The Emperor Jones, a 1933 American pre-Code film adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play of the same title, was made outside of the Hollywood studio system, financed with private money from neophyte wealthy producers, and directed by iconoclast Dudley Murphy. He cast Paul Robeson in his first film role, Dudley Digges, Frank H. Wilson, and Fredi Washington. The screenplay was written by DuBose Heyward and filmed at Kaufman Astoria Studios with the beach scene shot at Jones beach Long Beach, New York. Robeson starred in the O'Neill play on stage, both in the United States and England, a role that had helped launch his career.

In 1933, the film was released with a black actor's name getting top billing over a white actor for the first time, and an integrated cast into an America in which the Scottsboro boys were still being held for trial. The film opened to excellent, often glowing reviews in the trade, mainstream and African-American press - for Paul Robeson's powerful performance and often noting Murphy's visual innovations. Theaters in Times Square and Harlem were immediately sold-out. But releasing the film in the rest of the country was problematic. It remained controversial for its use of "nigger" even among liberal, northern, African American audiences - who nonetheless flocked to see it - and when distributed elsewhere, particularly in the South, the response was virulent: more than forty lynchings erupted in its opening week across the South where it wasn't showing yet. United Artists distributed the film and yanked it out of the midtown New York theater for a routine Wallace Beery comedy, after only two weeks. Elsewhere, post-production cuts were made taking out offending language wherever it occurred.