Desegregating Hollywood: Race, Film, and TV

19/09/2021

Actor Sidney Poitier appears to have been largely ignored by the national press until 1957. A look back at his early career through the period newspapers. Plus the 2012 TCM Summer Under the Stars s…

04/08/2021

Ena Hartman's break-out role might have been in a proposed movie co-starring Sidney Poitier about the life of actress Dorothy Dandridge (with Dandridge having personally approved Hartman to play her). But after Hartman and film officials negotiated details, Poitier—who was one of Hollywood’s most popular actors at the time—decided in the final stages to pass on the project, leaving the role unplayed and Hartman without that major job.



Offscreen, Hartman was close with friends with actor William Marshall (Blacula).



Backstory:



Ena Hartman is an unsung trailblazer of Hollywood whose smaller roles in 1960s media productions helped create a path for African Americans in film and television. African-American actresses working in the 1970s benefited from the trail Hartman helped blaze.

Ena Hartman was born on April 1, 1935, in Moscow (Jefferson County), Arkansas. The daughter of sharecroppers Daniel and Magnolia Smith, she was raised by her grandparents. She picked cotton and attended a one-room schoolhouse when she wasn’t needed in the fields.

At age thirteen, she moved to Buffalo, New York, to live with her mother. She dropped out of high school to open a restaurant, handling the duties of cook and waitress as she tried to earn money to go to New York City to become a model. She was discovered by a photographer in the lobby of a modeling agency that had just rejected her. In the late 1950’s she started a career as a top photographic model with the Grace Del Marco Agency and she studied drama with Josh Shelley and Lloyd Richards.

In the early 1960s, NBC television sponsored a talent competition for young actors and actresses, and her talents were brought to the attention of the vice president of talent relations for NBC. The network extended her a five-year talent contract in August 1962, which meant that she would be trained and developed as an actress to appear in NBC programming. She thus became the first African American to sign a talent contract with a major television network and also the first African-American woman to sign a contract with NBC.

Her roles were small at first, as she appeared as Caroline in the series Bonanza in the episode titled “Enter Thomas Bowers” (1964), and she drew positive reviews from critics nationwide for this role. She appeared as Corrine in “The Farmer’s Daughter” and as Ann Eliza Hammond in Profiles in Courage in 1965. Ena appeared in her first motion picture, “The New Interns” and then as an WAC secretary in the spy spoof “Our Man Flint” in 1966. In 1966, she left NBC and appeared as Marcia Davenport in the television movie Fame Is the Name of the Game.

To the delight of those who regularly watched sci-fi, she made another memorable appearance as a member of the Enterprise crew in the Star Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.” Among her other appearances were Tarzan (1966) and the popular television series Ironside (1967–1969), starring Raymond Burr, and as Ida Walters in “The Missing Realtor” episode of Dragnet (1967).

She finished the 1960s with appearances in the psychological thriller Games (1967) and as a nurse in the television movie Prescription Murder (1968), starring Peter Falk in his debut as Columbo. In 1968, Hartman also appeared in a number of other television shows such as Adam 12 and It Takes a Thief. She almost landed a role costarring with Elvis Presley in Change of Habit but lost out to actress Barbara McNair.

She was Honorary Mayor of Universal City for one year in 1968, meeting VIPs. She was the cover feature lead story for that honor on JET Magazine, Sept. 19, 1968. She was the first black woman to be so named. Ena was signed to a two-year contract by Universal-TV, getting one of her more visible roles as Ruth, a stewardess in the box-office hit “Airport” (1970). Hartman then became a tv series regular as police dispatcher Katy Grant for two seasons on the television series Dan August (1970–71), starring Burt Reynolds.

Ena also earned an Image award from the NAACP as the most promising new young Black actress in a series in 1970. After the Dan August series ended, she played Carmen Simms in the movie Terminal Island (1973), with Tom Selleck.

She appeared in an episode of “Police Story” in 1975, which pretty much was the end of her on screen career. Four television movies created by editing together episodes of Dan August were broadcast in 1980. By that time, Hartman had retired from the movie industry.

Ena Hartman is remembered as an attractive and classy actress who might have achieved more if she was born at a later time.

Ena Hartman is currently alive at the age of 84.

