Rowan University professor Shari Thompson teaches history of African Americans in film
OCEAN CITY — A second-generation island local, professor Shari Thompson’s passion for social justice, racial history and film philosophy stems from her early years in Ocean City.
Thompson’s grandmother was instrumental in a leadership position at Tabernacle Baptist Church until she fell too ill to continue her services.
It is one of southern New Jersey’s oldest African American churches and the city’s oldest surviving house of worship. Originally a Methodist church, Tabernacle Baptist organization was founded in 1896.
Thompson’s formative years were spent at Ocean City Baptist Church. She fondly recalled the pastor who built up the youth program to the point of hosting more than 100 children on Friday youth group nights.
She described her time at the church as “solo”; her mother worshipped at a church at the end of the street and her father did not actively attend church. Usually accompanied by her older brother, when he left the church, she said she was often the only Black person there.
“I basically grew up being the only Black person in various situations,” Thompson said about her time as a cheerleader and years competing in the Miss Ocean City pageant.
Pageants were a way for her to earn spending money for college, and she competed in the Miss Ocean City pageant until her senior year of college. She placed in runner-up positions but never won. In each of her competitions, she won the interview competition.
In her last year, she won talent and interview and walked away with first runner-up and more monetary earnings than the winner.
Ocean City seventh-grader fell in love with film
Before pageants and college, a seventh-grade Shari Thompson discovered an interest in filmmaking in her art teacher’s darkroom where students could develop their own film. This same teacher later gave her a Super 8 camera.
At the end of the school year, she submitted her own scripts to her English teacher for the end-of-the-year play. Thompson remembered the play’s plot: a smart girl was interested in a guy who was only interested in using her work to cheat.
Her classmates got to choose which play they wanted to perform, and they voted for her play, which she directed.
The next year, she wrote another script that she and her friends filmed during lunch on her gifted Super 8. The camera was without sound, so she simultaneously recorded audio with a cassette tape recorder.
These interests did not manifest again until she reached college at Georgetown University.
Thompson always had an interest in black-and-white films — she noted stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Grace Kelly — and became enamored with the independent films at a downtown Georgetown independent theater.
The “obsession with film and filmmaking sort of took off” after she was awed watching Emma Thompson in “Howard’s End” and Jane Campion’s “The Piano.”
With a bachelor’s degree in English, she was unsure about the direction of her career. She quickly took a job with the non-profit organization Teach for America but realized the job was not for her during the training.
Thompson taught at Atlantic City High School for one year and saved up enough money the following year to attend a six-week summer intensive at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
The intensive offered an introductory film course. She learned the basics of filmmaking, shot black and white films, cut the film herself, spliced it and showed a film each week. After making four short films that summer, she realized that was where her passion lay.
A year later she ended up at Temple University, where she earned an MFA in film and media arts. She worked as an adjunct professor and manager of the equipment office at Temple for a few years before applying for a job at Howard University as an assistant professor.
She loved being in Washington, D.C., in her five years of teaching at Howard. She moved back to Ocean City and currently works as a lecturer in the Radio Television & Film Department at Rowan University.
Forced conformity shaped her ideology
Thompson said she recognized how the micro-aggressions she faced in her childhood, particularly while in school, shaped her interest in racial injustice.
“In order to fit in, you had to lose any difference you had. It wasn’t about people accepting your difference, it was more about you conforming,” she said about growing up in the “homogeneous” city.
Her classmates would turn their heads and stare at her during the school’s slavery lesson.
“Every kid turns around and starts shooting you glances, and then you want to cringe, and you want to sort of curl up and die or go somewhere and hide. Because of the way in which the textbooks teach slavery; they teach it as if as an African American, you should be ashamed.”
“It shrinks you, but you don’t know what’s happening. It shrinks you and it quiets you. Because, again, you don’t want to be different. You feel ashamed that you’re a part of a people that your textbook and your teachers are telling you are people who were only enslaved,” she said.
Thompson said the curriculum does not teach important African history before slavery.
“If you are taught that you came from enslaved people who were illiterate, whipped, beaten and had to bow their heads, that’s like a daily lesson in subjugation. So, you grow up in that. Then when you leave, and you get out of it, and you get amongst other Black people … it’s sort of a relief of the subtle assault of being made to feel inferior all the time. And that’s something I would’ve never understood.”
When she returned to the island, she was wary about putting her then-fifth-grade daughter through the same troubles she experienced as a child. She was appalled when her daughter’s class was assigned to imagine the students were on a slave ship and write a letter home about the experience.
“I was like ‘Who does that?’ Our school systems don’t ask teachers to be sensitive when they’re teaching information to African American kids. For some reason, there is an apathy toward, you know, the way African American children feel.”
Four years at Georgetown taught Thompson that she was not alone growing up with those feelings. Surrounded by other Black students who “were made to feel inferior through the way that the curriculum either is taught or not taught,” she realized her struggles were felt nationwide.
In her last year at graduate school at Temple University, she was approached by Gloria Westbrooks-Breedlove, one of the Leesburg Stockade Girls. They were young civil rights activists who were viciously attacked, arrested and jailed without their parents’ knowledge for 45 days in inhumane conditions at the Leesburg Stockade for challenging segregation laws.
