Blaxploitation films were a phenomenon of the 1970s. Low-budget action movies aimed at African American audiences, blaxploitation films enjoyed great financial success for several years. Some blaxploitation pictures, such as Shaft and Superfly launched music and fashion trends as well. Eventually the controversy surrounding these movies brought an end to the genre, but not before nearly one hundred blaxploitation films had been released.

Even during the silent movie period, producers had been making films with all-black casts. An African American entrepreneur named William Foster released a series of all-black comedy films beginning in 1910. Oscar Micheaux produced, wrote, and directed nearly forty films between 1919 and 1948. Hundreds of "black only" theaters existed in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s, and there were low-budget African American films of all genres: musicals, westerns, comedies, horror films, and so forth. The market for these black films started to...