Chicago, 1898: How a 29-Second Film Preserved a Lost World of Black America

Two vaudeville performers stepped before a camera in Chicago in 1898. The film they made survived. Almost everything around them did not.

Image: “Something Good — Negro Kiss,” starring Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle, was released in 1898. National Library of Norway.

The camera began turning somewhere in Chicago in 1898.

The studio was small. A painted backdrop hung behind the performers, its canvas wrinkled from repeated use. The lamps required to expose the film filled the room with heat and cast a hard white light across the set. Near the camera, the air carried the faint smell of oil, dust, and hot metal. The machine itself was not much to look at—a wooden box mounted on a tripod, operated by a man standing just beyond the frame. Motion pictures were still a novelty then, more curiosity than industry, and there was little reason for anyone in the room to believe that what was about to be recorded would survive beyond its immediate purpose.

A man adjusted his jacket. A woman straightened her dress.

The signal came.

The man reached for her hand. She pulled away playfully. He stepped closer. She laughed. Their shoulders touched. They swayed together for a moment, and then they kissed. Not hurriedly, not self-consciously, not as though they were doing something forbidden. A smile followed. Then another kiss.

Twenty-nine seconds later, the film ended.

The man was Saint Suttle. The woman was Gertie Brown. Today their names survive largely in theater advertisements, entertainment notices, and scattered references in newspapers. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, audiences throughout the Midwest knew them as performers. Together with John and Maud Brewster, they formed a touring vaudeville act known as The Rag-Time Four. Advertisements billed Suttle and Brewster as the “Blackville Twins” and promoted Brown and Maud Brewster as “their best girls.” The troupe carried songs, comedy routines, and dance performances across a region increasingly tied together by railroads and commercial entertainment.

Like thousands of performers at the turn of the century, they lived according to train schedules. A successful engagement in one city might lead to another several hundred miles away. A week that began in St. Louis could end in Cincinnati, then continue to Indianapolis, Milwaukee, or Chicago. The railroads connected the country, but they did not erase its racial boundaries. A Black performer arriving in an unfamiliar town could not assume there would be a hotel room available, a restaurant willing to serve a meal, or even a safe place to spend the night. Missing a train connection might mean hours in a station waiting room or a long walk through unfamiliar streets searching for a boarding house that accepted Black guests.

None of those realities appeared on the posters pasted outside theaters.

The advertisements promised laughter, dancing, songs, and novelty. They showed smiling performers beneath elaborate lettering and announced evenings of entertainment. They said nothing about carrying costumes from station to station, waiting for delayed trains after midnight, or learning which hotels accepted Black travelers and which streets were best avoided after dark. The audience saw the stage. The performers experienced everything surrounding it.

Among the routines audiences expected from The Rag-Time Four was the cakewalk, a dance whose history stretched back beyond vaudeville, beyond emancipation, and into the slave quarters of the antebellum South. There, enslaved men and women organized contests in which couples paraded before one another in exaggerated displays of elegance and refinement. Participants strutted, bowed, posed, and performed elaborate gestures that mimicked the manners of slaveholders. White observers often saw only amusement. The performers understood something else. The dance was a parody hidden inside a performance. It mocked power while appearing to celebrate it.

Image: Cover of Old Jasper’s Cake Walk (1899), words and music by Saint Suttle. Courtesy of the Music Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5a526d80-c595-012f-9eb9-58d385a7bc34?canvasIndex=0

What began in slavery survived emancipation. The cakewalk moved from plantations to traveling shows, from traveling shows to vaudeville stages, and from vaudeville stages into the growing world of American popular entertainment. By the 1890s audiences across the country applauded routines whose origins reached back into bondage. Many never recognized what they were watching. The dance had traveled so far from its beginnings that its original meaning was difficult to see. Even Suttle helped carry the tradition forward, composing a song called Old Jasper’s Cake Walk and contributing to the transformation of a plantation satire into a form of modern entertainment.

Yet the success of performers like Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown unfolded within an industry shaped by a very different tradition.

For generations American audiences had crowded into theaters to watch white performers in blackface. Night after night, from Boston to New Orleans, actors darkened their faces with burnt cork and stepped onto stages where Black life was transformed into caricature. The details varied. The conclusions rarely did. Black people were portrayed as lazy, foolish, childlike, or incapable. Millions of Americans encountered these images so frequently that they ceased to appear artificial. The caricature became familiar. The familiar became ordinary. The ordinary became reality.

By the time Suttle and Brown entered vaudeville, they were working within an entertainment world already shaped by those assumptions. The contradiction appeared even in the advertisements that promoted them. At times they were billed as “The Two Real Ragtime Coons,” a title that reflected the racial expectations of the marketplace. Managers used the language because audiences recognized it. Audiences recognized it because decades of minstrelsy had taught them to do so.

Yet while one America watched caricatures, another was building something different.

