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This article is part of<\/em> Spielberg Week<\/em><\/a>, Slate\u2019s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg.<\/em><\/p>\n There is a moment in The Color Purple<\/em>\u2014Steven Spielberg\u2019s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker\u2019s novel detailing decades of a young Black woman\u2019s harrowing life in the Jim Crow South\u2014that has always felt like magic to me. <\/strong>It is the moment when Shug Avery (actress Margaret Avery) reveals that she wrote a song for the protagonist, Celie (Whoopi Goldberg), titled \u201cMiss Celie\u2019s Blues.\u201d Before Shug can even get any words out, Celie covers her mouth with the back of her hand to hide a pure, bashful smile. The refrain in the story up until this point, echoed by a series of men who have abused Celie in myriad ways, is that Celie is ugly. Her beauty, however, can be seen clearly in Goldberg\u2019s eyes, which remain both observant and, in moments of surprise, as wide as the endless expanses her character would traverse to reunite with her long-lost sister, Nettie. Every time I watch the film, this strikes me as the first time the viewer witnesses a real smile from adult Celie\u2014an indication she will blossom by the time the end credits roll.<\/p>\n \n Spike Lee declared that all of the Black men in the film were \u201cjust one-dimensional\u00a0<\/span>animals.\u201d<\/b>\n<\/p>\n This feat should be no surprise, given that wonder and enchantment are Spielberg\u2019s stock-in-trade. But when The Color Purple<\/em> was originally released, the discussion around it wasn\u2019t one of appreciating the film\u2019s Spielbergian magic. Instead, The Color Purple<\/em> sparked a firestorm, <\/em>prompting boycotts and a backlash that questioned many things: Walker\u2019s talents, whether or not white creators should be able to tell Black stories, and, above all, what constitutes appropriate Black media representation. The film and its surrounding controversy became one of the few stains on Spielberg\u2019s largely sparkling half-century career. Yet, in the 40-plus years since The Color Purple<\/em> inspired picket lines<\/a>, it has become a Black classic\u2014a position it should undoubtedly continue to occupy. Rather than being a blemish on Spielberg\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9, The Color Purple <\/em>deserves to be remembered as one of his most intriguing, and daring, success stories.<\/p>\n Upon its release, The Color Purple<\/em> was lambasted, protested, and cast off by many Black men. Organizations such as the Coalition Against Black Exploitation and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decried the film for what they believed was an uncharacteristic and harmful one-note depiction of Black men as needlessly and endlessly violent, as embodied above all by Danny Glover\u2019s character Mister. Columnist and television host Tony Brown went on The<\/em> Phil Donahue Show<\/em> and called the film<\/a> \u201cthe most racist depiction of Black men since The Birth of a Nation<\/em> and the most anti-Black family film of the modern film era.\u201d Spike Lee declared that all of the Black men in the film were \u201cjust one-dimensional animals<\/a>,\u201d stating: \u201cWithin recent years, the quickest way for a Black playwright, novelist, or poet to get published has been to say that Black men are shit.\u201d Walker\u2019s work was raked over the coals by many, including poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, who had a long-standing feud with Walker<\/a> and other members of what he defined to the New Yorker as Gloria Steinem\u2019s \u201cBlack feminist auxiliary.\u201d During a televised debate, Reed said of the film<\/a>: \u201cWhen I saw The Color Purple<\/em> advertised as \u2018Come join a celebration,\u2019 I thought I was being invited to a lynching,\u201d adding, \u201cand I was.\u201d In a New York Times article<\/a> headlined \u201cBlacks in Heated Debate Over \u2018The Color Purple,\u2019 \u201d Chuck Sutton, a radio host, was quoted as saying on his show that \u201cno media vehicle since Roots<\/em> [which premiered eight years earlier] has caused this kind of dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n Many Black women had a different response. Their reaction to this pushback is perhaps best summarized by something Oprah Winfrey\u2014whose Oscar-nominated debut in the film as Sofia helped catapult her from being a local Chicago television host to the titan of Black entertainment she is today\u2014said at the time: \u201cThis movie is not trying to represent the history of Black people in this country any more than The Godfather<\/em> was trying to represent the history of Italian-Americans. In this case, it\u2019s one woman\u2019s story.<\/a>\u201d Or as one Chicago woman, whose relatives were abused, told the Times<\/a>, \u201cBlack women should not be sacrificed for black men\u2019s pride. Let the film roll.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just the content of the movie itself that had many Black people raising fists and picket signs, but its backstory. The fact that the film was adapted for the screen by two white men\u2014Spielberg and the Dutch-born screenwriter Menno Meyjes\u2014was also criticized. And it wasn\u2019t just Spielberg\u2019s race but his background, which included nothing like this kind of material. Though we know Spielberg today as the director of not just popcorn entertainment but such serious, adult, and historically-minded movies as Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>, Munich<\/em>, and Lincoln<\/em>, <\/em>he hadn\u2019t yet done anything nearly so weighty, and was known instead as simply the whiz kid behind movies like Jaws<\/em>, Close Encounters of the Third Kind<\/em>, E.T.<\/em>, <\/em>and the Indiana Jones <\/em>movies (the most recent of which, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom<\/em>, wasn\u2019t exactly known for its racial sensitivity<\/a>). Everyone was questioning the director\u2019s decision to adapt the story, even hypothesizing that he was merely scheming for his first Oscar by choosing to adapt some loftier source material (the novel made Walker the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). But Spielberg loved the book, and as he told the New York Times<\/a>, \u201cI really wanted to challenge myself with something that was not stereotypically a Spielberg movie.\u201d Moreover, Spielberg\u2019s unprecedented string of hits had given him the ability to get the movie made on a scale that would not otherwise be possible. As actress Margaret Avery later put it<\/a>, \u201cthere were no Black directors at that time that the studios would give that power to.\u201d (Even Spike Lee had yet to release his first, low-budget feature, which came out the following year.)<\/p>\n These criticisms of the film were, in many ways, narrow-minded. Some pondered why white supremacy wasn\u2019t the villain in the story (it is one of them, evidenced by Sofia\u2019s imprisonment and subsequent judicial order to become the maid to the mayor\u2019s wife), while those who took up the #NotAllBlackMen\u2013esque stance were inadvertently brushing off the tales of domestic abuse many Black women attested to having lived. Among Black Americans, it was a true battle of the sexes playing out on the global stage.<\/p>\n