Collection: Blaxploitation Movies

Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, then president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP branch. He so named it because he claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypical characters often involved in criminal activity. However, the genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the heroes and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks, villains, or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.

Blaxploitation films were originally aimed at an urban African-American audience, but the genre's audience appeal soon broadened across racial and ethnic lines. Hollywood realized the potential profit of expanding the audiences of blaxploitation films across those racial lines.