First Black person to appear in a film

Q: Who was the first Black person to appear in a film?
Quincy G.
~Pontiac, Michigan

The history of early cinema includes many “firsts,” but identifying the first Black person to appear in a film requires both curiosity and caution. Much of the earliest motion picture experimentation is undocumented or lost. Some historians believe that Louis Le Prince’s Black servant may have appeared in one of Le Prince’s 1880s film tests—predating Thomas Edison’s studio experiments—but no footage survives to confirm this.

By the mid-1890s, Edison’s Black Maria Studio in New Jersey was producing some of the first American motion pictures. Short films such as The Barber Shop and Dancing Darkey (1894–1895) included unnamed Black performers, often in roles that reflected the racial stereotypes of the era. These films were viewed through the Kinetoscope, a single-person motion picture viewer that predated modern movie projection.

The earliest surviving film to feature identifiable Black performers in a dignified and affectionate manner is Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898). Produced in Chicago by William Selig, the short features vaudeville performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, who share a playful, tender kiss. In less than twenty seconds, the film defies the racist caricatures that would dominate cinema for decades, offering instead a joyful glimpse of Black love and humanity at the dawn of film history.

Something Good – Negro Kiss stands today as both a historical artifact and a cultural statement. It challenges viewers to reconsider how race and representation were encoded into the foundations of American visual culture.

 We value questions like this one because they allow us to uncover forgotten histories, challenge assumptions about race and representation, and deepen our understanding of how African Americans have shaped, and been shaped by, the visual culture of the United States.

~David Pilgrim
Jim Crow Museum
2025