1932 Des Moines, Iowa

Marcus R. McCraven

1923

Des Moines, Iowa

Interviewed on February 17, 2021

by Alexandra McCraven

You know I can’t remember the name of the first movie I saw but I’m certain it was a western, a cowboy movie. Those were the only movies I watched back then. I was probably around eight or nine years old when my mother first took me to a theater in Des Moines [Iowa]. So, it must have been either 1931 or 1932 at the time. I don’t recall much about the theater and I don’t remember the name but you knew it was a theater right away. It had all the new movies on the front, pictures of movie stars, and a lobby where they sold candy and popcorn. It looked very much like what they look like now I imagine, but I haven’t been to a movie in a very long time.

I think we walked to the theater on a Saturday afternoon when my mother was off from work. She worked as a maid. I went with friends the second time but I can’t remember their names.  We didn’t live too far from the theater, maybe a couple of miles from the shopping center in town where the theater was located. When we arrived we were allowed to go through the same entrance as the other families but we had to sit in the balcony while the white people sat on the first floor. It didn’t bother me at the time because most places were segregated. If you wanted to go to the movies, or anywhere really, that’s just what you had to do. I don’t even remember a single person refusing to sit in the balcony. There were a lot of children at the theater and we ordered popcorn in the lobby. I don’t think we had anything to drink but I remember the popcorn.

I went to see the movie because I wanted to see Tom Mix. I idolized him as a kid. We all did. I thought all the lead cowboys, like Tom Mix and Ken Maynard, were heroes. They were stars. No matter the movie, they always came out as the winner. We even used to act out the roles on the street outside my house. I had a holster that I would wear around my waist and even a plastic gun. We wanted to be just like them. We wanted to be men and heroes too.

I think Tom Mix was framed for something by another character in the movie and goes off to get revenge. The movie had a lot of shooting. Shoot ‘em ups. That’s what we used to call them. Shoot ‘em ups. Everybody had pistols. What you learned was how to handle a pistol and we practiced how fast we could draw them. All the main characters were always very fast with their pistols so if you wanted to be like them, you had to learn how to draw your pistol as quickly as possible. Tom Mix always had on his boots, a tall hat, and a handkerchief around his neck.

These movies were really popular because everybody loved cowboys. They had a whole series of movies about these cowboys but I don’t think they would be very popular today. They were racist and I didn’t like them very much after I got older. I saw these movies as offensive and they almost always involved killing Native Americans, killing people. I didn’t believe in that at all so I didn’t take any of my children to see them.

I never gave the female characters much thought but they had minor roles, often as the wife or love interest of the main character. I can’t remember there being any Black women at all. They didn’t have many Black people in these films, if any. And if they did include us it was always as minor characters or some demeaning role that only perpetuated negative stereotypes about us. When I was young, we didn’t have any Black heroes or Black movie stars. I was an adult when I first saw a Black lead and that was a big deal to me. But at that point in time, and at age nine, I really loved those cowboy movies.