Prior to entering the film industry Maria Williams was a social activist and educator, traveling across Kansas to lecture on topics such as politics and social justice. By 1891, her passion for social change led her to a local Kansas City weekly newspaper titled New Era, where she worked as editor-in-chief for three years before starting her own newspaper, The Women’s Voice, sponsored by the “colored women’s auxiliary of the Republican party.” According to Film School Rejects columnist Emily Kubincanek, Williams’ paper focused on “timely topics” much like her lectures.
Williams continued to be an active political figure well into the 20th century, publishing her memoir My Work and Public Sentiment in 1916 to document her life and social views. The title page of her book identifies Williams as a “national organizer” for the Good Citizens League; 10 percent of all sales were dedicated toward decreasing crime in the African American community.
Williams did not become involved in cinema until her marriage to African American entrepreneur and business owner Jesse L. Williams, among whose many business endeavors was a privately owned movie theater in Kansas City. The couple later went on to form their own production company, Western Film Producing Company and Booking Exchange, where Maria served as secretary and treasurer. It was under this banner that Williams made her 1923 silent film, Flames of Wrath, a five-reel crime drama that cemented her position as a pioneer of Black cinema.
While five-reel films were relatively common by 1920, it was especially rare for such a project to be headed by a woman, and an African American one, at that. Just one reel of film is 1,000 feet long and adds up to about 15 minutes of run-time, making the physical act of cutting and splicing a reel together very demanding. During the early years of cinema, this work was considered unskilled labor and was often completed by uneducated women, yet once sound and music was added into the mix, men deemed the work “too complex” for women to manage.
Despite the monumental achievement of Williams’ work, very little is known about the production of her film. Advertised as a “five reel mystery drama, written, acted and produced entirely by colored people” in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, Flames of Wrath was distributed to African-American theatres across southern America to much success. In a letter to the manager of the Douglass Theatre in Macon, Georgia – the biggest Black theater in the city – Florida cinema manager Roger Wilson boasted that the film had “never lost a dollar to an exhibitor in all of its rounds.”