Collection of eleven original postcards written to Stepin Fetchit from fans in Alabama, 1937

N.p.: N.p., 1937. Collection of eleven vintage postcards written to Stepin Fetchit, all from various locations in Alabama, and all post marked 1937. The postcards in the collection are all autograph letters signed, in manuscript pencil and ink, from adult and child fans in Alabama, requesting a photograph from the star, with several favorably commenting on his performances with Shirley Temple, likely referring to Fetchit's roles in the Temple vehicles "Helldorado" (1934) and "Stand Up and Cheer!" (1934), and one opining that they had seen Fetchit in "many pictures and '50 Roads to Town' [1937, the year of the postcards on offer here] was the best one."

The first African American actor to become a millionaire, famed vaudevillian, comedian, and stage and screen actor, Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, best known by the stage name Stepin Fetchit, was also the first African American actor to receive a featured screen credit and have a successful film career in Hollywood. Starring in over 60 screen credits between 1925 and 1976, Fetchit was billed as the "laziest man in the world" during the height of his popularity in the 1930s. By the 1960s, in light of the ongoing Civil Rights movement, Fetchit's persona came under increasing criticism as an anachronistic depiction of negative stereotypes. In recent years Fetchit's character has undergone another re-evaluation, with African American critic Mel Watkins, arguing in his 2005 book, "Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry," that the character was not truly lazy or simple-minded, but instead a trickster, deliberately conning his white employers so they would do the work instead of him, a technique developed during American slavery as "putting on old massa."

3.25 x 5.5 inches. Near Fine overall.