Peter P. Jones was already an established photographer — his subjects included Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry O. Tanner, and performer Bert Williams — when he established a film company in Chicago in 1914. He filmed vaudeville acts, the 1915 National Half Century Exposition and Lincoln Jubilee, and documentaries chronicling contemporary Black social organizations and community life, at a moment when almost no film camera in America was pointed at Black life with anything but contempt.
In 1915, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became the most commercially successful film America had yet produced. Jones responded directly: his 1916 film Re-Birth of a Nation was conceived, according to film historians, as a direct rebuttal — one of the earliest organized Black cinematic responses to Griffith, alongside Emmett J. Scott’s The Birth of a Race (1918).
What set Jones apart from his Black-owned peers was his financing. According to a front-page Chicago Defender story, Jones funded his company with capital raised from South American investors — an estimated $100,000 — making him likely the first Black filmmaker to structure an international coproduction, with his films shown in both the United States and Brazil. His company operated from an office at 3849 State Street in Chicago.
Jones later attempted to expand to New York, establishing the Seminole Film Producing Company, but it never completed its planned first project, an adaptation of a Jesse Shipp story called Shadows and Sunshine. Like most of the earliest Black film ventures, Jones’s company did not survive long against thin capital, segregated distribution, and an industry actively organized to exclude it.