Robert Ryan Revealed the 7 Stars Who Wanted Old Hollywood to Stay White

Robert Ryan was born in Chicago on November 11, 1909, won the intercollegiate boxing championship at Dartmouth, and served as a Marine Corps drill instructor in World War II before becoming one of Hollywood's most respected actors. He earned his only Oscar nomination playing an anti-Semitic killer in Crossfire (1947), terrorized a desert town in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and played a racist ex-con opposite Harry Belafonte in Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), a film produced by Belafonte's own company. Off camera, Ryan gave speeches for the NAACP and the ACLU, opposed the Hollywood blacklist, and co-founded a progressive school in 1951. He died of cancer in New York on July 11, 1973, at age 63. This video examines seven Golden Age stars through the lens of Robert Ryan's life and career: the man who played Hollywood's bigots on screen, and the stars whose own words and actions on the record show they wanted Hollywood to stay white. D.W. Griffith made the Ku Klux Klan the heroes of The Birth of a Nation. Chill Wills and Walter Brennan led George Wallace's California campaign in 1968. Robert Mitchum questioned the Holocaust in a 1983 Esquire interview. Howard Hughes wrote that integration was a wonderful idea for somebody else, somewhere else. Ronald Reagan called African UN delegates monkeys on a 1971 call with Richard Nixon. And John Wayne told Playboy in 1971 that he believed in white supremacy. Mentioned in this video: Robert Ryan, Crossfire, Bad Day at Black Rock, Odds Against Tomorrow, Flying Leathernecks, The Iceman Cometh, Harry Belafonte, HarBel Productions, Abraham Polonsky, John O. Killens, Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott, Hollywood Ten, RKO, Dartmouth, D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, Lillian Gish, NAACP, Woodrow Wilson, Ku Klux Klan, Stone Mountain, Directors Guild of America, Chill Wills, Avalon Boys, Giant, Francis the Talking Mule, The Alamo, Peter Ustinov, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Walter Brennan, The Westerner, Red River, Rio Bravo, The Real McCoys, John Schmitz, The Guns of Will Sonnett, Spencer Tracy, Ernest Borgnine, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, Esquire, Barry Rehfeld, Herbert Luft, That Championship Season, Howard Hughes, Hell's Angels, The Outlaw, Desert Inn, Robert Maheu, Michael Drosnin, Citizen Hughes, James Earl Jones, The Dating Game, Ronald Reagan, Screen Actors Guild, Rumford Fair Housing Act, Proposition 14, Pat Brown, Richard Nixon, Tim Naftali, The Atlantic, Patti Davis, John Wayne, Stagecoach, True Grit, The Searchers, Playboy, Richard Warren Lewis, Angela Davis, Motion Picture Alliance, Nicholas Ray, Ethan Wayne, John Lennon, Yoko Ono #RobertRyan, #GoldenAgeHollywood, #HollywoodSecrets 0:00 The Hollywood Stars Who Wanted to Keep It White 1:34 DW Griffith and the Birth of a Nation 5:18 Chill Wills: The Friendly Voice of Segregation 8:31 Walter Brennan: The Lovable Grandpa's Secret 12:37 Robert Mitchum: The Cool Tough Guy's Slurs 23:27 John Wayne: The Duke's White Supremacy Admission