28/02/2021

The Digital Home for Duke University Professor and Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal

20/02/2021

Historic TV with Robert Hooks

Robert Hooks leads a stellar cast in this made for TV dramatization on the life of Frederick Douglass. Also starring Claudia McNeil, Frederick O'Neal and Har...

17/02/2021

17/01/2021

New documentary about Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier premieres January 18th on PBS.

17/09/2020

Writer (usually of comic books), David Walker, uses his research skills to explore how slavery impacts his and others identity and shapes not only the narrat...

15/09/2020

The awards’ new Best Picture eligibility rules are so lenient, they’d shame any film that can’t meet them.

17/06/2020

The Times interviewed nearly two dozen Black entertainment industry voices, spanning directors, producers, writers, designers, agents and executives. They discussed racism in Hollywood, what needs to change and their frustration with years of talk and little action by powerful companies.

25/02/2020

How the Enlightenment created modern race thinking, and why we should confront it.

19/02/2020

What was it like to be an African-American performing artist trying to break into Hollywood during the 1960s?

From Pl***oy Magazine, May 1971:

PL***OY: Many militant blacks would argue that they have it better almost anywhere else. Even in Hollywood, they feel that the color barrier is still up for many kinds of jobs. Do you limit the number of blacks you use in your pictures?

JOHN WAYNE: Oh, Christ no. I’ve directed two pictures and I gave the blacks their proper position. I had a black slave in The Alamo, and I had a correct number of blacks in The Green Berets. If it’s supposed to be a black character, naturally I use a black actor. But I don’t go so far as hunting for positions for them. I think the Hollywood studios are carrying their tokenism a little too far. There’s no doubt that 10 percent of the population is black, or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves; they certainly aren’t Caucasian. Anyway, I suppose there should be the same percentage of the colored race in films as in society. But it can’t always be that way. There isn’t necessarily going to be 10 percent of the grips or sound men who are black, because more than likely, 10 percent haven’t trained themselves for that type of work.

18/02/2020

"Good Times" actress Ja'net DuBois dead at 74.

06/02/2020

https://www.fandango.com/egyptian-theatre-hollywood-aaofx/theater-page?date=2020-02-13

03/02/2020

“This is not a self-righteous condemnation, because I’m ashamed to say that I’m part of the problem.”

01/02/2020

SIDNEY is coming to the Criterion Channel!

Both one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century and a transformative cultural icon, Sidney Poitier forever changed the way African Americans were represented on-screen. Defying decades of racist stereotyping within mainstream Hollywood cinema, Poitier brought dignity and humanity to his ...

23/01/2020

The 1971 film "Shaft" will be coming to the Apollo Theater on Feb. 29, with its celebrated score performed live on stage.

21/12/2019

10/12/2019

Alumnus Nicholas von Sternberg finds art imitating his life in the Netflix movie “Dolemite Is My Name.”

16/11/2019

The mogul is opening the doors that the industry has tried to keep shut for Black Hollywood, but that doesn't absolve his work from critique.

24/10/2019

The actress held her own opposite Clint Eastwood and Sidney Poitier. So why did she languish in obscurity until her death?

18/10/2019

A landmark motion picture, The Learning Tree, premiered in New York City 50 years ago today. Directed by the trailblazing and...

12/03/2019

https://www.scpr.org/news/2019/03/12/88637/horror-noire-director-xavier-burgin-on-blacula-bla/

Xavier Burgin's new documentary Horror Noire explores the history of black people in cinema and specifically in horror, and celebrates artists he didn't learn about in school.

08/03/2019

https://www.rogerebert.com/chazs-blog/black-women-vs-the-end-of-the-world-again

Login | Roger Ebert

18/02/2019

A Cinematic Masterwork Does Irreparable Harm [Twilight Time Blu-ray Review]

31/12/2018

A graphic novel biography of the escaped slave, abolitionist, public speaker, and most photographed man of the nineteenth century, based on his autobiographical writings and speeches, spotlighting the key events and people that shaped the life of this great American.Recently returned to the cultu...

30/12/2018

The history of black Americans in film would have been far less well understood if not for the lifetime of research by Thomas Cripps. The leading American

15/11/2018

The archive of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, now at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, traces more than 60 years in the theater, in the movies and at the front lines of social activism.