History
The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was founded in Omaha, Nebraska, which had built up a black community, mostly of workers attracted to its industrial jobs. The brothers George and Noble Johnson founded the company in the summer of 1915 to produce films for African-American audiences. Noble was a small-time actor, and George worked for the post office in a federal civil service job. In 1915, Noble Johnson became president of the company; Clarence A. Brooks, secretary; Dr. James T. Smith, treasurer, and; Dudley A. Brooks was assistant secretary. Lincoln Films quickly built a reputation for making films that showcased African-American talent in the full sphere of cinema. In less than a year the company relocated to Los Angeles.
On 20 January 1917, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was incorporated in California with a capitalization of $75,000. At the time, the officers of the company were Noble M. Johnson, president;Dr. James Thomas Smith, who was the vice-president and treasurer; Clarence A. Brooks, secretary; Dudley A. Brooks, assistant secretary; and Willes O. Tyler, attorney. The only white member of the organization was Harry Gant, cameraman, a personal friend of Noble Johnson who had worked with him at Universal Pictures. Noble Johnson kept his job at Universal and operated Lincoln on the side. In 1918, his brother George P. Johnson became general booking manager handling all correspondence and newspaper advertising.
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“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)