Integrating Our Gang’s Schools

The Hal Roach Studio’s Our Gang series was notable from the beginning in showing black and white kids playing together on a mostly equal basis.

However, they didn’t go to school with each other—not for years.

Many American school systems were segregated in the early 1920s, either by law or (as in Los Angeles) by a combination of real-estate covenants and administrative moves that shuttled most black, Mexican, and Asian kids into certain schools.

At first the Hal Roach Studio’s school for its young actors replicated that situation, though it’s not clear if that was ever a goal. Ernie Morrison had been under contract for years when the series started, and he had a private tutor. Judging by photos like the one above from 1923, that tutor was a black woman.

In September 1922, having become responsible for educating more kids, Hal Roach hired Fern Carter (1893–1961) to run a school within the studio. She’s the woman standing in this publicity photo next to director Robert McGowan. She remained the teacher for the series’ main cast for more than twenty years.

Ernie Morrison continued to study with his tutor, however. It’s possible that race had no bearing on that arrangement. He and his father might have preferred that individual attention. It’s also quite conceivable that race was a factor. The Morrisons might have wanted to preserve that woman’s job, for instance, while the studio or other kids’ parents couldn’t imagine hiring her to teach the whole group. Or segregated schooling might simply have seemed like the norm. 

In those same early years, almost all of the Our Gang shorts were about children outside of school. Titles like “Saturday Morning,” “July Days,” and “Sunday Calm” reflect the focus on kids having free time to get into trouble. Physical comedy worked better when the cast wasn’t stuck to their desks.

Every so often, however, a movie showed the gang in a classroom. “Boys to Board” (1923) was set at a small boarding school, orphans preferred. “Lodge Night” (1923) showed little Joe Cobb as the new kid in a one-room school before shifting to other locations. Eventually all of “Commencement Day” (1924) took place in and around such a school.

And in all three of those movies, Ernie Morrison’s character isn’t in class with the white kids. He—and his little sibling Farina—still play with the white boys. In “Lodge Night” all the boys are part of a club spoofing the KKK. In “Commencement Day” Ernie has set up a merry-go-round near the school, charging kids some of their lunch for a ride.

In “Boys to Board” Ernie runs a delivery service, bringing Joe to the boarding school. That puts him in the position to rescue the white boys, so his outsider status actually makes him a hero. But it also appears that Ernie’s character doesn’t go to school at all.

As a result, those movies didn’t challenge audiences of the time with the sight of black and white kids in a classroom together. For some Americans, of course, that would have seemed normal, or at least unremarkable. But other white viewers might have objected.

During those years, Allen “Sunny” Hoskins was too young to go to school, and so was his character Farina. But eventually he grew up. In “Seeing the World” (1927), Farina is conspicuous among the students under teacher James Finlayson.

From then on, whenever audiences saw Our Gang in a classroom, that school was integrated. Starting in the early 1930s, more stories took place in school, and Farina, Stymie, Buckwheat, and other black kids (one even played by Dorothy Dandridge) were always on an equal basis with the white kids.

Likewise, behind the scenes Sunny Hoskins and his successors attended Fern Carter’s classes alongside his white cast mates. In fact, she described Sunny as her brightest student. And he, like most of the Our Gang alumni, recalled her fondly.

Falling for Farina

As related back here, Hal Roach and the makers of the Our Gang comedies modeled the character of Farina, played by Allen “Sunny” Hoskins, on the pickaninny stereotype.

Gloria Lee writes in Our Gang: A Racial History of the Little Rascals:

His hair was tied in pigtails and white ribbons. He ate watermelons, fell into vats of flour, and smoked a corncob pipe. He wore the clownlike, oversized shoes of a minstrel. . . .

Farina became the vehicle of all the most hackneyed and racist sight gags. He appeared in whiteface while his white friends appeared in blackface. When he got the measles, white spots were painted on his face instead of black ones. He clutched voodoo amulets and was terrified of ghosts. He was called “Shine” while Mickey was called “Freckles” or “Speck” and Joe Cobb was called “Fatty.”

