The purpose of this research is to understand the ways in which social justice movements such as the Civil Rights Movement and Black Panther Party Movement influenced the depictions of African-American women in American cinema by examining the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s. By examining the themes of American films starring African-American women from the 1930s throughout the 1970s, I was able to find that the social justice movements of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party Movement heavily influenced the images shown on screen. From a realistic depiction of an African-American family without the use of stereotypes such as the Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire in A Raisin in the Sun to an image of an African-American woman with a large afro, fighting crime in urban centers in the United States in Coffy, American social movements heavily influenced the normalized portrayals of African-American women in American society.
