On last Thursday evening, the Wake County Public Library hosted a thought-provoking presentation that honored the complex journeys of early African American actresses in Hollywood.
The presentation was delivered by Dr. Charlene Regester, a renowned scholar and associate professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With decades of research devoted to Black visibility in early film, Dr. Regester illuminated the ways in which Black women on screen struggled against—and sometimes strategically subverted—the racialized roles they were given.
Dr. Regester, who also serves as interim director of UNC’s Institute for African American Research, has long been a fixture in the world of Black film scholarship. She was among the first students to use the Walter Royal Davis Library at UNC Chapel Hill when it opened in 1984, where she reviewed over 30,000 articles from Black newspapers on microfilm…