Stepin Fetchit (Perry, Lincoln)

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Stepin Fetchit (Perry, Lincoln)

May 30, 1902
November 19, 1985

Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, named after four U.S. presidents, became a major star as Stepin Fetchit and the center of a stillongoing controversy. His supporters see him as a pioneering black comic actor who had a pathbreaking Hollywood career; his detractors see him as one who profited through his demeaning depictions of African Americans.

Perry was born and raised in Key West, Florida, and left home in 1914 after a stint at St. Joseph's College (a Catholic boarding school) to pursue a career in show business, joining the Royal American Shows plantation minstrel revues. With comic Ed Lee, he developed a vaudeville act entitled "Step 'n' Fetchit: Two Dancing Fools from Dixie." When Perry and Lee split, he adopted the name "Stepin Fetchit" as his own.

Stepin Fetchit spent years on the TOBA (Theater Owners Booking Association) vaudeville circuit, developing his stage persona as a lazy, dimwitted, slow, shuffling black servant, where he performed for primarily black audiences to great success. Stepin Fetchit came to Hollywood in the 1920s, and his first appearance in the 1927 film In Old Kentucky, playing his stereotyped black persona, earned him a positive mention in Variety. The next two films in which he appeared—Salute (1929) and Hearts of Dixie (1929), the first all-black film musical—brought Stepin Fetchit considerable press attention.

Stepin Fetchit went on to make more than forty films from 1927 to 1976, becoming one of the first black Hollywood stars. He was a favorite of director John Ford, with whom he made five films: Salute (1929), The World Moves On (1934), Judge Priest (1934), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), and The Sun Shines Bright (1954). In Steamboat Round the Bend and Judge Priest, Ford teamed him up with Will Rogers, with whom he had worked years earlier on the vaudeville circuit. The finale of Judge Priest consisted of Fetchit's leading a street parade in a top hat to the tune of "Dixie," and thereby stealing the show.

Nonetheless, Stepin Fetchit's main Hollywood career came to an end in the late 1930s. Black audiences were uncomfortable with the caricatures, and white audiences became tired of them. Stepin Fetchit left Hollywood in the early 1940s bankrupt, having reportedly squandered $1 million, and moved to Chicago, where he made occasional nightclub appearances. In the 1950s he reemerged, appearing in Bend of the River (1952) and The Sun Shines Bright (1954), but neither film succeeded in reviving his career. It was not until the late 1960s that he resurfaced as a member of Muhammad Ali's entourage and as the litigant in a 1970 $3 million lawsuit against CBS for, Stepin Fetchit claimed, "taking me, a Negro hero, and converting me into a villain," in a television show on black history. The suit was eventually dismissed.

In 1972 Stepin Fetchit was awarded a Special Image Award by the Hollywood chapter of the NAACP. He also received the Bethune-Cookman Award for Black Leader-ship (1972), and in 1978 he was presented with the Black Filmmakers' Hall of Fame Award. Stepin Fetchit died in Los Angeles in 1985.