so to see a black criminal in a movie would be foreign to their perception of the world. Years later when TV came along and we saw the struggles of the blacks we were surprised. Our ignorance had protected us from reality. This was one of the main reasons for the uprisings in the 60’s and how the baby boomers thought their parents were hypocrites. The greatest generation had always told their children to treat people with respect and when these 60’s kids saw the way blacks were treated they felt their parents lied to them. They never stopped to understand that their parents had no idea what was happening. On a very personal level I knew more about blacks than most of my friends because I often went with my Dad on his milk route which was in the black part of town and I knew they struggled economically but I was still unaware of their true plight. Or is all this just a rationalization of bad behavior!