The Rich History of Black Westerns Enters a New Era

The upcoming Netflix western “The Harder They Fall” chronicles a blood feud between the Nat Love Gang and the Rufus Buck Gang. As in many westerns, the dueling outlaws hold deep grudges. They live outside polite society. They shoot first and occasionally get around to asking questions.

They’re also all Black, a fact that goes unmentioned throughout the course of the film. “The Harder They Fall,” directed by Jeymes Samuel and starring an impressive lineup of stars, doesn’t use race as a means of social commentary, as many Black westerns have. Its radical gambit lies in reminding us there were Black outlaws and lawmen, even if they’ve often been given short shrift by the genre. The film makes its point through this brazen matter-of-factness.

“This is a western about Black people doing their own thing in their own space,” Samuel, a London native, said during a video call from Los Angeles. “It’s a western for us. We have been ignored from the history of the Old West and the cinematic presentation of what the Old West was.”

Samuel is correct in that what we think of as classic mainstream westerns tend to be white affairs. On the margins, however, the Black western is nearly as old as the genre itself. Race movies, or low-budget films made for Black audiences during the Jim Crow era, frequently featured western stories. Many of these starred Herb Jeffries, who often played a singing cowboy in the mold of Gene Autry. Some of the films were quite topical: In “Two Gun Man From Harlem” (1938), a Black man is framed by a white woman for the murder of her husband.

“These films are similar to the Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies, which were very popular,” said Rick Worland, a professor of film at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Basically, they were Black-cast westerns” — not unlike “The Harder They Fall.”