MANOHLA DARGIS AND A. O. SCOTT - ESSAY

Barack Obama in November demonstrated, to the surprise of many Americans and much of the world, that we were ready to see a black man as president. Of course, we had seen several black presidents already, not in the real White House but in the virtual America of movies and television.


The presidencies of James Earl Jones in“The Man,”Morgan Freeman in“Deep Impact,”Chris Rock in“Head of State”and Dennis Haysbert in the television show“24”helped us imagine Mr.Obama’s transformative breakthrough before it occurred. In a modest way, they also hastened its arrival.


Make no mistake: Hollywood’s historic refusal to embrace black artists and its insistence on racist caricatures and stereotypes linger to this day. Yet in the past 50 years? or, to be precise, in the 47 years since Mr. Obama was born? black men in the movies have traveled from the ghetto to the boardroom, from supporting roles in kitchens, liveries and social-problem movies to the rarefied summit of the Hollywood A-list.


Filmmakers as diverse as Charles Burnett, Spike Lee and John Singleton have helped tear away the veil across black life, as have performers who have fought and transcended stereotypes of savagery and servility to create new, richer, truer images of black life.


Along the way an archetype has emerged, that of the black male hero, who, like Will Smith in“Independence Day,”rises from the margins to save the day.


Modern African-American history has been, among other things, a series of firsts, and the first black movie star? the first to win an Oscar in a lead role and the first to see his name featured above the title in movie advertisements? was Sidney Poitier. For much of the 1960s Mr.Poitier bore the special burden of being the only one. He became a symbolic figure not only for other African- Americans but also for the nation as a whole: the Black Everyman.


His roles were concerned with addressing the thorny questions of African-American male authority. How does a black man assert leadership in a society that expects, and is often willing to enforce, his subservience? How does he reach some accommodation with the white world without sacrificing his integrity or his self-respect?


Confronting these challenges in movies like“In the Heat of the Night”and“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,”Mr.Poitier became an ambassador to white America and a benign emblem of black power .


In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles’s independent production“Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song”helped usher in a new kind of African- American male representation. This scrappy, low-budget triumph and its roving, carnal hero offered a rollicking alternative to the neutered black male of the sort that Mr.Poitier had often played.


Yet the hypersexualized black male also became fodder for white exploitation. In the years since, black male characters have often been divided along an axis of virtue and sin, forced to play cop or thug, saint or sociopath. It seems telling that in 2002 Denzel Washington became the second African-American man to win an Oscar for best actor playing a dirty Los Angeles police detective in the thriller“Training Day.”Mr. Washington brought a queasy erotic charge to his character’s violence that seemed intended to erase every last trace of his stoic, heroic, Poitieresque profile in films like“Philadelphia”and“Remember the Titans.”


The violence can be just as thrilling when it’s strictly verbal. Richard Pryor was among the first comedians to discover that a white audience could be won over by being provoked and insulted.


In 1984 Bill Cosby may have already been a father figure to younger black entertainers, but his career as America’s dad was just beginning, with the debut of“The Cosby Show.”The novelty of that series, at once revolutionary and profoundly conservative, lay in its insistence, week after week, that being black was another way of being normal.


The traditional composition of the Huxtable family, with the father as its benevolent, sometimes bumbling head, was part of the series’s strategy of decoupling blackness from social pathology.


“The Cosby Show”did not deny the existence of serious problems in black America? not least the problem of absent fathers? but the presence of Cliff Huxtable, in his own home and yours, suggested that the problems were not intractable.


Savior, counselor, patriarch, oracle, avenger, role model? compared with all this, being president looks like a pretty straightforward job.


Actors like Will Smith, top, who played the hero in“I Am Legend,”and Dennis Haysbert, the president on“24,”may have helped prepare Americans for the idea of a black leader. / BARRY WETCHER/WARNER BROTHERS PICTURES


ISABELLA VOSMIKOVA/FOX