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• Hollywood embraces today's black films as they enjoy more box office success

Richard Roundtree gave black audiences a new hero as the star of the "Shaft" movies.

"In the Heat of the Night" (1967) costarred Sidney Poitier as a visiting detective and Rod Steiger as a Southern police chief who grudgingly collaborates with him.

Hollywood's relationship with African-Americans has ranged from benign neglect !to belligerent distortion, occasionally punctuated by brief periods when studios were happy to cash in when the popularity of black culture !was at high tide.

For much of the early 8decades of cinema, African-Americans were rarely portrayed in movies at all, and when they were, it was invariably in a negative or demeaning light.

Take the black characters in D.W. Griffith's 1915 "The Birth of a Nation." The former slaves who remain loyal servants after Emancipation are viewed as subservient children, while a black politician is depicted as a rapacious opportunist.

During Hollywood's Golden Age, blacks were used mainly for comic effect or as foils for white characters, such as Hattie McDaniel in "Gone With the Wind."

There was an essentially underground movement of films made with black casts and crews that were shown exclusively in black neighborhoods from the 1920s to 1940s.

Filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux made movies that sometimes dealt seriously with themes of black life. Because they were financed and promoted outside the reigning studio system, mainstream audiences often did not even know of their existence.

Things began to change !in the 1950s and '60s, when black thespians slowly began to appear in leading roles, like Sidney Poitier in "In the Heat of the Night."

A new plateau of popularity was reached in the late 1970s with the blaxploitation genre. Films like "Shaft" and "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" were laden with sex and violence, but also contained powerful messages about !black identity.

The movement soon was co-opted by Hollywood, though, and turned into cheesy, over-the-top romps that glorified pimps and other criminals, drawing the ire of civil rights groups.

This cycle was essentially repeated in the 1990s with "gangsta" films that focused on urban crime drama. Early entrants such as Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" and John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood" were sobering depictions of black Americans tempted by the violence that surrounds them.

But they soon gave way to commercially oriented movies that elevated the gang-banger rather than focusing on the sociological imperatives that create him.

While some actors such as Denzel Washington and Will Smith have become box-office titans, they largely built their careers with Everyman roles that could have been written for any actor.

Up until 2005, there were just a handful of black directors quietly making quality films that tackled themes relevant to their community, such as Julie Dash ("Daughters of the Dust"), Kasi Lemmons ("Eve's Bayou") and Charles Stone III ("Drumline"). But in terms of box office, they were barely blips on Hollywood's 8radar.