African-Americans make it big in entertainment

Throughout the entertainment industry, there has been much discrimination for African-Americans to play strong roles in well known movies. As soon as "Hollywood's Golden Era" (1930's-1940's) came around, television shows started having "mammies" (nickname for black maids for mostly white families). Not too long after, movies with most of the cast being African-American began airing. In one of the articles called "The Studios Have It All Wrong" by Film Director Spike Lee, he stated, "...I rarely see anybody that looks like me. That's the case throughout the industry...". He said this refering to many of the office meetings that the movie producers had.

Another quote that stood out to me from Lee was "There are some black men who can push a project onto the screen: Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Wesley Snipes and Samuel Jackson all have varying degrees of power." All of these actors are talented but my favorite one that he stated was Will Smith. I have always been a huge fan of Will Smith and not just because he's just a good actor, but he can pull off any type of role extremely well, whether it's comedy from "Hitch" or a serious drama like "Pursuit of Happiness". He's probably one of the most recognized black actors, or just any actors in general, in today's entertainment industry.



Will became very well known when the comedy series "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" started in 1990 and continued through until 1996. After his huge popularity with Fresh Prince, he made many blockbuster films even to this day. A fascinating and amazing fact is that Will is the only actor in history to have eight consecutive films to gross over $100 million in the domestic box office. Lee also mentioned in his article that many black films haven't been recognized enough at award shows and that they seem to show the same black celebrities that host/perform at them. Well we really have come a long way since discrimination issues began and actors as talented as Will Smith prove that. It's definetely not a walk in the park to be standing where Will is, but looking back at everything that he's accomplised, we as a society have changed majorly when it comes to great success among diversity.