There were few black faces on the big screen back in the 1940s, when young Morgan Freeman collected soda bottles to pay his way into the local movie matinee. And the one or two who did appear made the young moviegoer squirm. He did not object to their playing servants, jobs his own parents had occasionally held, but it bothered him that these celluloid domestics were presented as empty caricatures, devoid of human dignity. "I didn't know anybody who acted like that," recalls Freeman.
Good roles for black actors are still hard to come by, but audiences currently have a chance...
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