"They will all be my color": Nina Mae McKinney and Black Internationalism in 1930s Australia

"There will be no black or white in America in 200 years. They will all be my colour" - Nina Mae McKinney. When the visiting black American film star Nina Mae McKinney (1912-1967) made the above statement during an interview with an Australian reporter in 1937, it was the first time in this country’s media history that an African American film actress expressed her specific ideas about race and American identity publicly. McKinney was the first African American film actress to appear in Australia, and the sheer scope of the media’s interest in her produced reviews of performances, stories of her film career, commentaries of her associations with other African Americans of contemporary interest, and several highly personal semi-biographical interviews. Taken together, this ephemera makes for instructive reading as iterations that were responsive to black internationalism expressed by a black American actress who at this point in her career had been marginalized by Hollywood’s racial climate but reified internationally as a major talent.