A Chocolate Cowboy (originally titled Mine Your Business!) is a silent short film released in 1927. The film starred white actor Fred Parker in blackface as a character named Rastus. There is nothing exceptional–or good for that matter–about A Chocolate Cowboy. The one interesting thing about the film is that the poster used to promote the film does not make it clear that the lead character is a blackface minstrel, which is uncommon for the time. It almost seems like the film’s distributor was intentionally trying to make it look like a race film with an all-Black cast. Blackface was very common during the silent film era, and producers made no attempts to hide the fact that a movie starred white actors in blackface. I’ll post more about blackface in film later.
To find out more about more about blackface in film, check out my new book, Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies, coming from Ten Spreed Press on March 24, 2026. You can pre-order the book here.
