From Boycotts to Black Classic: How Spielberg's Purple Became Untouchable

When Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel hit theaters in 1985, it didn’t arrive as a triumph. Instead, The Color Purple walked into a firestorm that threatened to derail both the film and its source material entirely. Columnists compared it to The Birth of a Nation. Spike Lee declared that all the Black men in the film were just one-dimensional animals. Picket lines formed. Organizations mobilized. For a moment, it looked like the movie might become a cautionary tale about a white director tackling material he had no business touching.

Four decades later, the war has ended. The Color Purple isn’t just respected—it’s woven into the fabric of Black cinema itself. It’s nominated for 11 Academy Awards, became the highest-grossing film of 1985 behind only Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Rocky IV, and has spawned a Tony-winning musical that launched careers and received its own film adaptation in 2023. Oprah Winfrey’s Oscar-nominated debut in the film catapulted her from local Chicago television host to the titan of Black entertainment. One of its most iconic moments—Winfrey’s All my life I had to fight speech—has become cultural shorthand, referenced winkingly by everyone from Tyler Perry to Kendrick Lamar.

The original backlash wasn’t without cause. The film faced legitimate criticism: the characterization of Black men, the question of whether a white director should be telling this particular story, the way certain elements of Walker’s novel were softened or glossed over. Walker herself has critiqued the reduction of Mister to one layer of brutality. The romance between Celie and Shug was minimized to a single kiss while the camera panned away to wind chimes—a creative choice born partly from PG-13 rating constraints in 1984, but a dilution nonetheless.

What’s worth understanding now is why the film was saddled with such impossible expectations in the first place. Historian Kobena Mercer called it the burden of representation: when a marginalized group has almost no other mainstream vehicles to see themselves reflected, a single film becomes asked to represent an entire people’s wide-ranging experience. As Maya Cade, creator of the Black Film Archive, noted, The Color Purple was Hollywood’s first attempt at the Black woman’s picture, and the dearth of widely recognized messages that spoke the emotional language of Black women meant the movie became a prime battleground for heated discussion.

But here’s what’s changed: the dearth has been hacked away. More movies and shows about Black people now reach screens regularly, relieving The Color Purple of bearing the weight of an entire demographic’s self-representation. In that space—freed from the burden of being the only one—the film’s genuine qualities have become visible. Quincy Jones’s score, which mixes traditional Black genres like jazz and gospel, remains timeless. Cinematographer Allen Daviau’s work is stunning. The performances, from Whoopi Goldberg’s observant eyes to Oprah Winfrey’s steadfastness to Margaret Avery’s grace, land with the force of truth.

Spielberg may have been an unexpected choice to direct a story rooted in Black women’s experience. He hadn’t yet done anything nearly so weighty, known instead as the whiz kid behind Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and Indiana Jones. But here’s the thing: having the unprecedented clout to get a film of that scale made when no studio would trust a Black director with that power wasn’t nothing. Actress Margaret Avery later put it plainly: there were no Black directors at that time that the studios would give that power to. Spike Lee hadn’t yet released his first feature film.

The Color Purple endures because, despite its flaws, it succeeds at what any director’s fundamental job demands: elicit great performances and create a unified work that makes you feel something. Forty-plus years later, it’s hard not to fall in love with what Spielberg and his cast built.