Al Jolson was probably America's foremost 'anti-racist' entertainer

Jolson's blackface was clearly NOT any kind of stereotyping as black music was not commonly known about back then . He actually opened the curtain to black music by intentionally putting it on stage in front of his all-white audiences to introduce them to a new kind of music he learned about and loved performing: jazz, ragtime, blues, soul, etc. - mostly originating in the black community.

He didn't need to perform in blackface - in fact most of his movie roles were actually not in blackface. There is nothing in The Jazz Singer story that required a blackface performer, and only a few of his songs in the movie were even performed in blackface. In some of his other movies he actually played a singing hobo and a singing convict behind bars, both without blackface.

As a Jewish immigrant the last thing he would do would be to stereotype another minority group, especially blacks, whose music he was putting on a pedestal. As America's highest-paid entertainer at that time, he used his fame and fortune to thumb his nose at our early American heavily racist culture. Consider that the KKK "at its peak in the early 1920s, ... included about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men." (Wikipedia) D.W. Griffith gave us Birth of a Nation (which glorified white supremism and the KKK) - Jolson responded with The Jazz Singer. And still some of us call him "racist?" Amazing!

You can watch some Jolson movie clips at the link below. You'll see that he never makes fun of or puts down black entertainers - he does the exact opposite - he makes them bigger than life. If we accuse him of anything, we should accuse him of having too much "chutzpa," with his blackface more an act of provocative and defiant "anti-racism." If not for his notoriety, we might have had an early version of Mississippi Burning instead of The Jazz Singer.

http://www.motionbox.com/filings?folder_id=4432541