Interview of George P. Johnson

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: ONE, SIDE ONE (JULY 11, 1967)

JOHNSON

[I was brought up] without a mother, turned over by an uneducated father to an uneducated widowed Negro servant in a rich white man's home to be raised. I was raised for twelve years in that environment. The whites took no particular interest in me except to allow me to live in their home, sleep in their servant's room and, in most cases, eat alone with the servants. Sundays and holidays we ate the main meal with them and attended prayers each day following the evening meal. They had a hired man, white, so I had no work to do. All the neighbors were rich white families, so we lived in an exclusive neighborhood about five miles from the city. All my playmates, girls and boys, were white. We walked to school about two miles, and only one or two colored were in the entire grade school. Sundays Mrs. [Nancy] Turner, the servant, and I went in the carriage to the Presbyterian Church about ten miles in the city. It was a small church, all white, across the fields about five miles away. As I grew larger I went to Sunday school there and now I have a Bible I won for learning the Ten Commandments. My father, two brothers, and one sister still lived in the house in which I was born; we could see it across the fields about two miles away. My father had a race track and big stables. He kept and trained from five to twenty-five race horses belonging to the millionaires of the city. That was the only reason he as a Negro could live in that neighborhood. He raised his three babies, two, four and six years old, alone, with maybe occasional help, until grown. My two brothers became expert horsemen. My father took four and five of the best horses on the train in the baggage cars to the big races each year in Cleveland, Terre Haute, and other big cities. Virgel, my oldest brother, had charge of the track and from three to five white hired hands. None of the family ever came around our house, but sometimes Mrs. Turner would take me on a visit to my father's. That's the only time I saw or was with colored people until about ten or eleven years old. While with the De La Vergnes (that was these people's name), I never read anything or saw a Negro paper or magazine; nothing was ever said about negroes. Mrs. Turner had colored friends uptown but none ever came to our house. Neither did my father, brother, or sister. Every other year or so the De La Vergnes would close up the house and go to look at their sugar plantations in Hawaii. Mrs. Turner would get a job while they were away in some other millionaire's home nearby, taking me with her. One was the O'Brien's home --- they owned a big hardware and harness shop uptown, as in those days all rich people had horses, and some poor also. The O'Briens also ran a chicken ranch and dairy, and I used to collect eggs by the thousands. I would churn with a big Newfoundland dog on a treadmill. Their peacocks would stray away and I would have to hunt all over the neighborhood to find them. Another home was that of the Kirkwoods close by. He was a big official, like a presiding elder, of the Presbyterian Church for a big district. He had two grown boys, married with families, in nearby homes; another boy about sixteen who was killed skating, breaking through the ice and drowning (we used to skate at night by the light of the big bonfire); a girl in high school; another by near my age, Marion. Mrs. Turner and I had one bedroom. Mrs. Kirkwood looked after the house. Mrs. Turner did the cooking, washing and ironing and Marion and I brought in the coal and kindling. We went to school together and played together, attended parties together. Mrs. Turner would make a chocolate cake and put in white icing "for Marion and George." The games would be in the neighborhood homes, kissing games and so forth, all of which I attended and never heard the word "Negro" at any time. But around the house Mrs. Kirkwood would come out and get Marion and make him practice piano an hour each day and then go over his lessons with him. But they never helped me and let me play out until dark. When I was with the De La Vergnes a Mr. Ed De La Vergne, a brother who was a millionaire with mines in Cripple Creek, who later became a state senator and who lived in the city, got married. (In 1921 or '22, when in the motion picture business I stopped by the Springs on one of my trips and visited Ivywild where I was born, the house I was born in, the Kirkwood home and the De La Vergne home.)

DIXON

Before we go any farther would you tell me on the tape your full name, please, and when you were born.

JOHNSON

My name is George Perry Johnson and I was born October 29, 1885.

DIXON

And that was in Colorado Springs?

JOHNSON

That was in Colorado Springs.

DIXON

What was your father's name?

JOHNSON

My father's name was Perry Johnson. One brother was named Virgel and the other was named Noble -- Noble was the one [Noble M. Johnson] that later became quite a movie star.

DIXON

And your sister's name?

JOHNSON

My sister's name was Iris. A few years later, when I got too large to be staying with Mrs. Turner, they sent me to my father to live. He at that time had moved and had another racetrack in a different part of town. I lived there about two years. I went to high school in Colorado Springs, riding a horse three miles every day to school. That's the first time I had ever lived with my own family. One day Mr. De La Vergne sent for me and I went to see him. He said, "I want to take you to the library." We went to the library and he showed me a book of Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute. Then he showed me another book of Hampton Institute, Virginia where Booker T. graduated from, and he said they thought they'd send me there. Marion Kirkwood and I had gone to high school together — we ate together at noon and we both had plans of going to high school (I was in the tenth grade) and going to Colorado College, which is in Colorado Springs, and becoming lawyers. But being ignorant, I knew nothing of conditions and so they bundled me up and gave me a basket of food and put me on the train and sent me to Hampton, Virginia, which was probably the worst thing they could have possibly done. They forgot to realize that Hampton, Virginia is in the Deep South. The teachers were white but all the students were colored students, and mostly dark southern. Hampton was formed the same as Tuskegee, with the idea of training southern Negroes in the three R's with the intention of them going back to the South and teaching other Negroes. They did not cater to higher education -- the Negroes that wanted higher education were told to go to Wilberforce College in Ohio and Howard Institute in Washington, D.C. I stayed there four years and graduated in 1904. And in fact I didn't know any more when I left than I did when I went there. I couldn't eat the food. In the summers I would go and work on the Hudson River day line in New York City; I worked at Lake George, New York; and in the hotels of Atlantic City, New Jersey, to make enough money to eat in the restaurant all the rest of the year. The De La Vergnes were only spending 10 dollars a month on my education and I worked as a janitor around on the school grounds to earn the other part of it.

