While recent decades have seen a proliferation of films written, directed, and produced by African Americans, the legacy of these endeavors stretches back over a century. African American filmmaking began in the silent era where independent producers made movies, known as race films, for segregated audiences. Like the vast majority of silent era film productions, most race films of this period are lost. In fact, hardly any material survives that was shot by Black filmmakers prior to 1920.[1] One of the first and most important of these ventures was the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, helmed by George P. Johnson and his brother Noble, an actor who would become one of the most prolific character actors in the Hollywood studio system in the first half of the 20th century and, arguably, the first Black movie star.
The Lincoln Motion Picture Company made five feature films and two newsreels from 1916 to 1922. To date, all have been considered lost, apart from four surviving minutes of their last feature, “By Right of Birth” (1921), archived at the Library of Congress, much of which is severely deteriorated due to nitrate decomposition.[2] While the fragments are somewhat narratively incoherent, this material is nonetheless invaluable as a rare surviving example of early race filmmaking and the only representation of Noble Johnson—the star of the company—in a Lincoln production.
However, it was that glimpse of Noble Johnson that led us to conclude the “By Right of Birth” fragment contains within it a fifteen second clip from another film called “The Trooper of Troop K” (1916), making it the earliest surviving footage produced by a Black film company. This is the story of how I made that discovery with Ally’s help, and how it requires a rewriting of Black film historiography.
I began by focusing on a scene where the actors Jimmie Smith and Beulah Hall sit on a stoop outside of a southern California style bungalow; it’s at about 2:27 in the file below. A title card decorated with images of cacti reads:
“Don’t believe that stuff that Joe writes. I know those soldiers. You would find him flirting with some Chili Queen.”
When the film cuts back to Jimmie and Beulah, we get the briefest glimpse of Noble Johnson. It’s easy to miss—a brief superimposed fade-in and out iris shot in the upper left corner of the frame. However fleetingly visible, Noble is unmistakable. He is dressed in army khakis and hat, looking affectionately at a woman with a large flower in her hair and a fringed shawl—is this the “Chili Queen” and are we witnessing the supposed flirting?[3]