Despite efforts to make the genre more inclusive, the western remains haunted by the twin maladies of colonialism and white supremacy. Especially in the first half of the roughly 130 years that Americans have been going to the movies, many westerns reduced the complexities of 19th-century life to a conflict between Native Americans—often depicted as primitive and played by European actors—and white characters determined to “tame” the frontier.
“The real wild, wild West was super diverse,” Van Peebles says. “We were all there.”
Research suggests that about one in four ranch workers in the antebellum Southwest was Black. Even the term “cowboy” grew out of the racist practice of addressing Black men as “boy”; white laborers on ranches were typically called cowhands.
Westerns featuring predominantly Black casts were made during the 1930s, when movie theaters in many markets remained segregated. These films frequently featured actors Herb Jeffries and Spencer Williams Jr. For the most part, these 1930s westerns depicted at least their principal Black characters with dignity, though reductive comic stereotypes were present, too. Curiously, in the same way that many Black superheroes in later decades have the word “Black” in their names (think Black Panther and Black Lightning), these early Black westerns were frequently coded with the word “Harlem,” regardless of their setting: Between 1937 and 1939, Jeffries and Williams co-starred in Harlem on the Prairie, The Two-Gun Man From Harlem and Harlem Rides the Range.
It took another three decades for a Black artist to take the reins of a western. He only got the opportunity because he was one of the biggest stars in the world—and because he still had something to prove. Sidney Poitier had made history with 1963’s Lilies of the Field, becoming the first Black performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. By 1967, Poitier’s star had risen so high that critics began to accuse him of being too conciliatory and demure in his approach to racial politics. The actor was particularly wounded by a New York Times op-ed written by Black playwright Clifford Mason, who asked, “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?” Poitier himself grew frustrated that he was so often cast as a paragon of virtue, devoid of human foibles or desires.
In the early 1970s, singer Harry Belafonte, who was deeply involved in the civil rights movement, showed his longtime friend Poitier the script for Buck and the Preacher, a movie set just after the Civil War. The two artists agreed that the project would offer them an opportunity to play morally complex characters—and a platform from which to advocate for racial justice through entertainment.