Timeline

1895

On December 28, Auguste and Louis Lumière hold the first commercial film screening at the Grand Café in Paris.

1895

On September 18, educator Booker T. Washington delivers the “Atlanta Compromise” speech, in which he urges a focus on vocational training as a means to achieve economic self-determination for African Americans instead of prioritizing resistance to systemic discrimination and racial segregation.

1895

On February 20, statesman and orator Frederick Douglass, a leader of the abolitionist movement and the most photographed man of the nineteenth century, dies.

1895

The journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells publishes the first set of lynching statistics in her book The Red Record.

1895

Vaudeville performers Bert Williams and George Walker begin their creative collaboration, later becoming one of the genre’s most successful comedic duos.

1897

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company films five Black performers dancing the popular cakewalk.

1897

Plessy v. Ferguson establishes the “separate but equal” doctrine for upholding the constitutionality of laws requiring racial segregation. This permits public accommodations, including theaters, to be segregated by race.

1898

The producer William Selig films the vaudeville performers Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle in Something Good—Negro Kiss, creating the first known moving image of Black affection on screen.

1898

The Edison Manufacturing Company captures the return of soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment from the Spanish-American War in Colored Troops Disembarking.

1900

The sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois organizes the Exhibition of AmericanNegroes for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, featuring hundreds of photographs showcasing the accomplishments of African Americans.

1901

Booker T. Washington publishes his autobiography, Up from Slavery.

1903

Edwin S. Porter releases Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Slavery Days, based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, the first of many film adaptations perpetuating racial stereotypes through the characters of Uncle Tom and Topsy.

1903

W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, in which he writes, “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

1905

The Chicago Defender begins publication, eventually becoming one of the most important Black newspapers in the country.

1907

Bertha Regustus stars in the Edison comedy short Laughing Gas.

1909

On February 12, on interracial group of activists establishes the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), pledging “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States.”

1909

The George W. Broome Exhibition Company releases the actuality film A Trip to Tuskegee, which promotes the positive influence of the Tuskegee Institute.

1909

Amsterdam News is founded in New York; by the 1930s it is one of the leading Black newspapers.

1910

On July 6, the release of Jeffries–Johnson World’s Championship Boxing Contest, a film documenting the heavyweight championship bout in which Jack Johnson beat James J. Jeffries, dubbed “The Great White Hope,” leads to social unrest and racial uprisings nationwide. The film was banned in many localities days after its release. Congress later bans the distribution of prizefight films across state lines.

1910

The NAACP begins publishing Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. Later editions would feature film reviews.

1910

The producer William D. Foster establishes the Foster Photoplay Company in Chicago, in part to create new roles for Black actors. Considered the first African American production company, it would release The Railroad Porter (1912), The Fall Guy (1913), and The Butler (1913).

1912

Alice Guy-Blaché directs the comedy short A Fool and His Money, one of the first films to feature an all-Black cast.

1913

The Black-cast feature now known as Lime Kiln Club Field Day, featuring Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey, begins production at Biograph’s Bronx studios. Racial unrest at the time may have prevented the completion and release of the film. A cache of the unfinished film’s camera negatives from Biograph’s vaults is acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1938 and is later compiled into an “archival assembly,” which premieres at the museum in 2014.

1914

The Hampton Institute releases the industrial film Making Negro Lives Count, which documents Black rural life and the training provided by the institute to bring about positive social change.

1914

Bert Williams stars in Darktown Jubilee, his screen debut.

1914

The vaudeville actor Sam Lucas stars in an adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, becoming the first Black actor to play the role of Uncle Tom in a film.

1915

D. W. Griffith releases the racist epic Birth of a Nation, adapted from the book The Clansman. Itscreens at the White House and becomes the first American blockbuster. The film leads to the resurgence of the terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan. Organizations like the NAACP mobilize the prevent the film from screening.

1916

The first wave of the Great Migration begins, as a steady exodus of Black Americans leave rural southern communities for urban centers in the North and West.

1916

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company is founded in Omaha and relocates to Los Angeles, becoming the city’s first Black-owned production company. Its first release is The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916), starring Clarence Brooks and Bessie Baker.

