Analysis | Casting Black actors in period pieces isn’t diversity. It’s history.

Advertisements

Three decades later, the director rights that wrong for anyone else watching. In its very first frames, “The Harder They Fall” announces itself on-screen without question with the title card “These. People. Existed.” The classic revenge plot of the film is fictional but nearly every character is based on a historic Black figure who, yes, actually existed in the Wild West. There’s Trudy, Nat Love, Rufus Buck, Bass Reeves and more — Black frontiersmen and women who probably wouldn’t recognize the whitewashed West depicted in the genre’s classics.

The Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News and Analysis