Africans, kidnapped and enslaved in the New World, soon learned to “signify” – to communicate with one another in a way that wouldn’t rile massa, for whom a different kind of communication was necessitated, as summed up by the grandfather in the opening pages of Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: “I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction.” We forget that massa, too, had need to signify. Bounded by fundamentalists and Puritans, he could no more exercise his wild side or express irreverent attitudes toward sex, religion, and race than blacks could stump for empowerment or date massa’s daughter.

Slaves had their say by making music of Exodus and desire. Whites had theirs by pretending to be slaves: nature’s dim-witted children who said the darndest things.

This is a severe simplification, but in examining the ongoing if mutable allure of minstrelsy, we tend to focus on racist stereotypes as vehicles for hatred, when in fact they also served as vehicles for freer, if not necessarily free, speech. As blackface minstrelsy slowly, slowly lost its appeal, it was successfully supplemented by the all-black theatrical pageant, written and produced by whites and presenting an America in which there are no whites and, consequently, no racism.

Not that the black communities they envision don’t have problems, like choosing between De Lawd and Lucifer, prayer and gambling, obeisance and transgression. These pageants, most famously Marc Connelly’s 1930 Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Green Pastures,” which sent a generation of white critics into paroxysms of teary gratitude, did triple-duty. They indulged in heresies by ascribing them to Negro folk culture; furthered the national illusion that, even in their segregated neighborhoods, stock Negro types made their way through life yesing (but with no thought of death and destruction); and thrust ingenious black performers into the limelight.

Warner has now released DVDs of three of the most celebrated all-black musicals (Fox is sitting on the other two from the same period, “Hearts in Dixie” and “Stormy Weather”), which came out in seven-year installments: King Vidor’s “Hallelujah” in 1929, Connelly and William Keighley’s “The Green Pastures” in 1936, and Vincente Minnelli’s “Cabin in the Sky” in 1943. An all-black cinema had thrived in black communities since the silent era, producing low-budget musicals, dramas, and Westerns. These, however, were major studio releases from MGM and Warner, distributed with the knowledge that Southern white theaters would boycott them. Yet they made money in their day, and continue to startle and entertain.

Warner, of course, worries that some people may take offense. In a written warning that can’t be skipped or fast-forwarded, the company disavows images it acknowledges as “wrong then and wrong now”; it also provides commentaries by black scholars, much as it included an introduction by Whoopi Goldberg in a recent collection of Looney Tunes, characterizing racial stereotypes as a part of history we need to confront. You can understand the hesitation. Is it really okay to take pleasure in Mantan Moreland as one of the funniest movie comedians of his day, or are we obliged to watch grim-faced as he gets more mileage from the line (in “Cabin in the Sky”), “I was the one that thought up flies,” than any actor had a right? You wonder, when a commentator characterizes Louis Armstrong as a great musician who incarnated an Uncle Tom image.

The 21st-century irony that hovers over these movies – all of which present a fundamentalist religious dichotomy between good and evil, rationalizing a literal interpretation of the Bible by crediting the viewpoint to Negro children or Negro illiterates (Eddie Anderson’s Little Joe, in “Cabin in the Sky,” signs his name with an X) – stems from our awareness that now they would be enacted by the intelligent-design crowd. The high priest of Israel in “The Green Pastures,” who takes God’s name in vain to further a political agenda, is Pat Robertson without the obsequious grin.

“Hallelujah” is a remarkable film, not only for the subject and cast, but because King Vidor filmed much of it on location in Tennessee and Arkansas, providing a documentary authenticity in his depiction of cotton farming, baptisms, and shotgun housing. So what if two songs, including a putative old-time spiritual (“Waiting at the End of the Road”) were written by Irving Berlin? At the center of the film is the dynamic Nina Mae McKinney, the first potential black sex symbol – reportedly 16, when the film was made.

