In 2017, Doris Berger, head of curatorial affairs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, was poking around the archives when she came upon the Edward Mapp collection, a cache of 1,200 posters and manuscript materials related to African American film. The discovery was a revelation: posters and lobby cards from films by studios like the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, considered the country’s first all-Black film production house, and the Chicago-based Micheaux Film Corporation. Growing up in Austria, Berger had never heard of these films, let alone seen their full-color posters. “I was blown away by the imagery of a film noir, or a western, with an all-Black cast,” she says. “I had no idea that existed in the ’40s.”
“Black film,” Berger says, “did not start with Black Panther.”
Since the premiere of the first big-budget blockbuster in America—the virulently racist , in 1915—Hollywood has not been a welcoming place for African Americans. Indeed, the posters Berger was looking at came from a time when African American directors and producers, shunned by the mainstream film industry, set out to create their own “separate cinema” in places like Chicago and Atlanta and Kansas City. At
