Before there was a Lincoln Motion Picture Company or a Micheaux Film Corporation, there was William D. Foster. Writing sports and entertainment coverage for the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers under the pen name “Juli Jones,” Foster spent years covering Black vaudeville and theater before deciding, in 1910, to make films himself. He founded the Foster Photoplay Company in Chicago — the first film production company in the United States established and owned by an African American.
Foster recruited his cast directly from Chicago’s Black vaudeville scene, drawing on his connections as a booking agent at the Pekin Theatre, the city’s first Black-owned theater. His first film, The Railroad Porter (released 1912 or 1913, sources differ), starred former Pekin performers Lottie Grady and Howard Kelly in a slapstick comedy about a Pullman porter, his wife, and a case of mistaken identity. It is credited as the world’s first film with an entirely Black cast and Black director — and it is also credited as the first Black newsreel, since surviving descriptions note it incorporated footage of a YMCA parade. Foster followed it with The Fall Guy, The Butler, and The Grafter and the Maid, all released in 1913, and later The Barber (1916).
Foster understood exactly what he was up against. Writing about the opportunity Black filmmaking represented, he argued: “If our colored people with an interest in the race at heart, would pool their money, stop fighting each other, and get down to business, they would not only reap unlimited returns, but would do the race a great service.” The pooling never came at the scale he needed. Distribution remained the company’s fatal weakness — like nearly every early race-film company, Foster had no regular network of theaters willing to book his work, and his films played only limited runs in Chicago and New York before disappearing. By 1917, Foster had shut the company down. None of his films are known to survive today.
Foster spent the following decade moving between ventures — selling sheet music, working for a Haitian coffee company, returning to journalism at the Chicago Defender — and made one more unsuccessful attempt to restart a film company. But the company he built in 1910, on almost no capital, set the template every Black-owned film company that followed would use: recruit from Black theater, self-finance, and fight a losing distribution battle against an industry built to exclude you. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, founded five years later, followed directly in Foster’s path.