Johnson, Noble and George

Little is known about the early lives or later years of Noble Mark Johnson (April 18, 1881–January 9, 1978) and George Perry Johnson (October 29, 1885–October 17, 1977), two brothers who in 1916 founded Lincoln Motion Pictures, the second black American film company. The brothers were raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado (Noble was born in Missouri, before the family moved to Colorado). Noble Johnson first worked as an actor in Philadelphia, while George attended Hampton Institute, in Hampton, Virginia, before moving to Oklahoma, where he worked at one of the region's early black newspapers in 1906. After moving to Tulsa, he produced the Tulsa Guide, another early black regional newspaper, and then became the first black clerk at the Tulsa post office.

At the time that they founded Lincoln Motion Pictures, George Johnson was working as a mailman in Omaha, Nebraska, and his brother was playing bit parts in Universal Studios films. They formed the studio, which was among the earliest Hollywood film companies, in order to avoid the financial domination of whites in the film industry and to protest the racist attitudes embodied in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Noble ran Lincoln's studio in Los Angeles, while George Johnson continued to work as a postman in Lincoln, Nebraska, directing the company's booking office there.

The company was one of the first independent film companies to make black films with black financing for black audiences, offering black actors and actresses some of the era's few opportunities to play characters other than servile domestics or heartless villains. Lincoln made about one film per year between 1915 and 1922, including The Realization of a Negro's Ambition (1916), The Trooper of Troop K (1916), and A Man's Duty (1921), all of which starred Noble Johnson. Despite large turnouts and excited responses in some cities, the company never gained a big enough audience for its films and lacked a national distribution system. This, combined with a depression that followed World War I, led to the company's failure in 1921.

Even before Lincoln Motion Pictures closed, George Johnson had started an informal news service devoted to black films and filmmakers. Eventually, he moved to Hollywood, changed his name to George Perry, and turned what had been at first a simple collection of newspaper clippings into the Pacific Coast Bureau, which documented production and financial activities and spread gossip about dozens of black film companies. George Johnson gave his archive to the University of California and completed an oral history there before his death in 1977.

After the demise of Lincoln Motion Pictures, Noble Johnson continued to work in film. He acted in many prominent films of the 1920s and 1930s, including Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), Ben Hur (1925), and King Kong (1933), but almost always in the "exotic" roles, such as that of the Native American, African, Latino, or Asian "primitive." He also appeared in Tropic Fury (1939), The Desert Song (1943), and North of the Great Divide (1950) before retiring in 1950.

See also Film in the United States, Contemporary

Bibliography

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Diawara, Manthia, ed. Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Leab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston: Secker and Warburg, 1975.

michael paller (1996)