Ernest Whitman breaks racist stereotypes in 1940, playing a train porter/lawyer!

Описание: In this scene from the 1940 film “Third Finger, Left Hand,” Melvyn Douglas discovers that a train porter, Ernest Whitman, has been studying law at night for 4 years. He hires Whitman to pretend he’s his lawyer, for a negotiation that Douglas is conducting with another lawyer, Lee Bowman.

This is one of my favorite scenes in any 1940s film. Whitman displays his fluency with legal jargon and his knowledge of common law, effortlessly flustering the other lawyer, who has immediately accepted that the train porter is a lawyer, and who never questions Whitman’s obvious competence in that role. Meanwhile Whitman also flawlessly pivots between his role as counsel to Douglas and his porter duties. It’s clear that Whitman is a man of exceptional intellect who absurdly remains a porter only due to discrimination.

Screenwriter Lionel Houser even made sure to show Melvyn Douglas pay Ernest Whitman for his services as an attorney, in a later scene. Black characters in majority-white films of this era were rarely given scenes with this level of dignity, much less such an opportunity to display intellectual excellence!

Ernest Whitman was also an ordained minister! You can read more about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_...

I’m sharing this scene for educational purposes. I do not own the copyright.

I will add captions as soon as I’m able. (My own vision problems prevent me from doing so right now, unfortunately.)