Watermelon Man is a 1970 American comedy film directed by Melvin Van Peebles and starring Godfrey Cambridge, Estelle Parsons, Howard Caine, D'Urville Martin, Kay Kimberley, Mantan Moreland, and Erin Moran.

Written by Herman Raucher, it tells the story of an extremely bigoted 1960s-era white insurance salesman named Jeff Gerber, who wakes up one morning to find that he has become black.

The music for Watermelon Man, written and performed by Van Peebles, was released on a soundtrack album, which spawned the single "Love, That's America".

Jeff Gerber lives in an average suburban neighborhood with his seemingly liberal housewife Althea, who tolerates her husband's character flaws out of love.

Althea, who watches the race riots every night on TV with great interest, chastises Jeff for not having sympathy for the problems of Black Americans.

[2] Herman Raucher wrote the script on spec in 1969, after realizing that several of his friends who espoused liberal sympathies still admitted to holding on to racist ideologies.

Godfrey Cambridge plays the role of Jeff Gerber in whiteface for the first few minutes of the film, and then goes without the makeup when his character changes into a black man.

Before Van Peebles had come into the project, the studio had told him that they were planning to cast a white actor like Alan Arkin or Jack Lemmon to play the part.

[5] Columbia was happy with the finished product, and the film was a financial success, leading the studio to offer Van Peebles a three-picture contract.

[3] In an analysis of Watermelon Man in Film Quarterly, scholar Raquel Gates describes it as a "cunning subversion of Hollywood and television conventions.

[1] In 2023, Bear Manor Media released a book about the film titled Melvin Van Peebles' Watermelon Man by Andrew J. Rausch.