DIXON

You had never been in the South?

JOHNSON

I had never been in the South at all.

DIXON

It must have been a shock to be treated as a Negro.

JOHNSON

Very much of a shock. Everything was different. I couldn't eat the food. It was a military school and at noon you had to form into military formation and march into the diningroom. I would march in, sit down and wait until the blessing was said, and get up and walk out. I couldn't stand blackeyed peas, soggy corn bread, hominy, mushy beans cooked in fat full of saltpeter. I just couldn't stand the food; so in my four years there I worked in the summer to make money to eat in a restaurant the rest of the year. In the meantime the De La Vergnes [would] often, when they went to their sugar plantation in the Hawaiian Islands, come to Los Angeles -- they owned a home on Orange Street in Los Angeles. They would leave Mrs. Turner there and they would go to the Hawaiian Islands. When I graduated my first ambition was to come to California and take Mrs. Turner out of service. I got on the train and I got as far as Topeka, Kansas. My sister was there visiting and she says, "Wait till tomorrow -- your father is coming through here from Colorado going into Oklahoma with a trainload of horses; you haven't seen him in four years so you wait one more day and see him, and you can go with him to Oklahoma and go on to California the southern route." So I did. We stopped first at Claremore, Will Rogers' home, and there was no millionaires there who had horses. So we moved them to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was becoming an oil town and millionaires were just moving in. We located there and my father got several horses. But we got there at the time of year when he generally picked one or two of the best horses and one of his own, rented a baggagecar, put stalls in it, attached it to a passenger train and went east to the big grand circuit races. He had a big stallion that he didn't want to race, so he wanted me to stay there until he got back and take care of that stallion. While I was doing that, I got into a newspaper business and I ran the first Negro newspaper in Indian Territory.

DIXON

What year was this?

JOHNSON

About 1906.

DIXON

You were about twenty-one then.

JOHNSON

Just about, yes. I had just been out of school -- I graduated in 1904, so this is in that interval of time. Then I got into the real estate business. Muskogee was a little town in those days. All the Indian affairs of the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma compose it all — the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee and Creek nations. All that business was handled in Muskogee, Oklahoma, with offices there, which made it a very thriving little town because every Indian and every Negro who had been slaves of Indian, called freedmen, they all had to come there to do business. In the different nations, the newborns got property; in the Creek nations, the newborn freedmen slaves, the children of slaves, freedmen, and the newborn Indians got 160 acres of land apiece; the Cherokee only got thirty. Consequently the Negroes in Oklahoma at that time were quite wealthy. They had thousands and thousands of acres of land and oil wells, and Muskogee was quite a town with the Negroes owning buildings, banks, and things all around there. Then the white people, statehood, came in just about that time, probably about '10, I'd have to look it up exactly, about '10, and all that went to Washington, that was handled in Washington. So Muskogee was just a small country town v/ith all that big business taken away from them. Now the oil wells just commenced coming in and [it] was getting white millionaires now. They wanted to build a town, but they didn't want to do it in Muskogee because to build Muskogee a big town would have made hundreds of Negroes millionaires. They owned too much property around there. You could go out of town and stand on a hill, and as far as your eye could see in three directions was all Negro property. They had lights and theaters and everything downtown. So they decided to make Tulsa the big town. In Tulsa they had them, all cornered off behind a railroad track. [That] is why and how they had the big riot later on in Tulsa -- Tulsa had a very big riot.

DIXON

Were you there at the time?

JOHNSON

No, I had gone then. In Muskogee the government had a school, Tallahassee Mission about ten miles out, that Negro children went to. I met a teacher there -- I used to get on the train and go out Sundays to see her, and after I got off the train I would walk about five miles. Well, I married her later.

DIXON

What was her name?

JOHNSON

Her name was Rosa Dale at that time. I was doing pretty good in the real estate business, the Johnson Investment Company, and I had an office in the Brown Building upstairs right on the main street. But I never could get accustomed to the Jim Crow car that was there. My wife's mother looked like a white woman, her sister was married to a colored fellow that looked like a white fellow, and sometimes when all of us got on the streetcar we'd have trouble with the motorman, the conductor, because the conductor had a sliding sign up in the middle of the car; he'd move it back and forth according to how many colored or how many white was there. Well, the white and colored and Indians were so intermarried in Oklahoma that even one of the state senators was married to a colored woman. There were so many, they had so much trouble, we'd get into fights every time he'd try to separate you. There was five of us, and three of us could get by for white if we wanted to. So I got tired of that and I decided I'd get out of the South entirely and I moved to Omaha, Nebraska.

DIXON

Tell me something more about running your newspaper.

JOHNSON

The newspaper? Well, we ran a little weekly newspaper and I was everything. Now we had it printed at a white plant.

DIXON

You say "we" — were there two of you?

JOHNSON

Well, I had another man, a fellow by the name of W[illiam] L. McKee who was a real estate man, and he had an office and I went in with him. And we'd go to the white plant -- the Tulsa Democrat was a white paper and we had a proposition with them to go to that paper. They printed our paper, and we would take their paper and mark out anything in there we wanted and he'd save that to put in our paper. So that was the news for it. Then I went out and got the Negro news myself around town. Well, that paper ran about five or six years and was circulated all over the United States.

DIXON

What was the name of it?

JOHNSON

Tulsa Guide, I have copies here. All over the United States, because everybody was very anxious in them days to hear about Oklahoma and that country, and this was the only [Negro] paper; there was another paper later in Oklahoma City and one in the little colored town of Boley. But they were local papers; I circulated mine all over the United States.

