This Day in History: 1966-06-30

Race censorship ends in Virginia — On this day in 1966, four and a half decades of official film censorship comes to an end in one of the last states with a censorship board.  The board had been created in 1922 in order to pre-screen every movie in the state and either grant a license for showing, ban it entirely or require the filmmaker to delete scenes or dialogue.  Although the official mission was to fight obscenity, the real job of the board was to ensure that portrayals of African Americans fit sterotypes on the screen: the faithful servant, the ignorant child, and the loathsome criminal, according to historian Douglas Smith. Another scholar, Melissa Ooten, explains in “Censorship in Black and White” that Virginia censors favored demeaning and negative portrayals of African Americans in movies. One result was to place severe limits on black film makers like Oscar Micheaux, who lived in Roanoke, Va. in the 1920s.