1916

Madame E. Toussaint Welcome and Ernest Toussaint Welcome establish the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange and later produce the documentary Doing Their Bit (1918), highlighting the role of Black soldiers in the war effort.

1916

Produced by the Frederick Douglass Film Company, The Colored American Winning His Suit is the first five-reel race film. It features a nonprofessional cast, with filming on location at Howard University.

1917

On July 28, the NAACP leads a silent march along Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest racial violence.

1917

On April 6, the United States declares war on Germany and enters World War I.

1918

The US government commissions the recruitment film Our Colored Fighters to showcase the training and participation of Black troops in World War I.

1919

Richard E. Norman releases The Green-Eyed Monster. A year later he establishes the Norman Film Company Studios in Jacksonville, Florida, after purchasing Eagle Film Studios.

1919

The news service Associated Negro Press is founded in Chicago by Claude A. Barnett, a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute.

1919

Oscar Micheaux writes, produces, directs, and distributes The Homesteader (1919), adapted from his autobiographical novel. Micheaux would go on to direct forty-eight features.

1919

Ernest Morrison, better known by the stage name Sunshine Sammy Morrison, becomes the first Black actor to sign a long-term contract with the producer Hal Roach. Morrison goes on to costar in the Our Gang short film series, featuring the Little Rascals.

1920

Sack Amusement Enterprises, a theater chain and production company, is founded in San Antonio, Texas.

1920

Oscar Micheaux releases The Symbol of the Unconquered and Within Our Gates, considered to be his response to Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

1921

Bessie Coleman becomes the first Black person to earn an international pilot’s license. The adventure film The Flying Ace (1926) is loosely based on her life.

1921

Violent white mobs attack Black residents of Tulsa’s Greenwood district. Hundreds are murdered, and the prosperous neighborhood known as Black Wall Street is destroyed.

1921

Reol Productions, based in New York, releases The Sport of the Gods, based on the novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

1922

Tressie Souders writes, produces, and directs A Woman’s Error; she is believed to be the first Black woman to direct a feature film.

1923

Maria P. Williams produces and stars in the mystery drama The Flames of Wrath.

1923

The musical short Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake Sing Snappy Tunes, one of the first sound films developed using the Phonofilm technology, is released.

1923

Richard E. Norman releases the South Seas adventure film Regeneration.

1925

Alain LeRoy Locke publishes The New Negro, the seminal anthology of the Harlem Renaissance, which includes stories, poems, and artworks.

1925

Paul Robeson makes his screen debut in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul.

1925

On August 8, the Ku Klux Klan organizes a white supremacist rally gathering thirty thousand participants, who march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

1925

Josephine Baker makes her Paris debut in the musical spectacle La revue nègre.

1926

The poet Langston Hughes publishes the influential essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” writing, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

1926

Colored Players Film Corporation is established in Philadelphia by Sherman H. Dudley, an African American vaudeville performer and theater entrepreneur, and the Austrian émigré David Starkman. The company would go on to produce Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926) and The Scar of Shame (1929) among others.

1926

The vaudeville performer Bert Williams dies.

1927

Josephine Baker makes her film debut in the French production La sirène des tropiques.

1927

Duke Ellington first performs at the Cotton Club.

1927

Lincoln Perry, better known by his stage name, Stepin Fetchit, makes his breakthrough debut in the film In Old Kentucky, which leads to a five-year contract with the Fox Film Corporation. Perry’s performance as a stereotypical shiftless trickster in subsequent films would make him the first Black movie star.

1928

The writer Zora Neale Hurston pioneers ethnographic filmmaking. During her doctoral anthropological research, she uses a 16mm camera to capture life in rural Black communities, producing films such as Children’s Games (1928), Logging (1928), and Baptism (1929).

1928

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer releases its first Black-cast musical feature film, Hallelujah, which catapults Nina Mae McKinney to fame.

1929

The stock market crash on Friday, October 29, leads to the Great Depression, which disproportionately affects African Americans and temporarily slows down the Great Migration.

1929

Fox Film Corporation releases its first Black-cast musical, Hearts in Dixie (1929), starring Clarence Muse.

1929

Fredi Washington, Duke Ellington, and the Cotton Club Band appear in the musical short Black and Tan, set during the Harlem Renaissance.

