In February 1915, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation premiered to unprecedented commercial success and was screened at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson. The film glorified the Ku Klux Klan and cemented degrading racial caricatures as the dominant vocabulary of American cinema for a generation. That was the film industry in 1915: a booming new art form built in part on the deliberate dehumanization of Black people, with virtually no Black ownership, authorship, or on-screen dignity anywhere in it.
One year later, in Omaha, Nebraska, two Black brothers decided the correct response to a film was another film. Noble Johnson, a working actor already appearing in mainstream Hollywood pictures, and his brother George Perry Johnson, a postal clerk, founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company on May 24, 1916 — the first film production company in the United States owned, operated, and financed entirely by African Americans. Noble handled directing and starring roles from Los Angeles. George ran booking, distribution, and marketing from the den of his rented house in Omaha. A 1917 Chicago Defender item captured what made the company unusual even among its Black-owned peers: “There is only one race film company worthy of the name… It is distinctly a Racial proposition, owned, operated and financed by our people only — not a white person even being allowed to own one share of stock.”
The company completed five films between 1916 and 1921. The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916) followed a Tuskegee Institute engineering graduate finding work in California’s oil fields — a story of professional achievement rarely afforded Black characters on screen. The Trooper of Troop K (1917) dramatized a real 1916 massacre of Black soldiers in the Army’s 10th Cavalry. A Man’s Duty followed in 1919. Because most white-owned theaters would not book Black-produced films, Lincoln’s work was shown instead in churches, schools, and the small handful of “Colored Only” theaters that existed — the films existed and were well-made, and still had almost nowhere to legally be seen by the audiences they were made for.
The company did not survive its own founder’s success. Noble Johnson’s dual life — leading a Black-owned studio while building a career as a contract player at Universal Pictures — became untenable after white theater owners complained to Universal that his Lincoln films were pulling business away from their screens. Universal pressed Johnson to choose. He gave up Lincoln’s presidency in 1918. Later management, seeking capital the founders could no longer supply, accepted financial backing from a white investor to fund the company’s final film, By Right of Birth (1921) — a compromise on the all-Black-ownership principle the Chicago Defender had specifically praised. It is also documented that Lincoln, like much of the race-film industry of its era, favored lighter-complexioned Black actors in its casting. The company closed by 1923.
Lincoln’s importance rests less on its five films than on what it proved possible: that Black-owned capital, Black creative control, and a Black distribution network could exist as a coordinated business, independent of white studios, within a decade of Birth of a Nation. It set a direct precedent for Oscar Micheaux’s Micheaux Film Corporation and the wider race-film era that followed. In February 2026, Howard University graduate Brennan DuBose publicly relaunched the Lincoln Motion Picture name, calling it “an act of visionary restoration.”