Free and Equal
Cast & Crew
R. William Neill
Charles K. French
Gloria Hope
Jack Curtis
Lydia Knott
Jack Richardson
Film Details
Synopsis
Judge Lowell creates The Society for the Uplift of the Negro to satisfy his passion for the equality of the races and to further his own political ambitions. At Tuskegee Institute, Lowell meets Alexander Marshall, an extremely bright mulatto student. As Marshall shares Lowell's dream to see the intermarriage of the races result in equality, he becomes Lowell's private secretary and passes for the son of a wealthy Creole abolitionist in order to raise money for their organization. Lowell's daughter Margaret falls in love with Marshall, who satisfies his lustful "instincts" in brothels. After Margaret recoils from his advances, Marshall encounters Belle Andrews, a good-looking maid who earlier flirted with him, and kisses her against her will. Margaret comes to apologize and witnesses Marshall inadvertently kill Belle as he clasps her throat to stop her from shrieking. During Marshall's trial, Margaret admits that she married Marshall, but a young mulatto woman testifies that she is really Marshall's wife, and a black woman reveals that she is his mother. Lowell, horrified to learn of Marshall's marriage to Margaret, throws the book he had been writing, which advocates full equality, into the fire. Marshall is taken to prison, where he madly clutches the bars.
Director
R. William Neill
Cast
Charles K. French
Gloria Hope
Jack Curtis
Lydia Knott
Jack Richardson
Thomas J. Guise
J. J. Dowling
Crew
Film Details
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
According to a news item in Photoplay, April 1918, this film was produced by Thomas H. Ince at the Triangle studios in the summer of 1917. Ince, the item noted, did not want to release the film because it was not complimentary to blacks, so he let stage producer A. H. Woods exhibit it in Los Angeles in 1918. The news item further states that during the brief exhibition, the city authorities began litigation against the film. It was shelved until the Frequal Company, in which Woods was financially interested, presented it at the Astor Theatre in New York on April 19, 1925. This presentation included a staged prologue and epilogue written by Willard Mack. In the prologue, Jack Richardson, who played Alexander Marshall in the film, exhorts black singers and dancers by a levee to assert themselves as equals to whites. In the epilogue, it is revealed that the preceding film was Richardson's dream; he awakens and says that Booker T. Washington was right in stating that the Negro should stay in his place. The story by R. Cecil Smith was copyrighted in 1917 by Thomas H. Ince. Some of the story varies from the plot as reported by reviewers of the film in 1925. The film was not well received by critics in New York; New York Times noted: "The story is as distasteful as it is ridiculous," while Variety stated that it "is just so much junk." The California Eagle, a Los Angeles African-American newspaper, commented that "notice was posted backstage before the matinee [of 20 Apr] was finished to the effect that the show would close on Saturday. That information provided whatever pleasure came from the $1.10 spent on the show.... Just about all it accomplished was to tarnish the halo that colored people had long since placed upon the head of Al Woods whom they had come to know as a friend of the race. Mr Woods May not need this good will but it was genuinely his. It is reported that one of Mr. Woods' employees resigned his job on an elevator rather than work for a man who presented such a film." The newspaper was particularly critical of "performers who will prostitute their talents in any such propaganda against the race of which they are a part while there are dishes to wash, ditches to dig, streets to sweep or any other honorable job with which they might fend off starvation." According to information in the NAACP Papers at the Library of Congress, the National Office of the NAACP sent an official to the opening on April 19, 1925, after having received over a period of a few months "more or less mysterious intimations" about the film "which was characterized as being much worse than The Birth of a Nation." The official judged the film to be "very offensive," and surmising that "the intimations sent us were a bid for publicity," the NAACP decided to take no action to protest the film. After a week in New York, it was withdrawn.