1929

Bessie Smith, known as the Empress of the Blues, appears in the two-reel musical short St. Louis Blues.

1930

Clarence Brooks and Evelyn Preer costar in Georgia Rose, one of the first “all-talking” feature-length race films, produced by Rosebud Film Corporation.

1930

The independent filmmakers and evangelists James and Eloyce Gist release Hell-Bound Train, which showcased visual allegories about the sins of modern life. The film was screened for their traveling ministries.

1931

Walter White becomes executive secretary of the NAACP. During his tenure he pressured Hollywood studios to expand the roles offered to Black actors.

1932

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson stars in the semiautobiographical Harlem Is Heaven, performing his signature “stair dance” to the music of Eubie Blake’s Orchestra.

1933

Ethel Waters stars in Rufus Jones for President, the satirical short featuring the screen debut of seven-year-old Sammy Davis Jr., who dreams of becoming president of the United States.

1933

Paul Robeson and Fredi Washington costar in The Emperor Jones, based on Eugene O’Neill’s play. Robeson re-creates his dramatic stage role of Brutus Jones.

1934

Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington costar in the Academy Award–nominated Imitation of Life. The Production Code Administration censors object to the story’s treatment of racial passing and a lynching scene in early drafts of the script.

1935

The animated film Little Black Sambo is released. It is adapted from the children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) by Helen Bannerman.

1935

Josephine Baker stars in Princess Tam Tam.

1936

Warner Bros. releases The Green Pastures, a Black-cast musical depicting Bible stories. Starring Rex Ingram, the film is a box-office success, although elements are criticized as stereotypical.

1936

Paul Robeson appears in Showboat; his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” would become a standard in his subsequent stage performances.

1937

The actor and singer Herb Jeffries stars in Harlem on the Prairie and goes on to popularize the singing cowboy in other Black-cast westerns, including The Bronze Buckaroo (1938), Two-Gun Man from Harlem (1938), and Harlem Rides the Range (1939).

1937

Fredi Washington, Noble Sissle, Paul Robeson, W. C. Handy, and Ethel Waters cofound the Negro Actors Guild of America, with the goal of increasing opportunities for Black actors and combating racial stereotypes in the entertainment industry.

1937

The actor Ralph Cooper and Harry M. Popkin and Leo C. Popkin establish Million Dollar Productions, producing titles such as Bargain with Bullets (1937) and Gang War (1940).

1938

Gang Smashers, starring Nina Mae McKinney and with a script by Ralph Cooper, is released.

1938

The Duke Is Tops, starring Ralph Cooper and Lena Horne, is released. The film is rereleased as The Bronze Venus (1943), with the popular Horne receiving top billing.

1939

Louis Beavers stars in Reform School as the warden of a juvenile prison who institutes progressive reforms.

1940

Hattie McDaniel wins an Academy Award for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939), becoming the first Black actor to receive an Oscar.

1940

Several production companies start releasing 16mm musical shorts, known as Soundies, which were played on musical jukeboxes. Black-cast shorts were usually added at the end of the reel.

1940

The actor Clarence Muse cowrites and stars in Broken Strings, in which he plays a concert pianist.

1941

The distribution and production company Toddy Pictures is founded. It rereleases race films like Harlem on the Prairie (1937) and Reform School (1939).

1941

Spencer Williams Jr. makes his directorial debut with The Blood of Jesus. Made with nonprofessional actors on a budget of $5,000, it showcases various spirituals and hymns. Screening in cinemas and Black churches, the film achieves commercial success.

1941

Hattie McDaniel becomes chair of the Negro Division of the Hollywood Victory Committee.

1941

The NAACP’s Walter White calls on Hollywood studios to stop perpetuating racist stereotypes and to create more realistic roles for Black actors.

1941

On December 7, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States enters World War II, declaring war on Japan.

1942

The Chicago-based All-American News Company, produced by William Alexander, begins releasing newsreels highlighting the activities of Black men and women in the armed forces. By 1945 it shifts away from newsreels to feature-length musical comedies.

1942

The singer, actor, and civil rights activist Lena Horne signs a contract with a major Hollywood studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

1943

Stormy Weather marks the height of Black-cast Hollywood musicals, featuring Lena Horne, Bill Robison, Cab Calloway, Katherine Dunham, Fats Waller, and the Nicholas Brothers.

