A “Picayune Entertainment”: African American Women and Early American Film Exhibition

African American women integrated cinema into their efforts to consolidate black social bonds and institutions along the pathways of turn-of-the-century black migration. After the end of Radical Reconstruction, black women sought new ways of generating publicity, promoting their ideas, and raising money in order to strengthen the institutions that stood at the center of black life—the church, the school, and the lodge. At the same time, however, hundreds of thousands of black migrants were leaving the rural hinterland for small towns and cities across the South and West. At this curious juncture when African Americans were looking inward and expanding outward all at once, black women—who were active entrepreneurs, more likely to migrate to southern cities than their male counterparts, and more apt to attend church—realized moving pictures could be used as a tool for collective racial progress. Carrying their film exhibitions across the same railways that structured turn-of-the-century black migration, black women traveled across the church and lodge circuit with their moving picture shows. Women also helped organize and run moving picture exhibitions, which raised money for the operation of black churches and the construction of church edifices that staked claim to urban space in the Jim Crow city.