McKinney’s career soon vanished: Hollywood offered no more black Jezebels until Lena Horne’s brief movie fling 14 years later. Still, here she is, wearing her heart or a pair of dice on her bodice, a black variation on the woman in the bulrushes, luring a too-easily enticed farm boy away from God before dying in a muddy ditch. Her nightclub dance, justifiably compared by commentator Donald Bogle to Elvis’s moves in “Jailhouse Rock,” is not to be missed, and the film’s theme of rehabilitation never seemed more pointed than now, when the idea of rehabilitation is so out of fashion. The DVD includes two 1930s shorts with McKinney and the magnificent teenage Nicholas Brothers, born to sport fedoras and determined – especially speed-demon Fayard Nicholas – to avoid every cliche when they can devise infinite variations on a basic time-step.

“The Green Pastures,” which also comes with a Nicholas brothers short and the infamous “Rufus for President,” with Ethel Waters and 7-year-old Sammy Davis Jr., begins with risible references to “very simple, devout people” who are “humble” and “reverent,” but comes powerfully alive in the broad harmonies of the Hall Johnson choir. Set in New Orleans, which began when “the whole world wasn’t nothing but a mess of bad weather” and where a child is warned against growing up to be a “transgressor,” it moves quickly to heaven – a combination fish fry and prayer meeting. De Lawd, wittingly incarnated by the striking Rex Ingram (even more witting as Satan in “Cabin in the Sky” – he was versatile), creates Earth to provide firmament for his custard. Religion is the custard of the people.

Eddie Rochester Anderson is very funny as Noah, but most of the minstrelsy here is designed to disguise such heresies as God not bothering to listen to prayers, and a conclusion (cleverly borrowed from the poorly married prophet Hosea) in which a non-biblical soldier named Hezdrel converts God from wrath to mercy. “The Green Pastures” postulates the moral growth of God – something you can only suggest through the eyes of Negro children. Even so, they show God but not Jesus; minstrels do have their limitations. De Lawd doesn’t know who Jesus is or where he comes from, though he looks awfully beatific watching the crucifixion.

Minnelli’s first film, “Cabin in the Sky,” deserves a better treatment, with a more learned commentary or documentary than it gets. It does offer a major audio-only extra: the excised five-minute Louis Armstrong version of “Ain’t It the Truth,” previously available on records, though it fails to explain how the number figured in the screenplay. Had they included Armstrong’s number in the original film, he would have stolen the show – it was the most ambitious orchestration and production in the film.

As released, Armstrong, though fourthbilled, appears only in a wondrously funny scene set in Hades with Ingram, Moreland, Willie Best, and other competing black comics. The original idea was to cut from Hades to Armstrong’s performance, which begins with a swinging vocal, followed by a trumpet solo and coda that leads to a blazing orchestral episode and finale, brimming with high notes. As Armstrong’s trumpet reprises the melody, the scene was to shift to Earth, where Ms. Horne’s Georgia Brown sings the same song while luxuriating in a bubble bath.

That idea was scotched by order of the Breen Office, which could not abide a beautiful black woman in a tub, but her scene was filmed, and a clip is included in the montage that accompanies the recording. Unfortunately, the DVD does not include the unedited audio performance of Duke Ellington’s “Going Up.” His appearance in the film, all too brief, and prominently featuring trombonist Lawrence Brown, is nonetheless a moment of glory – one of many. Minnelli is so spellbound by the talent at his disposal that the film plays as vaudeville basted by dramatic vignettes. Waters and Ms. Horne have their best turns ever in film musicals, as does Anderson (“Life’s Full of Consequences”) and John Bubbles.

Two complementary tap numbers play variations on the stereotype of the grinning, gravity-defying Negro dancer. First Bill Bailey (whose kid sister was Pearl) does a relatively conventional buck-and-wing to “Taking a Chance on Love.” Then, in one of filmdom’s all-time show-stoppers, the incomparable Bubbles, singing and dancing to the self-effacing minstrel anthem “Shine,” turns that characterization on its head, as he spins (note the one-legged turns, a la Peg Leg Bates) the material into an expression of narcissistic thuggery, smiling the entire community into death and destruction.

***

A benefit for 91-year-old Fayard Nicholas will be held on Sunday, January 22, at 2:30 p.m. at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Stern Auditorium, at 101st Street and Fifth Avenue. The show includes a lineup of tap dance legends as well as a screening of the Nicholas brothers documentary, “We Sing, We Dance.” Tickets are $25.