You mean, when Jim Crow and other measures were still in place.
Why, yes. And your point is?
My point is, the old race films showed a black society that had grown up and, to some extent, thriven if not prospered, under the worst of hardcore Jim Crow laws. Even given social and legal inequality of the two societies, black (or "colored", as people preferred to say) society was moving ahead, just as Bookerism had promised for three generations that they would.
That was before the liberals and the Bolsheviks got "a-holt" of them.