Introduction: Judith Weisenfeld, Department of Religion, Vassar College

In the spring and early summer of 1929 American moviegoers were greeted with the release of two films that marked the beginning of a series of Hollywood "all-colored, all-talking" films. Fox's Hearts in Dixie, directed by Paul Sloane, starred Clarence Muse and Stepin Fetchit in a story that focused on religion in African-American life. Film historian Thomas Cripps writes, "The plot of Hearts in Dixie is simple: a tale of old Nappus, a black tenant who scratches a meager living from worn soil; his daughter Chloe, wife to shiftless Gummy; and their two children, Chiquapin and Trailia.… [We see] inside the cabin where beautiful, careworn Chloe sees to the children. She sleeps a bit and dreams of a black cat, an omen that brings swamp fever to her and to Railia, forcing Nappus to choose between the white doctor or the conjure woman. In rich lights and darks with striking panache he persuades the doctor, the film's only white, to come to the cabin. Foreshadowed by a dance-ritual, Nappus and the doctor come upon a voodoo rite that Gummy has allowed to be chanted over his dying family (Cripps 1977, 239-240)."

Response to Hearts in Dixie was mixed, with most reviewers noting the significance of Hollywood's use of black actors in the new talking films but remaining critical of the fact that the film adhered "to the old tradition that the American public still wants to see our people singing in the cotton fields and dancing bare-foot in the sand," as Maurice Dancer wrote in the Baltimore Afro-American (March 9, 1929).