Pruning Knife Busy
Chapter 7 addresses film censorship in the South, and places this history in the larger context of the American film industry as a whole. From early boxing films such as the Johnson-Jeffries fight of 1910, which led southern politicians to ban interracial boxing films (and, in some cases, all boxing films) to the prodigious work of individual southern censors including Lloyd T. Binford of Memphis and Evan R. Chesterman of the State of Virginia, this history reveals the embeddedness of Jim Crow ideology within all sorts of film institutions. In the years after World War II, when film censorship practices came under greater scrutiny and legal threat, the work of southern film censors largely petered out, anticipating some of the coming confrontations of the Civil Rights Movement.