Pinky

This was one of the first Hollywood films to address issues of racial prejudice and identity. Jeanne Crain stars as Patricia Johnson or Pinky (an expression used in the black community to designate anyone with light skin who could pass in the white community), a bright, young woman who has been attending nursing school in Boston. While there, she meets a handsome physician who wishes to marry her despite miscegnation laws. Believing that such a marriage could never work and unwilling to renounce her black heritage, Pinky returns to her grandmother's home in the South. There, she is humiliated by southern racism and considers returning North to live as a free white woman. Ironically, Pinky develops a sense of self through a cantankerous old dowager under her care. When the elderly woman dies leaving her estate to Pinky, the woman's family contests the will but Pinky emerges victorious. Realizing that she has been fleeing her true self, Pinky decides to remain and help her people by converting the property into a nursing school for black women. Though the film broke new ground in the depiction of interracial relations, southern exhibitors refused to screen the movie upon its release. (Circulates).

Pinky Johnson (Jeanne Crain) returns to the South to visit Dicey (Ethel Waters), the illiterate black laundress grandmother who raised her. Pinky confesses to Dicey that she passed for white while studying to be a nurse in the North. She had also fallen in love with white Dr. Thomas Adams (William Lundigan), who knows nothing about her black heritage. She is harassed by racist local law enforcement while attempting to reclaim money owed to her grandmother.