African American images first appeared on the screen in 1898, only months after the first theatrical projection of moving images. At first benign in their effect, the earliest films showed black soldiers embarking for the Spanish-Cuban-American War and West Indians at their daily tasks. In 1903 a 14-minute Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared. Thereafter, as editing for narrative effect improved, black figures fell more in line with the racial stereotypes of the day, appearing as chicken thieves, venal preachers, and the like. They only rarely turned up in marginally authentic roles in films such as The Fights of Nations (1907), which at least depicted black culture, albeit in a warped form. As the 50th anniversary of the Civil War approached in 1910, collective nostalgia for the war inspired maudlin tales of fraternity. Black slaves, once the focus of the combat, were reduced to sentimental figures who often sided with their Southern masters against their Northern liberators. The most renowned and artistically the most compelling of the genre was D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). The first steps toward a specifically black cinema arose out of these rituals of white chauvinism. Bill Foster, an African American whose work has been lost, made such films as The Railroad Porter, probably a light comedy set in a particularly black milieu in 1912. The Birth of a Race (1918), two years in the making and perhaps three hours in length, began as a response to Griffith's film. But its succession of producers and backers, including Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee circle, Universal Pictures, and Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck, lost touch with the original concept. Nonetheless, it inspired George P. Johnson and his brother, Noble, to found the Lincoln Motion Picture Company to carry forward the quest for a black cinema, only to fail because of a nationwide influenza epidemic that shuttered theaters.

After World War I the American movie industry gradually moved to California - to Hollywood. The ensuing Jazz Age offered little new to African Americans. Few movies offered blacks parts with any authenticity. Such parts included the grizzled hobo in Jim Tully's tale of the lowly, Beggars of Life (1928); the seaman boldly played by the boxer George Godfrey in James Cruze's Old Ironsides (1926); the faithful renderings of blacks in Showboat (1927) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927); and those in early sound films such as Dudley Murphy's St. Louis Blues (1929). However, blacks generally played out conventional roles as chorus girls, convicts, racetrack grooms, boxing trainers, and flippant servants.

The sameness of the images surely led to the first boom of race movies that were made by black, and often white, producers specifically for black audiences. George and Noble Johnson made as many as four such films that were black versions of already defined Hollywood genres - success stories, adventures, and the like - all of them since lost. In Philadelphia the Colored Players crafted a canon, most of which survived in the late 1990s, that included a Paul Laurence Dunbar story, a black Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926), and their masterpiece, The Scar of Shame (1927), a melodrama about caste and class in black circles.

Of all African American filmmakers of the era, Oscar Micheaux dominated his age. A sometime Pullman porter (see Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters), homesteader, and novelist who sold his books door to door, he was also a legendary entrepreneur who both broke with and built on Hollywood genres. More than any other known figure, Micheaux took up themes that Hollywood left untouched: lynching, black success myths, and color-based caste. For years there was scant access to his work: there was only Body and Soul (1924), starring the black athlete, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. But his recently rediscovered films of equal stature, among them Within Our Gates (1920) and The Symbol of the Unconquered (1921), have allowed fuller study.