1943

Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Rex Ingram, and Lena Horne star in the Black-cast musical Cabin in the Sky, with musical numbers by Duke Ellington.

1944

The NAACP begins granting awards to actors who advance the image of African Americans. Among the first recipients are Rex Ingram, Lena Horne, and Dooley Wilson, for roles in Sahara (1943), Thousands Cheer (1943), and Casablanca (1942), respectively.

1944

The musical short, or Soundie, Jump Children stars the iconic all-women swing orchestra International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

1944

Mantan Moreland plays the chauffeur Birmingham Brown in Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, reprising the role in twelve other films in the Charlie Chan series.

1944

The US War Department commissions the propaganda film The Negro Soldier, produced by Frank Capra and written by Carlton Moss, who also acted in the film. Initially intended for limited distribution, it is released nationally.

1945

John Johnson begins publishing Ebony magazine, which highlights entertainment figures.

1947

Cab Calloway stars in the full-length musical Hi De Ho.

1947

Jackie Robinson is the first Black baseball player to sign with a major league team.

1947

Louis Armstrong stars alongside the vocalist Billie Holiday in New Orleans

1947

The NAACP calls attention to the increase in lynchings of Black veterans returning from World War II during 1946.

1948

Oscar Micheaux releases his last film, The Betrayal.

1948

James Baskett receives an Honorary Award from the Academy for his portrayal of Uncle Remus in Song of the South (1946). The film, however, was criticized for its depiction of an idyllic master-slave relationship.

1948

The National Theatre in Washington, DC, is boycotted for its policies of racial discrimination.

1948

The National Theatre in Washington, DC, is boycotted for its policies of racial discrimination.

1949

An outdoor performance in Lakeland Acres by Paul Robeson turns violent when it is disrupted by agitators protesting his affiliation with the Communist Party.

1949

The release of the studio films Pinky, Intruder in the Dust, Home of the Brave, and Lost Boundaries—which deal with various racial issues, including passing and discrimination—mark the rise of the social problem film. These films highlight contemporaneous social issues and invite white audiences to empathize with Black characters who face prejudice or injustice.

1950

Jackie Robinson stars in the autobiographical drama The Jackie Robinson Story, detailing his journey to becoming the first Black baseball player in the major leagues.

1950

The jazz singer and musician Nat King Cole stars in the short film King Cole and His Trio with Benny Carter and His Orchestra.

1950

Sidney Poitier makes his screen debut in No Way Out, playing a medical intern confronted with a racist patient. It was noted for its frank treatment of racism.

1951

Paul Robeson submits a petition to the United Nations accusing the US government of a policy of genocide against African Americans.

1951

Jet magazine is founded in Chicago. Billed as “The Weekly Negro News Magazine,” it gains popularity for its coverage of the civil rights movement as well as the entertainment industry.

1951

On March 25, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux dies.

1952

The actor William Walker is elected as a member of the Screen Actors Guild board of directors. He would appear in more than one hundred films over the course of his career.

1953

The NAACP announces the Fight for Freedom campaign, whose aim is to eradicate racial discrimination by 1963, the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

1953

The autobiographical Joe Louis Story is released, detailing Louis’s path to becoming the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

1954

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court declares, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

1955

In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man; a bus boycott is soon organized.

1955

Dorothy Dandridge becomes the first Black actor to receive an Academy Award nomination for a performance in a leading role for Carmen Jones (1954).

1955

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is violently murdered in Mississippi for allegedly having flirted with or touched a white woman. Photographs published in Jet magazine that show his brutalized face in the open casket shock the country.

1956

The singer Nat King Cole is brutally attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan during a performance in Alabama.

1956

On June 6, Paul Robeson is called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which questions him about his political activities and communist associations. He is later blacklisted, which severely curtails his career.

1956

Carib Gold, starring Ethel Waters and featuring the screen debut of Cicely Tyson and Geoffrey Holder, is considered to be one of the last race films produced.

1957

Sidney Poitier and John Cassavetes star in Edge of the City. The film’s depiction of interracial friendship is groundbreaking, earning praise from the NAACP.

1958

Sidney Poitier is nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Defiant Ones (1958).