DIXON

Did you sell advertising, too?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, we sold advertising. We had white and colored advertising -- even the white department stores would advertise in there. But I was a greenhorn and I had no organization and I didn't know much about it. And so I dropped it, let it go down; and that was way ahead of the game because that was done before I went to Muskogee. When I got to Muskogee I went into the real estate business. Then I moved to Omaha and we married in Council Bluffs, across the river. I don't know why. Then I decided I'd go in the post office. So I told several colored people around there I was going in the post office. And they said, "No, you're not either. They don't allow no colored folks there. They got two carriers but no clerks, never been a colored clerk in the post office." So then I inquired around, and I said, "Who is in town big enough to tell the postmaster where to get off?" And they said the one man in town was J.L. Brandeis -- he owned the Brandeis Department Store and the biggest theater in town. And so I went to Mr. Brandeis one day and asked him for a job. He looked me over and he said, "l can't use men like you. I don't employ colored clerks, and the kind of job I'd give you you wouldn' t have." I said, "Well, you don't know, Mr. Brandeis — I'm in pretty bad shape, I need some money." He said, "Well, we have a janitor's job." I says, "Well, I'll take it." I took the janitor's job. One of the Brandeis boys (they had three boys) one of them went down in the Titanic. But he told me, he said, "Now if you can get anything better, I'll help you. If you can find anything, why, you let me know." So I went and took the post office examination and I stood eighth on the list. And so I went to him one day and said, "Mr. Brandeis, you told me that if I could get anything you'd help me." He said, "Well, what do you got?" I said, "I stand eighth on the list of about fifty in the post office examination and I understand they won't hire Negro clerks in the post office." He said, "Well, what do you want me to do about it?" I said, "Well, I don't know. You told me to come and see you if I got anything, and I just thought maybe you could send the postmaster a little letter and it might be all right." He stopped and thought a few minutes and he called his stenographer over (that was Friday) and he dictated the letter, and I didn't know what was in the letter. But I knew that Monday morning I was called to work. I was the first Negro clerk ever in the Omaha Post Office.

DIXON

How did the other clerks accept you?

JOHNSON

Fine. No trouble at all. I worked up there to the top man in the post office when I left. In those days we carried mail from the post office to the trains in a streetcar. We took all the seats out of the streetcar, gave it a motorman, and I was clerk in charge of the car. I'd put the mail sacks in the car and go three miles to the station, throw them off and pick up some more and bring them back, and run down the main street of town and get off at every corner and take the mail out of the box and put it in the car. I was boss, the motorman had to do what I told him to do. I ran that. And that was from 3:30 to midnight. In the summertime when it was beautiful I'd sit there in the middle of the car with my legs hanging out the door, but in the wintertime I'd sit on top of the stove and like to freeze to death. Thirty below zero. So I was the first Negro clerk ever put in there. Well, I worked there nights, and I lived three or four miles away. In the wintertime the snow would be three feet deep, schools would turn out at four o'clock, the streetcar lines would get snowed under and I'd walk three and four miles, at two and three and four o'clock in the morning, home. You'd work overtime sometimes two and three hours and then I'd have to walk home.

DIXON

Did you ever get frostbitten?

JOHNSON

No, no, I wrapped up pretty good. It wasn't so much cold as it was snow. But the snow packing and trees would fall down and streetcars couldn't get by, and it was just very uncomfortable. Then in the summertime it was 110° in the shade, very hot. I was there [during] the tornado. My wife was just about to have a baby. We lived in a two-story house. It felt sultry all day, and a man looked out the window and he says, "The tornado is coming and it's going to hit us." So I grabbed my wife and carried her down to the basement. And he said, "No, it's going to miss us." But it went through a colored section about ten blocks away and killed hundreds of people and tore down buildings and everything else. But we put on shoes and overcoats and went down there to see it. We had to wade knee-deep in water and the streetcars was laying in the streets, turned over, and all the trees. We got down there and there's twenty-four Negroes in the bottom of a pool hall basement crying and hollering and screaming. The wind was blowing, blew the trees over, and the fire department couldn't get there. It tore a clean path through the town in the white and colored section about two blocks wide — it cleaned out everything except in the colored section. Next morning I went into the white section -- in the white section it caused a suction. We walked through the white section and all the outside of the houses had been pulled off. You could walk along and look at every room in the house; the house didn't go down but it had sucked out the outside sections. That was in Omaha, Nebraska.

DIXON

Was that about 1918?

JOHNSON

Yes, along just about that time. Then at another time they had a riot -- a Negro had, I guess, assaulted a girl or something, but the paper fanned it up for about two weeks. The little paper. The Omaha Bee is the big daily paper -- they didn't say much about it — but there was a little evening paper and they fanned it all up. They put the Negro in the top story in the city hall; the jail was on the top floor. The mayor went up there to try to [stop] the lynchers and they came pretty near close to lynching the mayor. They took this man down about two blocks, on the corner of the post office where I worked (I think that was a Sunday or something, I was off that day), and they burned him alive on the corner right by the post office. Then we heard they was coming out to the colored section and clean that out, so I sent my wife three or four miles away to another home, and us and the fellows around us got guns and all went out on the top of houses and behind billboards and was waiting for them to come out, but they never did come out. That was a bad time then. That's the only place I've ever heard of that. I've heard of lynchings, but they burnt this guy right on the corner. They burned him alive.

DIXON

You said your wife was about to have a baby in that tornado. Did she have it during the tornado?

JOHNSON

No, I'm getting them mixed up. We had two babies a year apart on the same day in the same hospital. In going to school I put my present daughter's age up a year because all the records show a George Johnson had a baby girl in that year. So there was no name, you don't name little babies, so they looked on the record, I said she's six years old, and they looked on the record and they saw I had a baby that year. So I got her in school one year earlier.

