This paper’s aim is to understand to what extent the social evolution of Black people in the US has been mirrored on their representation in motion pictures. From slavery to the Black Power movement of the 1970s, African Americans became citizens and activists. From 1915 to 2019, mainstream films caricatured them in choosing White people to play their roles. Then, Blacks were denied or underestimated. All of that until a decade ago, a time from whence Hollywood has seemed to be ready to honor Black people and integrate them in the frame of its national mythology. In a nutshell, the present paper consists of an equating between cinema and historiography, in order to understand how African Americans’ representation is influenced by and provide input for social evolutions to build a collective memory.