1958

Eartha Kit and Sammy Davis Jr. star in Anna Lucasta. The end credits feature the work of the noted artist Charles White.

1959

Harry Belafonte stars in the postapocalyptic drama The World, the Flesh and the Devil, which explores an interracial romance after a nuclear catastrophe.

1959

Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Sammy Davis Jr. star in Porgy and Bess, adapted from the 1930s Broadway musical written by Ira Gershwin.

1960

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee adopts a “Jail, No Bail” campaign after several students are arrested for protesting racial discrimination and opt to serve jail sentences instead of paying fines, which would indicate accepting an immoral system.

1960

With the broadcast of Integration Report 1 (1960), Madeline Anderson becomes the first Black woman to direct a televised documentary.

1961

Lorraine Hansberry adapts her Broadway play A Raisin in the Sun for the screen. The movie version stars Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, and Diana Sands.

1962

Brock Peters plays Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Harper Lee.

1962

Civil rights leaders conduct massive sit-ins and marching campaigns across the South to protest racial segregation.

1963

Martin Luther King Jr. and peaceful protestors are attacked during demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. Assaults on young protestors by police officers using water hoses and police dogs are covered on television and in newspapers, causing international outrage.

1963

Josephine Baker, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, and other Hollywood icons join the March on Washington, advocating equality for African Americans. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech.

1963

James Baldwin’s book of essays The Fire Next Time is published, offering a critical analysis of race relations in America.

1964

Sidney Poitier becomes the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for his starring role in Lilies of the Field (1963).

1964

Nothing but a Man, starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, premieres at the Venice Film Festival to critical acclaim.

1964

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning discrimination in public spaces, education, and employment.

1965

Nine from Little Rock (1964), which chronicles the efforts of nine Black students who are the first to integrate an all-white Arkansas high school, wins an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject.

1965

On February 21, civil rights activist Malcolm X is assassinated in New York.

1965

An uprising in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles is one of the largest race-related rebellions of the civil rights era, leaving thirty dead and more than one thousand injured.

1966

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a Black Power political organization, is founded in Oakland, California.

1967

Racial violence erupts in cities across the country—including Atlanta, Detroit, and New York—in what is called the “long, hot summer.”

1967

The Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia strikes down laws that prohibit interracial marriage.

1967

Ruby Dee, Julian Mayfield, and Jules Dassin cowrite the screenplay for Uptight (1968).

1967

With the release of To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Sidney Poitier becomes the number one box-office draw.

1968

Melvin Van Peebles’s La permission (The Story of a Three-Day Pass) is released.

1968

On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by a white segregationist. Violence erupts across many US cities.

1969

Charles Burnett directs his first short, Several Friends, while studying film at UCLA. Shot in cinema verité style, it features nonprofessional actors.

1969

The photographer Gordon Parks directs The Learning Tree, the first studio film helmed by a Black director.

1969

Following the Watts uprising of 1965 and continued social unrest, a group of students of color at UCLA petition for the creation of an Ethno-Communications initiative. Several students from this program, part of a group now known as the L.A. Rebellion, would go on to create neorealist-style films.

1969

A documentary following boxer Muhammad Ali, Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee, is released.

1970

Robert Goodwin begins a crowdfunding campaign to direct the blaxploitation drama Black Chariot (1971).

1970

Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man is released, leading Columbia Pictures to offer Van Peebles a three-film contract, which he declines.

1970

Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem is released. Shot primarily on location in Harlem, it utilized local actors as extras.

1970

Sounder (1972), starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield, begins shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after racial tensions in Georgia cause the producers to shift the location. Tyson and Winfield would go on to earn Academy Award nominations for acting.

1971

The documentary King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis (1970), which chronicles Martin Luther King’s nonviolent civil rights campaign, is nominated for an Academy Award.

1971

On July 6, Louis Armstrong, influential musician, dies.

1971

Melvin Van Peebles writes, produces, distributes, and stars in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The film, advertised with the tag line “Rated X by an all-white jury” becomes one of the highest-grossing independent films of the era.

1971

The Congressional Black Caucus is formed.

1971

Gordon Parks’s Shaft is released. Isaac Hayes goes on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Theme from Shaft.”