DIXON

What happened to the first little girl, did she die?

JOHNSON

She died. My wife couldn't carry them, all of them were seven-month babies; the one living was seven months. We fed her with an eyedropper and held her on a water bottle for quite a while. Didn't think she would ever live. She grew up to be quite a girl. Those are some of the Omaha experiences. I went back there twenty years later, thirty years later, I guess, a few years ago; I went in the post office and I couldn't find a single person in the whole post office that ever knew me, that had ever heard of me. All of the bosses, superintendents, foremen, everybody gone.

DIXON

Why did you go to Omaha?

JOHNSON

Oh, I .just picked. I had always heard of Omaha and Minneapolis were very fine towns for colored people, very little prejudice, you see, and Minneapolis was too cold for me. And so I picked Omaha. There wasn't much real prejudice in Omaha; of course, they have them shut off in one part of towm, but they had nice homes and they got a lot of work, [though] not the main, not the best type of everything. Let's see if there's something else in Omaha. When in the picture business I went to Chicago to a meeting. I said I'd go the Western Pacific because I had a friend born in Grand Junction and I wanted to get off the train there and say I had been in her town. My father used to race in Grand Junction. Grand Junction is a great peach country and Rocky Ford is a great watermelon country, and both of them towns one day a year have races and celebrations. In Rocky Ford they pile waterrnelons in the street box and you can have all you can eat -- cut out the center and throw it away and just eat watermelon all day long for nothing, races and everything. In Grand Junction they do the same thing with peaches. The finest peaches in the world grow in Grand Junction and the finest watermelons in Rocky Ford. They all go to hotels -- you never buy one in the grocery store. So I got on the Western Pacific, and I got off at Grand Junction and walked around and when I got back I [could say] I'd been "in your town." Well, I got into Denver and I got on the train, and then I wanted to stop off and see an old lady in Omaha that I used to live with years ago. She's still living, she's ninety-five years old now. So I stopped off; I went to her house and she hadn't got up, so I left my grips across the street and went back downtown and went into my old post office and looked around, and then I went back after she had got up and I spent the whole day with her. I went down to the train, and in Omaha the station is in two levels. And of course you've got to go through about three or four hands and every hand you go through they've got to examine your ticket (I was going to Chicago, I just laid off for the day). So I went there and they sent me to a certain place and the man examined my ticket and says, "You go over there and go downstairs . " I went downstairs and I showed another man the ticket downstairs and he says, "That's your train over there." Then there's a conductor standing outside of the train and I went there and showed him the ticket, and then the porter came to pick up my bag and I showed him the ticket. So I got in there and the train started going. I said, "Well, I'm going to sit on the left-hand side so I can see the river." The river is just on the other side of Omaha. Council Bluffs is just across the river in lowa. So I was riding and pretty soon I looked up and saw a sign that said "North Platte, Nebraska." Well, I was going the wrong way! I v/as going just where I come from, I was going back to Denver. Oh, boy, I called them conductors things and they had a fit. They said, "How in the world could you do that? That's never been done. You went through five hands and every one of them put you on the wrong train." So they wired ahead where I was going and told them I would be a day late, and wrote back to my wife then. They said to me, "You get into Denver and you go and see the baggagemaster." And I saw him and he said, ''You've got the whole line between here and Chicago all upset -- everybody is telegraphing and phoning and wondering how this could happen. There isn't nothing we can do now, you lie over and you take the night train out, and the train is yours -- you can go in there and eat anything you want and do anything you want, it's yours," I made the mistake of not suing them. I told them that I was on some very important business in Chicago and that one day's delay caused me some trouble. I could have gotten away with it, you see. I didn't do it. But I never got over it. They've been razzing me the rest of my life. "You big stiff, you've been traveling all over the United States and you get lost between Denver [and Chicago]." [laughter] You see, in those days we carried mileage tickets, traveling men. You'd get on anywhere you wanted to and get off mileage. Only trouble then was the daylight-saving time and everywhere you'd be in trouble. I got off at one time in Hannibal, Missouri, to catch a train going to Chicago and mistook the time, and I stood out on a flagstop there all night from about six o'clock at night till about two o'clock in the morning, cold, waiting for the train to come through. I got off at the wrong place.

DIXON

How long were you in Omaha?

JOHNSON

I was in Omaha — I forget now -- about ten to twelve years I guess. I got that credit out here [in the Los Angeles post office] when I went here. Then when I got out here I fooled around in pictures too late. You see, I came out here on a leave, I faked a leave of absence to come out here. (You see, I had got into the picture game -- that's another big tale) I faked a leave of absence and got out here and I stayed too long, and I went to go back and they wouldn't take me back. I had to take a new examination and go into this post office, but I got my credit for my time on my pension. But that's another tale as to how I got Into the picture game.

DIXON

Yes, I think we'll wait to go into that.

JOHNSON

More about the connections and things. But this takes quite a bit of my early life. That had an effect on my future and connects in pretty soon with the part when I get into the picture game. That has always been my trouble. You see, I've been raised, trained, all my habits were white. I talk that, I act that, I was trained that.

DIXON

Yes, your whole thinking.

JOHNSON

One of the main things there was one of my playmates, the same boy playmate I told you about [Marion R. Kirkwood] -- we wanted to go through school [together]. He went through Stanford. He wrote me back In Oklahoma, he wrote me a letter in 1906 when I was in Indian Territory, addressed to the Indian Territory. Looking through my stuff some time ago I found that letter, so I went dovrn to the telephone office and looked in the Palo Alto book and I saw his name, so I took that letter and wrote him a letter and sent that copy of that letter to him in Palo Alto. Oh, boy, he was glad to get it. He had gone through Stanford, become Dean of Law, and been Dean of Law for years and years and retired. He still lives in Stanford. That's his picture [shows picture]. Now here is this letter. 1906. That was when I was with him when he was in high school.

