Stepin Fetchit, Hollywood's First Black Film Star [8min]

Although he never won an Oscar, Lincoln Perry was America's first black movie star. But for that distinction, Perry paid a heavy price -- he is best known as the character of Stepin Fetchit, a befuddled, mumbling, shiftless fool. Seen through a modern lens, Perry's"laziest man in the world" character can be painfully racist. Perry, a veteran of the vaudeville"Chitlin Circuit," got his break in Hollywood in 1927 when he was cast in the silent film In Old Kentucky. According to film historian Mel Watkins, Perry created the character to make himself stand out from other actors vying for the role."He acted as though he didn't know where he was, and he immediately got the attention of the producers and the director of the film," says Watkins, author of the biography Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry. Watkins says that like most Americans, he thought of Stepin Fetchit as a symbol of the negative side of the African-American experience. But in his research, he discovered Perry to be very different from his Fetchit character."This is an amazingly complex man. Intelligent -- and he was anything but what people take him to be." Visit website for extended story, book excerpt and photos. Roy Hurst reports.