![]() Strikingly, in these early years African Americans often appeared on the screen in unmediated, unedited form and therefore devoid of some of the worst stereotypes with which they had been maligned by decades of southern novels, advertising logos, and popular songs. Movies had played the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, and in the following year opened at Koster and Bial's music hall in New York. ![]() Movies, in their "primitive" days, when techniques of cutting and editing as a means of conveying a narrative had not yet been perfected, became the first medium of mass communications for the poor, teeming populations that filled northeastern cities toward the end of the nineteenth century. ![]() Their Great Migration in turn coincided with a similar migration from Europe. Black Americans came to cities in flight from the southern peonage that had replaced the institution of slavery after the Civil War. Motion pictures and large numbers of African Americans arrived in American cities simultaneously in the late nineteenth century. ![]()
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