Thomas Cripps (film historian)

Thomas Cripps ( - September 17, 2018) was an emeritus professor at Morgan State University who wrote and lectured about the history of African American cinema. He wrote the documentary film Black Shadows on the Silver Screen. His book Slow Fade to Black has been viewed as groundbreaking and poet Thomas Sayers Ellis penned a poem by the same name, which he dedicated to Cripps.

He was born in Baltimore and graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1950.

He coordinated of the University Television Project at Morgan State University, helping produce some 40 programs on African-American life and culture. He died on his 86th birthday.

Bibliography

• Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (1977)
• Black Film as Genre
• Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era
• "The Negro Reaction to ‘The Birth of a Nation’", an essay that won the 1962 George P. Hammond Prize
• "Movies, Race and World War II", an essay that won the 1982 Charles Thompson Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Archives of the United States
• "The Lily White Republicans: The Party, the Negro, and the South in the Age of Booker T. Washington", his dissertation