I mean early Hollywood was an unconventional place. But he was also unconventional and didn’t think that there was anything wrong with black and white children playing together.ĭid it make a difference that it was filmed in California? So did the series creator Hal Roach do this on purpose? So, the fact that you have black and white children on screen playing together, going to school together, playing baseball together when baseball would not be integrated for many more years is astonishing. And then you have the height of Jim Crow these laws that pretty much up hold segregation. The so-called Red Summer of 1919 where you have riots throughout the country. You have the Ku Klux Klan undergoing a period of resurgence. And this was a period, it has been described as being the nadir of race relations in America.

These are things that as a child I didn’t necessarily realize, but that have been quite stubborn and quite problematic stereotypes.īut when the series of shorts started, just having black and white kids playing together was a radical idea? What I learned through my education is that there is a long legacy of these kinds of racial stereotypes in Hollywood.

Watching “Saturday Night Live,” hearing Murphy making fun of the way Buckwheat was always incoherent and had this crazy hair and always considered a little bit clueless about things. Things like the Buckwheat character, which is probably the most famous, because of Eddie Murphy. It was as I got older that I would look back on the films with a great deal of nostalgia but also but also with a lot of questions since as I got older I started to see these problematic racial portrayals that many people commented on in later years. So my sister and I would sit in our living room and watch whatever was on TV. I grew up in Los Angeles and my parents were often at work. I grew up watching them in my living room. Were the ‘Rascals’ part of your childhood? Why did this fascinate you so much? But the films were also full of ugly racial stereotypes. This is the most fascinating part: The Rascals were black AND white children playing together in interracial harmony. In the 1950s, they were re-packaged for television, and a new audience.

The 'Little Rascals' were hugely popular, and continued to be popular as “talkies” well into the 1930s - and beyond. Many kids of that era thought Farina, Stymie, Darla, Alfalfa, and Buckwheat - and the other Rascals - were playmates created just for them.Īctually, 'The Little Rascals' was launched in the 1920s by the Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood during its silent era.įirst it was “Our Gang” – then “The Little Rascals” - one and two reelers – ten or twenty minute “shorts” that were run before the feature film in movie theaters. The Little Rascals was a staple of children’s television beginning in the 1950s.

The cast of the original little rascals