DIXON

Was this at the high school?

JOHNSON

Yes, the high school in Colorado Springs.

DIXON

Was this like ROTC?

JOHNSON

The military section of the high school. Just the cadets, you know. Here's one '06 and '02. That's in Colorado Springs in '02. Now another thing that I didn't know till later on since I've come here is Mrs. Turner and De La Vergne are buried right here in Rosedale Cemetery. I got out to the cemetery, buried right here.

DIXON

Mrs. Turner was a widow?

JOHNSON

She was a widow, yes; she had been a widow a long time. I have her picture somewhere. She just took pity on my mother -- I mean, my mother dying and leaving my father with three kids, you see, little kids, two, four and six, and nothing but men, horses, no women in the house at all. He raised them without any woman. And they just took pity on me -- she asked these people who had her if she could take me in .

DIXON

She must have had a heart as big as all outdoors.

JOHNSON

Yes. The main trouble was she couldn't read or write, see, she was uneducated. Then the De La Vergnes took no particular interest in me. They just permitted me to live in the house and all that, but they didn't teach me to work. They had a big department store uptown, a furniture store. They should have taken me uptown and made me work in the summers. I didn't have to do a nickel's worth of work. I lived ten years without seeing a dollar bill -- I didn't know what money was. I didn't need money, and didn't know what it was.

DIXON

That is a mistake.

JOHNSON

Yes, that was a big mistake. They could have taught me to work and explained to me what the conditions were and what I would be up against as I grew older. But they didn't do that. They had two grown children who lived in my town. Now that's Colorado Springs right there and that's Pikes Peak [refers to picture]. Here are the springs right here at the bottom of Pikes Peak. An automobile road goes up there now. There's the cog road -- that was the only way you could get there. We used to walk all night to get there to see the sunrise in the morning. Now with the automobile road we can get up there in a few minutes. Right down below there in the valley — where Cheyenne Canyon is and the Broadmoor, all millionaires -- right in this valley, that's where we lived. That's where I lived, right in there. It's a beautiful place. The Army is about to take it over, they're building all kinds of stuff there.

DIXON

Did you have any problems when you went to live with your father and brothers, not having really lived with them?

JOHNSON

Yes, yes, quite a bit. Of course, they didn't like me because I was "dumb." Never treated me very nice; you see the other boys had been raised to work. He would go off and leave them, seven, eight years old, to manage five and six white hired hands that he had. He trained them and they were horsemen from, the time they were babies; they were both expert horsemen and they had been taught to work. When I got with him I couldn't do nothing, you see; he expected me to know as much about horses and as much about other things as the other kids did. Well, I didn't know it. He took very little interest in me at all. I had a lot of trouble that way. I was pretty young and could stand it, but they just said, "Well, you're dumb, you don't know nothing." I never lived with him over two years in my life, and you can't train people in a year or two what others have learned all their lives. Both my brothers are expert horsemen, and being horsemen, they learned a lot of good common hard business sense, you see. And I never worked, I never earned a nickel. The first money I ever made in my life [was when] we used to go out after the races -- the barns would be empty, all the horses would leave, and we'd have charge of the track. He'd have ten or fifteen of his horses but all of the other horse barns would be empty. So we'd go down and pick up gunny sacks -- Colorado Springs is a teetotaler town, there's no saloons, and the way they drink there, they go to a drugstore and buy a couple of bottles of beer and then come around in the alley and drink it. My brother and I would go around and stand in the alley with a corkscrew and give them a corkscrew so they would give us the bottles. Well, that's the only way we made some money -- gunny sacks and bottles. What we made money for in the wintertime, we went to Negro minstrels; in the summertime we went to the circuses. That's the only thing to go to in the whole town, you see. Circus day we'd go at five o'clock in the morning and stay all day, go down and see them unload and follow the circuses and be down there all day long. But as I say, I never had any family relationship with any of them, even the brothers and sisters or any of them. I was never very long with any of them.

DIXON

Did your sister stay with your father all of these years?

JOHNSON

No, she married in Tulsa and went to Kansas City to live. She didn't have much time. She lived with him the first ten years of her life, no longer than that, about the first fifteen years of her life. She married young.

DIXON

That must have teen a hard life for her, too.

JOHNSON

Yes, it was. It was quite a hard life because she was with men most all the time. She had to cook. We had four and five hired help, you see, and we generally employed white help because we couldn't find Negro help that knew; anything about horses. So most all our help was white help. I never had nothing to do with horses except when out of racing season our best horses would have to have ten miles of exercise every day. So he'd say, "You go out " (one name was Puerto Rico, a big stallion), "you go out and give Puerto Rico a workout this morning." So I'd go back there, and coming back we'd come over a hill. Well, the hired men would see me coming back and when I got back they'd have another horse hitched -- I'd get out of one sulky and then [exercise] another horse, I'd do that all morning long, giving each horse about ten miles.

DIXON

These were trotting horses?

