The image I’ve selected is a promotional poster for the 1978 musical The Wiz, an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz with an entirely African-American cast. To understand why this film exists, and why the fact that it exists is relevant, we have to examine the conditions under which L. Frank Baum created the original Wizard of Oz story in the final years of the 19th century. Baum was a member of the Democratic Populist party, and in the 1890s he ardently supported Populist William Jennings Bryan in both his 1896 and 1900 presidential campaigns – obviously, both were unsuccessful (Littlefield, 49). Henry Littlefield proposes that The Wizard of Oz is an allegory for the political climate during the time Baum was writing it: Dorothy is the common citizen, the cowardly lion is Bryan, and the Wizard represents the U.S. government leadership (the emperor has no clothes). Though Bryan’s dual losses in the presidential election proved that Baum’s Populist party was in the minority, The Wizard of Oz has a happy ending, with all of the characters realizing that what they were looking for was inside themselves all along. If Littlefield is right about the allegory, we can see The Wizard of Oz as a story that Baum wrote with the intent to empower and motivate his fellow Democratic Populists to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and perhaps be a bit smarter and braver the next time around. Baum was writing for a minority group that didn’t have the political or social clout that it desired.

Flash forward almost eight decades to the conception of The Wiz in the late 1970s. Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 are superfamous African-American pop stars in a nation that had only been desegregated fairly recently. It would be disrespectful to say that L. Frank Baum’s Democratic Populists were ever in a situation as dire as that of African-Americans in the mid 20th century; however, enough parallels can be drawn that I believe it is fair to say that The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz were created with a similar goal – to empower and encourage a minority demographic that lacks social and political power. The Wiz feautures a Dorothy who is from Harlem, not Kansas, but both locations were chosen with the goal of appealing to the common citizen as opposed to the elite. Additionally, the Wizard himself in The Wiz turns out to actually be a failed politician, which is probably a symbol for the numerous ways that the U.S. government has failed and mistreated African-Americans throughout the country’s history. If The Wizard of Oz was an attempt to rally and reinvigorate the downtrodden and few Democratic Populists, than The Wiz was an attempt to empower African-Americans, who suffered awful injustices at the hands of the government trusted with protecting it. Both works succeed in these goals while simultaneously delivering a fun, entertaining musical.