When African Americans Came to Paris, by the award-winning documentarian Joanne Burke, gives viewers a glimpse into the lives of several African American figures who sought opportunities in Paris during the Jim Crow era in the United States. The DVD consists of six videos that intersperse archival film footage from Paris at the time and photos from and about the subjects of each section. Each section also features commentaries from various scholars. In the end, the viewer comes away with a brief introduction to several important historical and cultural figures.
The first video, “W.E.B. DuBois and the 1900 Paris Exposition,” focuses on Du Bois’s exhibition of African American life in the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900. Called “The Exhibit of the American Negro,” the show, which was very popular among the visitors to the exposition, included hundreds of photos of urbanized, educated African Americans in the South only thirty-five years after the abolition of slavery. The video discusses how the exhibit, although shut out of the official U.S. pavilion, was able to be viewed a short distance away thanks to the efforts of Du Bois and his crew to find an alternative space.
The second video, “Henry Ossawa Tanner: An Artist in Exile,” tells the story of the artist whose famous painting “The Banjo Lesson” is known the world over. Scholarly commentary is interspersed with images of Tanner’s work and a voiceover that describes the obstacles and physical violence that he faced in the United States because of racial prejudice. It is contrasted with the freedom he found in Paris and the accolades that he received as he neared the end of his life.
The third video discusses the 369th Infantry Regiment, a black army unit that fought in France in World War I. Although American blacks who enlisted in the army did so out of a sense of patriotism, the white-run army employed them mainly as manual laborers. It was only when France became desperate for fighters that black men were allowed into combat. Once allowed onto the battlefield they spent more time at the frontlines than any other American outfit and fought so fiercely that the Germans gave them the nickname “Hellfighters.” Nevertheless, when they returned home they faced an increase in bigotry and violence.
The fourth video takes as its subject Lt. James Reese Europe, a little known American musician and war hero who was the first African American officer to lead troops in combat in World War I. He was also New York’s leading black orchestra conductor, who regularly performed at Carnegie Hall, and a businessman who organized small bands. He and his band performed internationally and made several musical recordings. Though a rising star, his life was tragically cut short at the age of thirty-nine.
The fifth video carries on the theme of music, following the path of jazz to Paris after World War I. For the French, African American jazz musicians represented the accessible “Other.” This section stresses the fully integrated nature of Paris life, where interracial romances were accepted and blacks were welcomed in jazz clubs not just as entertainers, as in New York, but also as patrons.
The last video focuses on three African American female visual artists who found the freedom to express themselves in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet lived a hand-to-mouth existence for twelve years but nevertheless was very productive. Augusta Savage moved to Paris after her admission to an American art program in Fountainbleau was rescinded when the admissions committee, made up entirely of white men, found out that she was black. She remained in Paris on a grant for two “very industrious years.” Finally, with a sabbatical from Howard University in 1937, Lois Mailou Jones was able to spend a year in Paris where, she proclaimed, she experienced “a sense of absolute freedom.”
One criticism of the compilation is that in an effort to denounce white American prejudice, the director portrays France as a haven for people of color, not taking into account France’s treatment of its own subjugated masses. For example, in the video about the Harlem Hellfighters, Burke contrasts the U.S.’s inhuman treatment of black soldiers with France’s equal treatment of its West African soldiers. There is no mention of the fact that many of those soldiers had been kidnapped from their farms and conscripted, and lived under deplorable conditions in their camps, a subject that the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmene Sembene explored in several feature films. While several scholar-commentators in the videos hint that life in France was not altogether free from prejudice, by and large, the subject of France’s own brand of bigotry is glossed over.
Overall, however, the director makes good use of archival images. The narrative voiceovers tell stories of tenacity, racial pride, and as one scholar remarks in the film, “self-possession” in the face of profound white American bigotry. The videos are effective in conveying a sense of hope, while also relating the challenges that these pioneers faced.
The DVD is ideal for classroom use, and in fact it seems to have been conceptualized as such. A Teacher’s Guide for grades 6‒12 is posted on the film’s Web site. The fact that each video is four to eight minutes in length also makes it ideal for classroom use for both younger and more advanced students as part of larger units on the time period, such as the African American experience abroad, or African American figures in history.