JOHNSON

These were trotting horses. We never had running horses. Only saddle horses we had. My brother would catch wild ponies and break them, and break up all our croquet sets and teach them how to play polo. All the millionaires played polo, yes, they all played polo. Then we broke horses, too. I remember one time President Arthur lived there after he retired and he had two bobtailed horses and a big surrey, and one horse got a line under his tail and run through a plate glass window in a drugstore downtown. So the next day they brought him out for us to break him. Well we had a cart with a step on behind and long shafts. And then we put two lines that you guide him with and we put a third line on him. My brother would get on and take the lines to guide him with, and I'd get in there with the third line. We went outside the race track -- you had about ten miles of just vacant land there -- so we'd put that extra line under his tail (See, what happened there was, they bobtailed horses and the tail got sore, and the line got under his tail and he squeezed down on it and started running, and they couldn't guide him and he run through a plate glass window down there). So when we got out there I took the line under there, and then we had two lines to guide him with, and he'd start running. We let him run about ten miles till he got all white with sweat and then we'd turn him around and take a whip and whip him ten miles back. Two days of that would break him of that. Then we'd heal up the sore under his tail. Then we'd have other horses to break. We'd take a horse and put him out here on a rope, and then take a piece of rag and tie it halfway out there and shake it up and he'd start running. Then you'd wrap the rope around you and stand like this, and then he hits the end of that rope and he flops over fast. In two days you'd get him so that you could put firecrackers in tin cans under him and they don't run away. In the wintertime the racing season is out, and all you have to do is feed the horses and rub them down and walk them and exercise them, but nothing else to do with them. I was never much of a horseman; I spent two years of my life with my father alone.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: ONE, SIDE TWO (JULY 21, 1967)

