The African American Science Fiction Character in Literature, Television, and Film

Ms. Sands also performed with Sidney Poitier in the 1960 film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. Next, the show would also present a little known but still active performer in TV and film, Robert Doqui, who in The Outer Limits episode "The Invisible Enemy," plays a doomed astronaut named Frank on a perilous mission to the planet Mars; consequently, audiences today may recognize Doqui as the beleaguered police sergeant in the RoboCop motion pictures. Actor-turned-Hollywood-director, Ivan Dixon, best known to the mid-to-late 1960s TV audiences as a cohort of Bob Crane’s in Hogans’ Heroes, also appeared as one of four human benefactors of alien brain cells in the classic 1963 Outer Limits two-episode "The Inheritors." He also made an appearance as a preacher on The Twilight Zone. Even the late Gregory Morris, best known the character Barney, a member of the IMF on the spy/quasi-SF series Mission Impossible, made an early appearance as an Army sergeant on The Twilight Zone. With its stories of wonder of the human spirit and futurist prediction, Star Trek is itself a sophisticated American mythology enterprising its focus on humans (and aliens) with a sense of hope, especially for African Americans since one of its later incarnations, Deep Space Nine, showcases a strong Black character in Ben Sisko, portrayed by actor-director Avery Brooks of Hawk fame, who not only a Starfleet captain but is also a single parent to boot! Prior to the Sisko character, Geordie La Forge, played by Roots star Levar Burton—who is a director of a few Star Trek shows and is also host of the Emmy-winning children’s TV program Reading Rainbow—won audiences as the blind chief engineer of the The Next Generations’ 24th century starship Enterprise.

In film, many Black characters have also been emerging in SF. Very early in his career, African American actor Harry Belafonte plays one earth’s last survivors after a nuclear holocaust in the film The World, the Flesh, and the Devil in 1959, and so too does actor-dancer and Roots star Ben Vereem in the movie post-apocalyptic film Gas-s-s-s! by director Roger Corman in 1970. Next, Paul Winfield portrays an Army officer, who unfortunately meets a grisly fate with giant mutated man-eating cockroaches in Damnation Alley, 1977, also starring George Peppard of Banacek and The A-Team fame. It is interesting here to note Winfield’s quips about the fact that since he has been killed off in many SF/Fantasy films that he could create one entire film devoted to them including Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan! Actor Yaphet Kotto makes his presence known as one of the doomed astronauts in the 1979 motion picture Alien. In this film he is not killed off until near the film’s climax. While Belafonte’s presence is somewhat groundbreaking in the genre for its time, the other characters portrayed by the aforementioned actors are never treated with enough substance and prestige as their white counterparts nor do they stay around long enough for viewers to appreciate them. Nevertheless, in later SF films, the Black character is treated with a little more dignity and is given more breadth and depth of character. Such is the example of actor Joe Morton’s portrayal of a an alien in The Brother from Another Planet, which functions as a modern allegory, depicting the tale of a mute interstellar fugitive, who happens to be Black and winds up in the urban confines of Harlem, NY. For SF tropes, his alienness is ironically overt in that, although he has the appearance of an African American male, he has a removable eye and clawed three—toed feet. He is the "clever innocent . . . a healer . . .[and] he can fix machines" and director John Sayles conveys the message of the Black man as other, but craftily turns this notion on its ear in that the Brother character is the "alien among the alienated."

NOTES

1. Sturgeon, Theodore. More Than Human. New York: Ballantine, 1953.
2. Quoted in The Turbulent Years: The 1960s. Time-Life, 2000.
3. Madsen, Dan. "Nichelle Nichols: Where No Woman Has Gone Before." Star Trek Communicator. April/May 1998: 16 – 20.
4. "Catching Up with Nichelle Nichols," Star Trek: The Magazine, November 2002, 29.
5. "Brother From Another Planet, The" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1995, 163.
6. Ibid.