JOHN WAYNE'S CONTROVERSIAL QUOTES
Marion Michael Morrison, an actor who went by John Wayne and was nicknamed The Duke, starred in movies from 1930-1976.
He came to be known as a hero in western films, an archetype that especially began to take shape four years after World War II, when Sands of Iwo Jima was released.
One of Wayne's most popular roles was in 1954 film The High and the Mighty where he portrayed a heroic copilot.
Wayne was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in June 1980 – about a full year after his death.
Now his legacy is in doubt because of a frank interview he gave to Playboy Magazine in 1971.
Wayne revealed in the May 1971 interview that he believes in white supremacy and claimed black people are too 'irresponsible' to be given power.
'With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so,' he said in the interview. 'But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.'
Wayne also expressed a derogatory outlook towards Native Americans in the interview.
'I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians,' he claimed to Playboy. 'Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.'
In that same interview with Playboy, Wayne also expressed homophobic views. He called Midnight Cowboy, a film that starred Jon Voight as a naive Texan male prostitute and Dustin Hoffman as a New York pimp, 'a story about two f**s.'
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