Westbrooks-Breedlove had hired a lawyer and the women were looking for someone to document their story because they thought it would be helpful for their legal case. Some of them had not spoken about their stories since the 1960s.
Her documentary, “The Leesburg 33,” told the harrowing survival stories of the women. It screened at the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival and was broadcast on WYBE.
“I feel like when I do stuff like that, it kind of heals me in a way,” Thompson said.
If there is ever an opportunity to do a film that highlights an injustice, she will always take it.
Image of Blacks in film reflects American society
Professor Thompson teaches African American History at Rowan University, a course she was asked to revise a few years ago because it was a course that was on the books but had not been taught for a decade.
Her course begins with the history of the portrayal of Blackness in cinema.
D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) is regarded as the first blockbuster Hollywood hit. It was the first movie to be screened at the White House, in the East Room on Feb. 18, 1915.
“What that film did was basically set up the cinematic image of Blackness that we have been fighting against ever since,” she said.
Thompson explained the film pushes a lost-cause narrative, propagandizing the pseudo-historical myth that the Civil War was not centered around slavery.
The film “reframes” slavery as something done to Black people because they needed the supervision of the Southern patriarch, effectively romanticizing slavery.
Despite being held in high regard as a landmark in cinematic history, the war epic is horribly bigoted. White actors with burnt-cork makeup comprise most of the black characters. Black men are depicted as sex-crazed deviants, unintelligent and lazy while the Ku Klux Klan are this film’s American heroes.
“Now we have these stereotypes for the rest of American cinematic history — even today we are fighting these stereotypes,” she said.
Thompson travels through the decades of cinema and studies the trends of Black characters.
Vaudeville was a popular form of live entertainment and had its most explosive growth in popularity from 1900 to 1912. Vaudeville had its roots in minstrelsy.
Minstrelsy was developed in the early 19th century and for more than 100 years remained the “most popular form of entertainment in the United States.”
Pivoting from vaudeville in the 1920s, Thompson said that instead of white performers darkening their faces with burnt cork to degrade and mock Black people, it turned to black performers.
World War II introduced integration and forced society to think about the idea of integration. She noted that the “obvious hypocrisy was too great” because, while fighting racism overseas against the Nazis, Americans were sitting in segregated schools and lynching African Americans.
During the 1940s and 1950s, social problem films highlighted antisemitism and racism. Films focusing on integration argued that white folks should integrate with Black folks “because they’re nice.”
Notably, Sidney Poitier became Hollywood’s most utilized actor to tackle interracial issues. Poitier became virtually the sole African American Hollywood star and was made to represent the “image of the perfect black man,” Thompson said.
“There came this big backlash and out of this Sidney Poitier-perfection mode came blaxploitation.”
Blaxploitation films emerged in the early 1970s as a sub-genre of exploitation films made to present a new image of African Americans. Thompson said that although Black people were trying to reclaim their image in film, “that image is detrimental because … the heroes sometimes are pimps or drug dealers. They’re getting over on “the man,” but they’re negative. You don’t want kids emulating them.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, stereotyped roles such as the comedian or the mammy caricature dominated the roles available to Black actors. She said that a mammy presents a “fat, black, harmless woman. Just there as a vehicle to help the white characters along.”
“The history of African Americans specifically in film has been to fight the original images and stereotypes that were codified by D.W. Griffith in ‘Birth of a Nation.’ Constantly fighting these stereotypes in order to create African Americans who are humanized. More human depictions of Black people in all of their humanity.”
Thompson presented research on racial ideology and the Disney princess at the National Association of African American Studies Conference. Disney’s “bastardization” of the original fairytale story inserted a white-male perspective and created damsels in distress from the “proactive and active women” in the folk tale.
“Because Disney made all of his characters white, then princesses by default must be white. The level of understanding is just so low; they have no idea of the history of the fairy tale and how Disney has bastardized them in order to fit the American model of what a princess would look like,” she said about Americans believing the altered Disney version is the definitive version.
The triple-threat professor, screenwriter and filmmaker is intensely interested in the intersection of film and philosophy in contemporary cinema. Every filmmaker delivers a message with their story because “every filmmaker has a worldview.” She looks for the base message a filmmaker is trying to deliver and identifies them with a philosophy.
The Coen brothers’ movies are famous for the nihilism strain that flows through most of their films, bringing their own philosophy up for nihilist accusation. She mentioned many dystopian movies — mostly adaptations from books — and asked, “What are we feeling as a society that tells us everything in the future will be bad?”
Thompson has written two feature-length screenplays of a much lighter subject matter than her documentary and multiple other screenplays at various stages.
Three years ago, she challenged herself to write a Hallmark movie. Based in Ocean City, she added the many holiday traditions of the city and featured Santa Claus arriving on a surfboard.
“It stacks up very well. I put it against any Hallmark movie,” she laughed.
A semi-autobiographical short film waits to be brought to life about an interaction she had with a stranger at a court house.
By JOELLE CARR/For the Sentinel