The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon

{{short description|1907 comedy film}}

The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1907) is a comedy film made in the United States by Selig Polyscope Company.{{Cite web|url=https://archive.org/details/edisonmpc-I138|title=Motion Picture Catalog I138|via=Internet Archive}}{{Cite journal|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225141|title=Another Audience: Black Moviegoing, 1907–16|author=Waller, Gregory A.|year=1992|journal=Cinema Journal|volume=31|issue=2|pages=3-25|jstor=1225141|doi=10.2307/1225141|url-access=subscription}} It is about a nursemaid whose admirer turns out to be a gambling ne'er do well after their marriage, causing her to have to work as a washerwoman to make ends meet.{{Cite web|url=https://goldenglobes.com/articles/forgotten-hollywood-black-films-silent-era/|title=Forgotten Hollywood: Black Films of the Silent Era|date=February 12, 2023}} It is "the earliest known American-made film with an all-black cast."{{Cite web|url=https://library.tctc.edu/AfricanAmericanStudies/tvandfilm|title=TCTC Learning Commons: African American Studies: African Americans in Television and Film in History|first=Som|last=Linthicum|website=library.tctc.edu}}

The Jim Crow Museum describes the film as featuring the first "cinematic coon" and as "a stupendously racist portrayal of two dimwitted and stuttering buffoons".{{Cite web|url=https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/coon/homepage.htm|title=The Coon Caricature – Anti-black Imagery – Jim Crow Museum|website=jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu}}

Confusingly, the Selig Polyscope Company also issued a 1905 film of the same name, which the film historians S. Torriano and Venise T. Berry decried as of a genre of films that "denigrate[d] the African image on film to the lowest common denominator,"{{Cite book |last=Berry |first=S. Torriano |url=https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_A_to_Z_of_African_American_Cinema/W28vCHtlJyUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+Wooing+and+Wedding+of+a+Coon&pg=PR24&printsec=frontcover |title=The A to Z of African American Cinema |last2=Berry |first2=Venise T. |year=2009 |publisher=Scarecrow Press |isbn=978-0-8108-7034-5 |pages=xiii–xiv |language=en}} – and which had featured an all-white cast in blackface.{{Cite journal |last=Waller |first=Gregory A. |date=1992 |title=Another Audience: Black Moviegoing, 1907–16 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225141?seq=1 |journal=Cinema Journal |volume=31 |issue=2 |pages=3–25 |doi=10.2307/1225141 |issn=0009-7101|url-access=subscription }}