But something strange started to happen. Despite his genesis in the flattest of stereotypes, Farina started to become—how else to put it?—human. He went through the minstrel motions, but even the narrowness of his scripted roles couldn’t suppress his outsized personality. The public fell in love with him.

Just as rival studios needed an equivalent of Ernie Morrison in their kid gangs, many also had a younger black child in this stereotypical form. In the McDougall Alley Kids and Buster Brown series that counterpart was a girl named “Oatmeal,” played by Hannah Washington.

One manifestation of public interest the character, and of recognizing that a real child played the role, was the demand to know if Farina was a boy or a girl. For a while the movies were ambiguous, as were newspaper stories. Roach milked the question, playing coy in press releases.

Eventually, however, the studio acknowledged that “Sunny” Hoskins and the character of Farina were little boys. The costume changed to have pants, but it retained a couple of the pickaninny traits. Sunny wore one pair of shoes inside another because Farina had flat oversized feet. He kept his hair long enough for pigtails for years. Farina continued to suffer a disproportionate amount of mess and rough treatment.

From 1925 to 1931 Farina was the series’ main black character. In several films he was clearly the lead: “Your Own Back Yard,” “One Wild Ride” (1925), “Monkey Business” (1926), “Love My Dog,” “Chicken Feed” (1927), “Spook-Spoofing,” “The Smile Wins” (1928), “Election Day,” “Fast Freight” (1929). In some movies Sunny’s sister Jannie played Farina’s little sister, often called Mango.

Sunny made the transition to talkies while some other Our Gang kids struggled. Lee notes that one issue in that shift was that he’d been born in Boston and grown up in Los Angeles, so he didn’t speak in the broad “Southern” dialect the intertitles had assigned to Farina. It looks like he figured out how to deliver those lines for the microphones not quite as broadly but still with enough rural character to please the public.

Ultimately, Sunny Hoskins outlasted a second generation of fellow players. His seniority in the series matched his line deliveries, which projected a long-suffering personality. Having started as a toddler, he ended up appearing in more Our Gang movies than any other actor.

This series of postings started by noting the roots of the Farina persona in the character of Topsy in stage productions and parodies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Farina actually played Topsy in the 1926 short “Uncle Tom’s Uncle,” when the gang put on their own version of the show. Pudgy Joe Cobb portrayed the title character in blackface, his mom repeatedly telling him to wash his face and do his chores. That reflected the ongoing influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel on American culture.

Who Could Replace “Sunshine Sammy”?

Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison was the Hal Roach Studio’s first child star and the highest-paid of the original Our Gang cast. All the more remarkable since Ernie was a black kid in 1920s America.

After a couple of years of those movies being increasingly successful, Ernie’s father asked for a raise. Hal Roach didn’t renew the Morrisons’ contract.

In early 1924, Ernie went off to make more money in vaudeville, though he returned that summer to complete “Fast Company,” a short started the previous year but delayed by the director’s injury.

Roach’s competitors appear to have seen Ernie as a key to the appeal of Our Gang. Many of the rival series that sprang up in this period also featured an African-American boy of the same age.

For example, James Berry played “Bubbles” in some of the Century Kids films—made up in one with white lipstick to look like a minstrel-show caricature. His brother Ananias appeared in the rival McDougall Alley Kids shorts. The Mickey Maguire series featured Jimmy Robinson as “Hambone Johnson,” the hero’s closest friend.

Roach himself recognized Ernie Morrison’s value by trying to replace him. Later in 1924 “The Sun Down Limited” introduced Flemon Miller as “Powder-Puff.” I can’t help but think there was some knowing irony in how that character appeared with the intertitle, “He wanted to join the ‘Gang’—But the quota was exhausted.” Flemon lasted for only one more film, “Every Man for Himself.”

The studio then hired Eugene Jackson from the competing Reg’lar Kids series, at first as “Snowball.” Roach renamed him “Pineapple” after someone combed his hair so it stood up like pineapple leaves—i.e., he was made to look like a joke. Like Ernie Morrison, “Pineapple” was usually older brother to “Farina.” Gene made six shorts from the middle of 1924 to the start of 1925 and went on to a long show-biz career.

