Carlton Moss
*Carlton Moss was born on this date in 1909. He was a Black screenwriter, actor, and film director.
From Newark, New Jersey, he was the son of Frederick Douglas and Sarah Vincent Moss. Moss grew up in both North Carolina and Newark. He attended Morgan State University, where he formed an acting troupe called "Toward a Black Theater" that made a tour of Black campuses before hitting New York, where Moss was soon in the thick of the Harlem Renaissance.
In 1936 he was one of a trio of African American theatre artists who led the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project after the departure of John Houseman. Houseman recommended Moss for the position, later describing him as "skillful, progressive, educated and sensitive to every changing breeze of Harlem opinion." Moss directed a successful production of The Show-Off (1937), its first presentation under the new leadership, at the Lafayette Theatre.
Moss produced the documentary Frederick Douglass: The House on Cedar Hill. Later he wrote The Negro Soldier script for a 1944 propaganda film encouraging racial harmony among World War II soldiers and specifically encouraging Black men to enlist. After this film, he became an essential figure in the independent cinema of African Americans. In 1944, Moss went to Europe to make the film Teamwork, a documentary about the work of a Black quartermaster unit known as "The Red Ball Express."
He had the chance to work with Elia Kazan on Pinky but left the project, as he felt it was demeaning to Blacks. After he had settled in West Hollywood, he was a sharp critic of black-exploitation films and even dismissed one of Bill Cosby's successful TV series as harmless pap. He later taught as a guest lecturer at Fisk University and the University of California at Irvine in the Comparative Culture Program and made educational films about African-American history. Carlton Moss died on August 10, 1997.
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