Celebrating Black History Month

February 25, 2025 | Black History

African-American Writers

Walter Film established a designated section in it’s comprenehsive collection that includes black artists, film makers and writers, such as the likes of Lorraine Hansbury, Maya Angelou and Scott Joplin, all represented here.

Blaxploitation

After the cultural misrepresentation of Black people in the race films of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the Blaxploitation movie genre presented Black characters and Black communities as the protagonists and the places of the story, rather than as background or secondary characters in the story. To counter the racist misrepresentations of Blackness in the American movie business, the UCLA financially assisted Black students to attend film school. The cultural emergence of the Blaxploitation subgenre was facilitated by the Hollywood movie studios adopting a permissive system of film ratings in 1968.

Slavesploitation

Slavesploitation, a subgenre of blaxploitation in literature and film, flourished briefly in the late 1960s and 1970s. As its name suggests, the genre is characterized by sensationalistic depictions of slavery.

One early antecedent of the genre is Slaves (1969), which was “not ‘slavesploitation’ in the vein of later films”, but which nonetheless featured graphic depictions of beatings and sexual violence against slaves.