"The people who say such things are crazy. I am a Northerner, I hate segregation, and I gave jobs to hundreds of Negroes at the same salary the whites were paid. I had production companies hire poverty-stricken Indians and pay them the highest Hollywood salaries for extras. Me, a racist? My best friends are black: , and a caretaker who has worked for me for thirty years. I even made ', about a character who was not just a nice black guy but someone nobler than anybody else in the picture. They wouldn't let me make that picture because they said that a movie about a 'nigger' wouldn't make any money and couldn't be exhibited in the South. I got angry and told them they could at least have the decency to say 'Negro' or 'colored man,' because most of those 'niggers' were worth better than they. When I landed at there were scores of black bodies lying in the sand. Then I realized that it was impossible not to consider them full-fledged American citizens."
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Responding to the observation by French film critic Samuel Lachize that "some people detected—wrongly, Lachize added—some racist aspects in his work"; as quoted in "Notes of a Press Attaché: John Ford in Paris, 1966" by Tavernier, Film Comment (July 1994), p. 69
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John Ford
John Martin Feeney (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973), known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director. He is remembered both for Westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), as well films in other genres such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
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