RADIO HELD BIAS ON NEGRO PROBLEM
Canada Lee, Negro actor, charged yesterday that the “lynch mentality: American radio made :cannibals, dehumanized monsters, clowns, menials, thieves and liars” out of the Negro people whom it had “jailed in a concentration camp of silence where we are surrounded by indifference and our real words reach nowhere.”
Mr. Lee, who has repeatedly denied he was a Communist, joined with Paul Robeson, the singer, William L. Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress, and Howard Fast, author, in violent attacks on American radio owners for alleged efforts to distort and conceal Negro problems and what he termed their refusal to hire qualified Negro workers. They spoke at a conference sponsored by the Committee for the Negro in Arts held in the Theresa Hotel, Seventh Avenue and 125th Street.
BOSTON CHRONICLE – (CYRUS DURGIN) – JUNE 12, 1948
Mr. Lee has distinguished himself variously in the theatre before now. His Othello is kind and honest in the first scenes and movingly distraught when the Moor falls prey to jealousy…”
BOSTON TRAVELER – (A.E. WATTS) – JUNE 12, 1948
“Mr. Lee’s characterization is a thoroughly thought out one which measures contrasts and intensifies Othello’s acute misery as Iago builds up his distrust in Desdemona….as Mr. Lee gives his speeches, the words seem to come directly from him, bred of his writhing mental torment. It is a notable characterization.”
CANADA LEE CALLS DIALECT HORRIBLE
Canada Lee, the the actor who got his start in “Native Son” and also appeared in “Lifeboat”yesterday criticized the pattern of writing Hollywood scenarists and Broadway playwrights who portray the Negro with “a horrible dialect” and in characterizations that are “as unfair and horrible as the dialect.”
“The Negro has as fine a talent and as much to contribute to the American stage as anyone else,”. Mr. Lee said in addressing about 60 of the older children in residence at the temporary shelter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 100 Schermerhorn St.
The actor said he had turned down many parts on Broadway and in Hollywood because they placed the Negro in an inferior light.
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