Hall Johnson Portrait and Black Hollywood Production from The Green Pastures to RKO Studio Photographs in the Segregation Era, c. 1936

Hall Johnson Choir

Photograph

[African American Film] Hall Johnson and Black Hollywood production photo archive documenting two Black-cast productions and Black portraiture under Jim Crow Hollywood, circa 1936 to 1940s, including a portrait of composer and choral director Hall Johnson and a studio backlot photograph identifying the Marc Connelly Production Company. During American segregation, Hollywood overwhelmingly cast Black performers in stereotyped supporting roles, with a small number of major studio productions built around Black casts and Black musical talent for white audiences. The Green Pastures (Warner Bros., 1936), produced by Marc Connelly from his own Pulitzer Prize winning play, and a series of RKO Radio Pictures shorts featuring the Hall Johnson Choir, including Deep South (1937), are among the rare examples. Hall Johnson arranged music for over thirty Hollywood films between the mid 1930s and the 1940s, even as the studio system denied Black performers screen credit, equal pay, union access, and creative control.

Photo archive of 11 silver gelatin photographs, ranging from approximately 4 x 5 to 2 x 3 inches, California, circa 1936 to 1940s. One photograph shows Hall Johnson in white shirt and trousers with eyeglasses, standing before dense banana plant foliage, providing direct documentary evidence of Johnson's presence on a Hollywood production. A studio backlot photograph shows livestock, including cattle and a zebra, assembled outside a stage building marked with a large painted "2," with a plaque visible reading "Marc Connelly Production Company," tying the image to Connelly's The Green Pastures (Warner Bros., 1936), in which Noah's ark scenes required paired animals on set. Five photographs record film crew at work in a cotton field with crane and platform rigging, a vertical close view of a laborer bent into the plants, an expansive field view with an "RKO" sign at the upper edge, and an ornamental bordered presentation print of a cotton picker, identifying the cotton field photographs with an unidentified RKO Radio Pictures production from the same period. Two square format portraits show an unidentified Black man in suit, tie, and round eyeglasses, likely from a later sitting

The archive sits at the intersection of two of the most significant Black-cast productions of segregation era Hollywood and preserves a portrait of Hall Johnson, whose choir shaped the sound of Black spirituals on the American screen for over a decade. The Green Pastures remains a landmark of early Black cinema as a rare major studio feature built around an all-Black cast, and the RKO Hall Johnson Choir shorts circulated Black musical performance to wide American audiences within a segregated industry. Minor corner creasing on one photograph; overall very good condition. A direct visual record of Black performance and Black music inside the Hollywood studio system during the Jim Crow era.

Item #23243

Price: $1,450.00