Lawrence Chenault was an actor of stage and screen who was one of the most familiar figures of the race film era, making 24 back-cast films in the 1920s and 30s. He was a favorite of race film giant Oscar Micheaux, who directed nearly all the films he appeared in. Chenault was known as an actor who could impersonate a variety of types skillfully, once playing three different characters.in one film, the 1922 western, The Crimson Skull.” He is also known as an important member of the Lafayette Players, the Harlem acting troupe founded by Anita Bush (his co-star in The Crimson Skull) that also included Charles Gilpin and Dooley Wilson. He played a key supporting role in The Scar of Shame 1929), considered by many the greatest of the surviving race films.
Chenault was born on November 23, 1877, in Mount Sterling, Kentucky to parents Mollie Mitchell and William O. Chenault. The family later moved to Cincinnati, where the young Lawrence sang solos in Allen Temple Church services. After his mother married Ambrose Saunders in 1888, he became known for a while as Lawrence Ambrose and is listed as such in the 1890 U.S. Census. He had a brother, Jack Chenault (1888-1925), who also became an actor.
Chenault began his career as a performer in Black minstrel shows, joining Al G. Field’s Negro Minstrels in 1895. Minstrelsy was soon to give way to cinema as the new leader in entertainment, but not before bequeathing its demeaning representation of Blacks to the new medium. Early cinema’s depictions of African Americans are filled with the racist stereotypes featured in the minstrel shows including watermelon guzzlers, chicken thieves, and comical killers of English syntax. The culmination of the practice came in 1915, with D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, called by many observers the most racist film in American history. The [Black] race film movement (1915-1950) challenged the minstrel stereotype by producing movies with all-Black actors attempted to show more realistic images of “the race” to its intended audience: Black moviegoers. Chenault was an early participant in the movement.
His first screen appearance was in The Brute in 1920. Like The Crimson Skull and many other race films, it is considered lost. Prominent among his performances in surviving films are a despicable racist passing for white in Micheaux’s The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920); the prison mate of the “bad” Paul Robeson twin in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1925); the villainous barroom owner in Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926); and the well-to-do father of the leading man’s intended bride in the well-regarded The Scar of Shame (1926).
He was a popular leading man with the Lafayette Players during the Harlem Renaissance. When he collapsed following a performance in 1928, due, it seems, to the death of a friend and longtime roommate, it was newsworthy enough to be reported in The New York Amsterdam News (Aug 8, 1928, p.7); The Afro-American (Sept 8, 1928, p.2); and the Philadelphia Tribune, the latter carrying the headline “ Chenault is Stricken; for Friend.” (Sept. 6, 1928, p.8).
His last film was the lost Harlem After Midnight made by Micheaux in 1934, Lawrence Chenault died in Indianapolis, Indiana on December 27, 1943, of lobar pneumonia and is buried there in Floral Park Cemetery.
