Sounder Lobby Card 2 (1972)

Family relationships are prevalent within Sounder. The film shows white supremacy as having explicit social and economic consequences for the Morgan family. This lobby card shows David Lee giving his father the cake baked by his mother. David is allowed to visit Nathan Lee in jail because he is male and he becomes a liaison between the gendered oppression of his mother and the racial oppression that led to his father’s imprisonment. 

 White supremacy is elusive but omnipresent for the Morgans. Ed Guerrero argues that “Hollywood cannot construct a permanent seamless image of white superiority the screen, any more than the film industry can completely control or eradicate the oppositional or emergent ideological impulses of African Americans or make black people vanish from the historical scene” (Guerrero 6). When the matriarch of the family, Rebecca Morgan, is prohibited from visiting Nathan in jail, she goes to the store in order to purchase ingredients to bake Nathan a cake. In this scene, the store owner and landowner, Mr. Perkins, asserts himself as a man with power over Rebecca and influence in the community. He infantilizes her, undermining her as a mother and unveiling the lack of agency she has within her own family. However, Mr. Perkins performance of white supremacy is not “seamless,” as Guerrero states, and could be misinterpreted as a man demanding moral behavior from employees. The actions of each character are dictated by white supremacist force that are not explicit within the image. Yet, the family remains strong and is able to navigate their social context together; they are unyielding within the historical setting of the Jim Crow South.  

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. Print.