After letting Gene Jackson go, the studio’s next Our Gang film was “Official Officers.” Its gang included a black boy played by Todd Roark, who had won a Los Angeles Evening Express Baby Contest with the prize of one week’s work in an Our Gang movie for $100. Todd didn’t stand out, but it’s interesting that the studio brought him on as a gang member, not an incidental extra.

In this same period, George “Sonny Boy” Warde played Sing Joy, a Chinese boy in the gang, over nine shorts. Sonny Boy’s own ancestry was Japanese and French, though there are questions even about that; later he adopted the stage name Luis Cordova before shifting back to Sonny Loy. The point is that the Hal Roach Studio appears to have been trying to present Our Gang as racially inclusive, even while presenting the non-white kids in stereotypical forms.

Meanwhile, every one of those mid-1920s shorts included Allen “Sunny” Hoskins as “Farina,” then four and five years old. In a couple of those movies he was the only black kid. And it turned out he was Ernie Morrison’s replacement all along.

From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Our Gang

As influential as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was on ante-bellum American culture and politics, stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel continued to shape popular culture for the next century.

In the theater, both straight and parodic, the novel’s black characters turned into racist caricatures. The Uncle Tom of the novel resists cruelty, dispenses moral wisdom, and becomes a martyr. In plays for post-Civil War white audiences and in minstrel-show offshoots, that character became old, feeble, and subservient.

The novel also included a young black girl named Topsy. In those dramatic adaptations, and especially in minstrelsy, Topsy became a comic grotesque, the prototype of the racist caricature of a pickaninny. In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Robin Bernstein writes:

The pickaninny was an imagined, subhuman black juvenile [with…] dark or sometimes jet-black skin, exaggerated eyes and mouth, the action of gorging (especially on watermelon), and the state of being threatened or attacked by animals (especially alligators, geese, dogs, pigs, or tigers). Pickaninnies often wear ragged clothes (which suggest parental neglect) and are sometimes partially or fully naked. . . . the figure is always juvenile, always of color, and always resistant if not immune to pain.

The shadow of the theatrical Uncle Tom’s Cabin falls on Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies—despite those movies being relatively progressive in showing black and white children playing together.

Racial inclusion was part of Roach’s plan for the movies from the start. In 1921 he built a short movie around one of his studio’s most popular supporting players, nine-year-old Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison. That movie was called “The Pickaninny” even though Ernie didn’t conform to that stereotype in his looks or persona. It didn’t do well enough for the distributor to want a series, perhaps because of resistance from Southern cinemas.

Roach then assembled a team of kids around Morrison, calling them his “Rascals.” The industry instead took the title of the first release, “Our Gang,” as the name of the series. From the start in 1922, those movies featured a bunch of white kids plus Ernie—usually from a poorer family, but always welcomed as a playmate and sometimes as a leader. At times his character would be called something cliché like “Booker T.,” but more often he was just “Ernie,” like the other actors using their own names.

Later in the spring of 1922, the Our Gang series brought on Allen “Sunny” Hoskins, less than two years old. His character, named “Farina,” was designed to match the pickaninny type: pigtails, shapeless sack dress, and oversized flat shoes. For months the movies presented Farina as Ernie’s baby sister, thus closer to Topsy.

The white filmmakers gave Farina other traits based on racist stereotypes. In “Giants vs. Yanks” (1923) toddler Farina carries a straight razor, as so many black men supposedly did, according to the cliché of the time. “One Wild Ride” (1925) ends with Farina literally buried in watermelons. The intertitles rendered his lines in a broad dialect with more malapropisms than the other gang members. 

Most troubling, there’s a pattern of Farina enduring more physical punishment and mess than the other kids, reflecting the notion that pickaninnies didn’t feel as much pain. Of course these are slapstick comedies, so the whole cast fell about, but “Sunny” Hoskins went through more than others.

The Our Gang movies never made a direct connection between Farina and Topsy, but they didn’t have to. Minstrel-show stereotypes were pervasive in early-20th-century American culture. In “The Big Show!” (1923), the gang acts out famous movies, several of the kids impersonating older movie stars of the day. What role was there for Ernie Morrison? He played Uncle Tom.