JOHNSON

Speaking of my youth in Colorado Springs, I referred to living with my foster mother Nancy Turner who raised me. She worked as a servant in the home of T[homas] C[arter] Kirkwood, a high official in the Presbyterian Synod. The Kirkwood home was a large frame house including acreage not far from the De La Vergne home in which I was raised. The family consisted of a wife, older daughter, a younger son Marion about my age, and two married sons. The De La Vergnes would at various times close up their house and go to Hawaii to see after their sugar plantations. Mrs. Turner and I would move into the Kirkwood home. Mrs. Turner would do the cooking, and all I did was help Marion bring in the coal and kindling for the big base burners. We walked about two miles to the grade school we both attended. We played together and both attended neighborhood parties together, I being the only Negro in the entire community. We went through grade school into high school together and planned to go to Colorado College, also in the Springs, together. But the De La Vergnes sent me to Hampton, and while Marion and I corresponded for years, I have never seen him since. Years later, when I was operating the first Negro weekly newspaper ever established in the Indian Territory, back in 1906 in Tulsa, Marion wrote me a letter dated 5/20/06 from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, where he was attending school. Incidentally, I have that letter and also mine dated 12/16/02 when I was in Virginia at Hampton. Years later, in 1960, I ran across Marion's letter that he had written to me fifty- four years ago. I remember that he was in California at that time. I went down to the telephone office, asked to see their directory of Palo Alto, and looked through it and found the address of Marion. I immediately wrote him a letter which he received and answered, sending me a photo of himself standing on his front porch with a head of hair much whiter than my own. He was graduated from Stanford, [became] Dean of Law at Stanford, retired and now spends most of his time at Stanford. A popular weekly law digest of San Francisco, in the issue of August 5, 1966 prints on its front page, "The current issue of the Stanford Law Review is dedicated to retired Dean Marion Rice Kirkwood." On October 3, 1960 he wrote me the following letter, in part: Dear George, It was a surprise, but a very pleasant one, to hear from you after nearly sixty years. My life hasn't been a very exciting one as we have stayed put most of the time. I graduated from Stanford in 1909, went through law school, finished in 1911. Then I taught a year at the University of Oklahoma in 1912, married Mary Tucker of Colorado Springs, and came back and joined the law faculty at Stanford. I remained a member of the faculty for forty years until I retired in 1952. We were away for one year in 1930/31 at Duke University in North Carolina, and I have taught in the summer at quite a number of law schools all over the country. I still teach one course at Stanford in water law but it only runs for two months. We have two sons — one is an aeronautical engineer and the other a psychiatrist--and four grandchildren ranging in age from one to ten, and another on the way. We see them several times a year and of course take great pleasure in them. We are both quite in good health with only the usual aches and pains of old age. All my family are gone except my brother, Tom, who still lives in Colorado Springs. He is getting on for ninety and is quite well except for crippling arthritis. It was good to hear from you.On one of my trips east I stopped at Colorado Springs, took a car ride to Manitou, and went to Ivywild. This house I was born in, a brick, had been refinished, is still standing and looking far better than it used to. I walked around the De La Vergne home, went to the Kirkvrood home, rang the bell and talked to the new owners, telling her that I once lived there ages ago. When I lived there trains from Denver came in on one side of town and those going to Denver on the other side. Now knowing that, I went to the station in back of the hotel and was standing there waiting for the train when somebody was kind enough to tell me that the trains going to Denver went on the other side. I hailed a taxi and just managed to hit it as it was moving out.Now the Omaha, Nebraska tornado, Easter Sunday, April 23, 1913. On the sultry Easter Sunday, April 23, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, I was living with my wife, who was expecting a baby soon, in the two-story frame home of a retired quartermaster sergeant of the United States Tenth Cavalry in the United States Army. It had been a very hot, quite sultry day, a deathly still Sunday afternoon. Just before dark all of us had retired to an upstairs front bedroom. Glancing out the window the sergeant yelled, "The tornado is coming. Go to the basement at once." I grabbed my wife and was on the basement stairway when he yelled, "Never mind, it's going to miss us." We came back into the room and looked out the window and could see the big black funnel whirling cloud about ten blocks away, tearing its way through a Negro business section on its way across the river headed for the city of Council Bluffs, lowa. As we watched, the lights went out, fires began breaking out in dozens of places, whistles and sirens were blowing and the rain began falling. The sergeant and I put on boots and raincoats and started for the business section. Going dovm the main street on which the car line ran we were soon knee deep in water, climbing over the overturned trees, wires, parts of homes, overturned streetcars, until we finally reached the business corner of 24th and Lake Street. The fury of the tornado had wrecked the theater full of people [and a] two-story brick building in the basement of which was a pool hall in which more than a dozen of the patrons were trapped. We could hear screaming and praying. The fire and police wagons could not reach the scene because of the wires, overturned streetcars and wreckage covering the street, and the broken water mains. Hundreds worked all through the night, pulling people from the wreckage, some dead, others badly injured. The rain was a great blessing and after midnight turned into snow. The next morning we went back again, and things were pretty well under control. We walked about ten miles in the path cut by the tornado, which had torn its way through an exclusive white residential section. In this section not many lives had been lost and no homes were destroyed. A tornado causes a suction and for miles in this section we could walk along the streets and look into all of the rooms of the large fashionable homes, as the suction had caused all the walls to fall outwards leaving all the rooms upstairs and down exposed to view. A tornado does many freakish things--a tombstone weighing fifty pounds was blown four miles; a horse and a buggy hung in a tree; a home was deposited in the middle of the street; a garage was torn from its foundation and hurled bottom side up one hundred yards away and the automobile inside left unharmed. In Omaha alone there were 642 homes destroyed, 1,669 homes wrecked, 6,834 persons left homeless, 115 dead, 352 injured and a five-million dollar property loss.I've got something else here that may be a little interesting. This is about Nikola Tesla's experiments in wireless telegraphy, the first time it was ever done. In about 1898 as a youth in Colorado Springs, Colorado, due to the long hours of twilight after supper, us children would congregate on the street corners under the gas lights that hung high up over the intersections and play games such as "Run, Sheep, Run," "Duck on a Rock," and so forth until the curfew rang us in. I recall that one night we did not play any games, but everyone stood around with his eyes focused on the top of Pikes Peak, the 14,000 foot snowcapped rriountain in plain sight, waiting to see the history-making experiment of the noted scientist Nikola Tesla, who lit a light on the peak from the city without any wires. When the light appeared cheers went up, but none among the hundred or more present realized that it later made history.My father, owner and trainer of harness horses, trotters and pacers belonging to the Cripple Creek gold mine millionaires who lived in the beautiful little town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, nestling at the foot of Pikes Peak, would in the spring and summer rent a baggage car, build stalls in it, attach it to the fast passenger trains and go east, entering the horses in the big grand racing circuit in such cities as Glenns Falls, New York, Peoria, Illinois, Indianapolis, Indiana, and others. At various times he would take one of my older brothers with him and enter two horses in some of the races. He was not only paid the care and training of the horses, but also expenses involved, railroad fare, entrance fee, expressage to and from the depot to the track, meals, lodging, and a percentage of whatever winnings were made. All details were merely jotted down day by day in pocket notebooks and when he returned home, it was my tedious task to do the bookkeeping and making out the various statements to send to each millionaire owner.My father, like most all males in Colorado Springs, had the gold fever. So not content with his profits from racing, he and generally one of my two brothers would leave the horses and stables in charge of the other brother and would outfit themselves with pick, shovels, tent, food and a jackass and head for the gold-mining territory high up in the Rockies near Victor, Independence and Cripple Creek. They would stake a claim, build a tenthouse with boarded floor and sides with canvas tops, build some bunks and add a wood-burning stove, and then prospect and find a location of their own which assayed high enough to make it a good prospect. Then they started digging. As the hole grew deeper they would add a windlass rope and bucket and then they would alternate: one dig awhile and then come up and run the windlass and let the other go down and do some digging. They would always locate within five to ten miles of a reduction plant, as the ore after being dug would have to be put in sacks, placed on a jackass or a donkey, as we generally call then, and taken to the plant. Sometimes after digging, the ore would not assay at a value to make the project pay, so they would give it up and try another location. In the end my father generally