Comrades, We’ve Been Screwed!

One day in the summer of 1932, families sunbathing on a beach in Odessa, a southern port city of the Soviet Union, saw a sight new to them. Sprinting along the sand was “a dark amazon pursued by two or three of the darkest tallest and most giraffe-like males…all naked as birds and as frolicsome as Virginia hounds, diving like porpoises into the surf,” wrote an eyewitness, the American poet Langston Hughes.

These young Black Americans and Hughes were part of a group of 22 touring the Black Sea coast as guests of the German-Soviet film studio Meschrabpom. They were there to shoot a movie about Black American history that would use nearby locations as stand-ins for American cotton fields. The visitors held hopes that their movie, a production titled Black and White, would rank as a cinematic landmark and strike a blow against American racism.