Black churches sponsored concerts. Mutual aid societies organized performances. Black newspapers reviewed traveling acts. New theater circuits emerged. Performers developed networks that connected Richmond to Baltimore, Philadelphia to Washington, Pittsburgh to Chicago. The opportunities remained uncertain, the pay inconsistent, and the barriers substantial, but a distinct world of Black entertainment was taking shape. Suttle and Brown moved through that world, carrying with them songs, dances, jokes, and traditions that had survived slavery, emancipation, and the disappointments that followed.

Those disappointments were becoming increasingly visible by 1898.

Across the South, the promise of Reconstruction was receding. Mississippi officials administered literacy tests and poll taxes designed to reduce Black voting. Other states followed similar paths. Railroad passengers found themselves separated by law. Newspapers warned readers about Black political participation. Photographs of lynchings circulated through the mail. The legal and political architecture of Jim Crow was rising piece by piece across the region.

The distance between that world and the Chicago studio was not great.

A train could cross it in a matter of hours.

Yet it might as well have been an ocean.

The film preserves none of these larger realities directly. It contains no politicians, no legislators, no judges, no mobs. What it preserves instead are things paper often loses: movement, gesture, expression, the slight hesitation before a smile, the ease with which one person turns toward another.

Brown does not lower her eyes.

Suttle does not perform servility.

Neither appears frightened.

Neither appears ridiculous.

Nothing in the scene seems remarkable.

That is precisely what makes it remarkable.

Elsewhere, Americans were preserving very different images. Confederate monuments rose in public squares. Political cartoons circulated in newspapers. Photographs documented racial violence. Those images survived because institutions considered them important. They fit prevailing narratives about power, race, and the nation itself.

The twenty-nine-second film of Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown survived for different reasons.

Almost by accident.

The reel was stored, misplaced, forgotten. Years passed. Then decades. Presidents came and went. Wars were fought. Neighborhoods rose and disappeared. The names of the performers faded from public memory.

Then, more than a century later, the film surfaced again.

The nitrate strip flickered across a screen.

There they were.

Still smiling.

Elated.

Still reaching for one another.

Still suspended in a moment before the twentieth century fully settled over the country.

For twenty-nine seconds, the film preserves a world that rarely appears in the historical record—not a courtroom, not a legislature, not a battlefield, but a world of train stations and theaters, boarding houses and dressing rooms, audiences gathering beneath electric lights and performers carrying costumes onto railcars bound for the next town. It preserves a world in which the descendants of enslaved people transformed satire into art, art into livelihood, and livelihood into memory.

And it preserves something else as well: a brief moment in which two Black Americans stood before one of the newest technologies on earth and left behind evidence that they had been there, together, long before the nation learned how to remember them.

Video: “Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898) William Selig.” YouTube video, 0:29. Posted on YouTube. Accessed June 15, 2026.

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Intellectual Map

Primary Sources

Black Film Center & Archive. Something Good—Negro Kiss. 1898. Digitized motion picture. https://blackfilmarchive.com/Something-Good-Negro-Kiss

Mississippi Constitutional Convention. Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Mississippi, Held at Jackson, Mississippi, August–November 1890. Jackson, MS.

https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/mississippi-constitution-of-1890

New York Public Library, Music Division. “Old Jasper’s Cake Walk.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 15, 2026. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5a526d80-c595-012f-9eb9-58d385a7bc34

New York Clipper. Various issues, 1897–1900. Illinois University Digital Newspaper Collection.

https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=NYC

The Freeman (Indianapolis, IN). Various issues, 1895–1900. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn82016211/?st=calendar

United States Census Bureau. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1901/dec/vol-01-population.html

https://archive.org/details/b32182661_0003/page/n6/mode/1up

Wells, Ida B. A Red Record. Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm

Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. The New York Age, June 25, 1892.

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/southern-horrors-lynch-law-in-all-its-phases-by-ida-b-wells-1892/

Secondary Sources

Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

https://archive.org/details/chicagosnewnegro0000bald/page/n1/mode/1up

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

https://archive.org/details/racereunion00davi

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935.

https://archive.org/details/blackreconstruct0000dubo

Emery, Lynne Fauley. Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970. Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books, 1972.

https://archive.org/details/blackdanceinunit00emer

Field, Allyson Nadia. Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. https://www.dukeupress.edu/uplift-cinema

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780060158514

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin Press, 2019.

Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

https://archive.org/details/landofhope00jame

Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

https://archive.org/details/historyofafrican0000hill

Krasner, David. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.

Krasner, David, ed. African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

https://archive.org/details/troubleinmindbla0000litw_x9o3

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

https://archive.org/details/lovetheftblackfa0000lott

Mahar, William J. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

https://archive.org/details/behindburntcorkm00will

Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816–1960. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

https://archive.org/details/profilesofafrica0000pete

Riis, Thomas L. Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

https://archive.org/details/justbeforejazzbl00riis

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

https://archive.org/details/musicofblackamer00sout

Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010. https://archive.org/details/warmthofothersun0000wilk/warmthofothersun0000wilk

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

https://archive.org/details/strangecareerofj0000unse