Ted Sarandos

Miky Lee

Kimberly Steward

Jim Gianopulos

Patricia Bellinger Balzer

Jason Blum

Arnaud Boetsch

Laura Dern

David Dolby

Sidonie Seydoux Dumas

Sid Ganis

Olivier de Givenchy

Ray Halbritter

Tom Hanks

Dawn Hudson

Bill Kramer

David Linde

Eva Longoria

Ryan Murphy

Dominic Ng

Katherine L. Oliver

Alejandro Ramírez Magaña

David Rubin

Regina K. Scully

Emma Thomas

Kevin Yeaman

Doris Berger

Donald Bogle

Cara Caddoo

Rhea L. Combs

Terri Simone Francis

Michael Boyce Gillespie

Whoopi Goldberg

J. Raúl Guzmán

Shola Lynch

Ron Magliozzi

Ellen C. Scott

Jacqueline Stewart

Gary Dauphin

Lauren Girard

Erwin Hines

Yosuke Kitazawa

Kit Masaracchia

Adriana Siu de Olaso

Emily Rauber Rodriguez

Mike Schiro

Agnes Stauber

Chandini Tirunagaru

Connor Uretsky

Mike Vazquez

Savannah West

Dan Yalg

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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

Bertha Regustus stars in the Edison comedy short Laughing Gas.

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

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.”

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

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Bert Williams stars in Darktown Jubilee, his screen debut.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vaudeville performer Bert Williams dies.

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.”

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.

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.

Duke Ellington first performs at the Cotton Club.

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

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

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).

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Josephine Baker stars in Princess Tam Tam.

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.

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

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).

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Louis Armstrong stars alongside the vocalist Billie Holiday in New Orleans

Something Good Negro Kiss

Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey in Lime Kiln Club Field Day (dir. Edwin Middleton, T. Hays Hunter, 1913), film stills. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.

Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey in Lime Kiln Club Field Day

Louise Beavers in Reform School (dir. Leo C. Popkin, 1939), film still. Courtesy Academy Film Archive.

Fredi Washington (center) and Duke Ellington and his band in Black and Tan (1929). Core Collection, Production Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences


Fredi Washington (center) and Duke Ellington and his band in Black and Tan (1929)

Bill Robinson and Lena Horne in Stormy Weather (1943). Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Sidney Poitier with Diahann Carroll in Paris Blues (1961)

I am Somebody

Covering the approximate time span of the exhibition, this chronology includes important moments in cinema history.This compilation of events was developed primarily by using exhibition catalogues, film history texts, newspaper articles, anthologies, and archival documents in order to provide a broad framework and understanding of the film activity of the period.

No Image Available 

Covering the approximate time span of the exhibition, this chronology includes important moments in cinema history.

Timeline

Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971 is the recipient of the 2018 Sotheby’s Prize. The Sotheby’s Prize was founded to support and encourage museums to break new ground by recognizing curatorial excellence and facilitating an upcoming exhibition that explores overlooked or underrepresented art history. The Sotheby’s Prize was awarded by a jury of museum curators and directors comprising Sir Nicholas Serota, Donna De Salvo, Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), Connie Butler, Emilie Gordenker, and chaired by Allan Schwartzman.

Regeneration is made possible in part by major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Technology solutions generously provided by Christie®.

Lead support provided by Campari® and J. P. Morgan Private Bank.

Generous support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and Octavia Spencer.

Accompanying exhibition catalogue supported in part by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

Academy Film Archive restorations are funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation.

Academy Museum Digital Engagement Platform sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies.