The Book Our Gang Reveals the Complicated Racial History of the Little Rascals

Our Gang, Julia Lee's new book on the history of the much-loved Our Gang comedies of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, has a provocative subtitle: A Racial History of the Little Rascals. Let’s face it, if you're old enough to have been a fan of the black-and-white shorts — which, like many things from that era, had their last real resurgence in the ‘90s, thanks to LaserDisc reissues — you've probably found yourself at one time or other wondering how American audiences during the more or less Klan-friendly 1920s and ‘30s respond to the racially mixed cast of kids making slapstick “mischief” together. Wasn’t white America uniformly piggish toward its Black citizens? Did bigoted adults just grin and bear it for the sake of a few laughs? Surely there must have been some riots in the movie theaters or lynchings in effigy. Actually, that wasn't the case. As Lee discovers in this deeply researched and colorful history, the answers to these questions turn out to be varied, nuanced, fascinating and, at times, surprisingly gratifying.

Lee could have cast a wider, whiter, more “holistic” lens on things, but that would have meant a much longer book. “It is the story,” she specifies, “of the four African-American stars of Our Gang — Sonny Hoskins, Ernie Morrison, Stymie Beard and Billie Thomas — the gang within the gang ...” So instead of just another fan book, this is a cultural history of the Our Gang phenomenon, the public responses to the films and to the “racial aspects” of the comedies.

As it turns out (and as one would expect), there were indeed “racial reactions” to Our Gang’s seemingly out-of-whack egalitarianism, so odd and so “liberal” for the time as to seem downright subversive and, in the truest sense, avant-garde. As Lee informs us, 1922 was both the year the Our Gang comedies debuted and a peak year for the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States.

The double-edged, contradictory nature of that era can seem so glaring as to be downright confusing:...