lost all the profits he had made racing trying to get rich as a Cripple Creek gold miner. So many did this that they used to say that the streets of those small mining towns were paved with gold. Years later when the value of gold went up and the cost of refining went down, the streets of some of those towns were dug up and enough gold was striked to make it pay.The De La Vergnes, in whose home I was raised for twelve years, sent me off to school in 1899. I never saw any of the family again until about 1903 when working in the summertime at the Strand Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. One of their sons, Harry, on a trip to New York City made a trip to Atlantic City just to see me. It was quite an agreeable surprise and we spent several hours together. About 1920 I received news that Mr. De La Vergne was alive and in Los Angeles. In my files I had the name of a firm, with whom Mr. De La Vergne had done business years ago. I found one of the names in the telephone book, called them up, and he told me that Mr. De La Vergne was in the city, rooming in a hotel on Hill Street downtown. I immediately went down to see him. He was quite aged but was glad as well as surprised to see me. After conversing for a while he said to come on and go with him. He took me on the streetcar out to the cemetery right here in town on Pico, Rosedale, to the grave of Mrs. Turner who he explained had "been rooming with some colored friends whom she used to know in Colorado Springs but vjho lived on Bixel Street near the Don Lee Building, now part of the freeway. I already knew about her death by falling downstairs at her home. We parted and lost track of him again. Several years later I made inquiries at the same cemetery and was told that he had died and is buried in the same cemetery. So now I visit the two people who played the most important part of my life's history. There's an article here that goes back and explains a little of my early life. As to my grandparents I know very little, having lived with my father, brothers and sisters less than three years of my entire life. In the years 1897 and '98, the De La Vergnes lived in Hawaii. Mrs. Turner, talking me with her, moved into a home she owned in the city which had been occupied for several years by her only child, a man and a wife whom I have rarely seen or knew much about. I knew nothing of Mrs. Turner's early life in Missouri, her husband, or when she first began working for the De La Vergnes. At expense to her, I presume, she sent me to my father who at that time lived at Ivywild and was caretaker of the Colorado Springs racetrack a few miles from the city in a little place named Roswell. As manager of the track his work was to supervise it and keep it in order during the racing season. The rest of the year there would be no horses other than from five to ten trotters and pacers, some belonging to hin and other to Springs millionaires. Aside from myself, my sister and two brothers, he had from two to five white hired hands. They slept at the stables and ate at his house, my sister doing the cooking. He also trained and broke wild horses to be driven or to ride. Noble would go into the hills, catch wild horses, especially small ones, and break up all our croquet sets training them to be polo ponies. The real race horses would have to have about ten miles of exercise daily. That was my only experience with race horses. My father would have a hired man most every morning hitch up several horses to the sulkies, and have each of us three brothers take a horse and drive him around the track for ten miles every morning for exercise. In the afternoon we would break wild horses to be harnessed and driven. There was one case concerning President Arthur who was at that time living in the Springs. One day while riding in a fashionable surrey through the main street of Colorado Springs, his coachman got one of the reins under the bobtail of one of the two horses he was driving. The horse squeezed down on the reins, started running and ran through a plate glass window of a big store. The next day that horse was brought to my father to break him of that habit. The horse was hitched to a two-wheel cart with long shafts with a step on behind and three reins attached to his bridle. My father was in the cart with two normal reins with which to guide him. I got in the cart and held the third rein. We took the horse outside the track enclosure. I switched one rein under the horse's tail; he squeezed downon it and started to run. He let him run about five miles, turned him around, took the whip and made him run the five miles back. He was covered white with sweat but that cured him.During the racing season my father would enter two or three of his horses in the big moneyed stake race. One or both of the brothers would drive the other horses, and had instructions to get in front and set the pace while he with his horse would trail along behind. In the half a mile track they would have to circle the track twice. Now Father with the third horse would have to hold him in the first trip around and then gradually let him out so he would just win by a nose. The trick is that your horse is marked by the time in which he wins a race, and if you are smart you won't let him win with any faster time than is absolutely necessary. If you're in a 2:10 trot and you win the race in 2:03, the next time you start your horse you'll have to enter it in the 2:03 class, which means that you're in faster company and have far less chance of winning. Of the men in the family I was the only one who knew nothing about horses and was never in a race.It was in this brief stay with my father that I first met my grandmother. She was over 100 years old, smoked a pipe, and also had a bad case of asthma. I have no other recollections of ever having seen her before or since. Noble M. Johnson My brother Noble M. Johnson was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 18, 1881, the third oldest child of a family of three boys and one girl, his father Perry J. Johnson and mother Georgia having moved to Colorado from Marshall, Missouri a few years prior. His father was a racetrack trainer and driver of national reputation who in the forty years prior to 1915 was before the public racing horses for the blue ribbon and grand circuit at every track in the United States that was under the jurisdiction of the Racing Association. Father during his racing career won many notable stakes and lured several world and many track records, the most common of which were the Kentucky $10,000 stake in Lexington, Kentucky in 1902, and the Commercial Commerce Stake in Detroit, Michigan. Prior to my birth, my father had built and maintained on our home estate in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a race track, paddocks and special training stables at which he trained not only his own horses but many of those of the Cripple Creek gold mine millionaires who resided in the Springs. During the racing season each year my father would lease a baggage car, build stalls in it, take one of his own horses and several of those of the millionaire owners, attach the car to a passenger train and go East, entering and driving them in the various cities on the various circuits, leaving Noble and an older brother home to manage his stables.When Noble became school age he attended public schools in the Springs. Among his schoolmates was Lon Chaney, who with Noble became famous in Hollywood as a movie actor. Becoming restive at the age of fifteen, he left school and traveled with his father over the racing circuits for two seasons, gaining a knowledge and experience of training and caring for horses far beyond his age, which proved of great value later in his motion picture career. In the winter season he rode, trained and clipped horses. He bought some and made friends with many of the cowboys in the surrounding ranches, so that at the age of seventeen he made up his mind to lead the life of a cowboy. With another boy of similar ambitions, they headed for the cattle country and secured jobs with the Sanborn and Kaiser cattle outfit in Jefferson, Colorado.In the following years until 1914 he worked at various jobs, training horses for the Charles Walker saddle stables of Denver, for the uranium mining company as cook, and various other jobs in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Canada, Oregon and back to Denver, Colorado, June 19, 1914, returning to his home in Colorado Springs.Driving an automobile party to Kansas City he found a great deal of interest centering around a motion picture outfit temporarily stationed there taking pictures. It proved to be a company of Lubin filmmakers under the direction and management of Romaine Fielding, sent out by the Lubin Film Company of Philadelphia to take the eight-reel Western feature The Eagle' s Nest, the story having been written about twenty years previous and invented by Edwin Arden who was playing the lead in the picture. It appears that in producing the film one of the actors was injured and they sent down to Colorado Springs to request someone to fill the part. Noble was recommended, applied and was employed to portray an Indian in the film in which Eileen Sedgwick was the female lead.After the film was completed the company returned to their headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Johnson remained home; his performance met the approval of the Philadelphia headquarters and Johnson was ordered at once to come to Philadelphia. As a member of the Lubin organization he appeared in the following main films, always in a different role, but none in the characterization of a Negro. In the second film, Mr. Carlson of Arizona, with Romaine Fielding and Vinnie Burns, Johnson was cast as an American; in The Species of a Mexican Man, with the same leads, in the role of a Mexican; in From Champion to Tramp and A Desert Honeymoon, the same leads, in the role of an American; in A Western Governor' s Humanity, same leads, in the role of a Mexican; and in The Death Warrant, same leads, in the role of an Indian.Then made the jump here to California and Intolerance was his first picture. He become a Wild West cowboy and fighter for Universal and played in serials with Eddie Polo and other big serials there. From then on he played in hundreds of pictures.* * * *-One summer when I was about ten years old, the De La Vergnes, in whose home I was raised, had to make one of their occasional trips to Hawaii to see after their sugar plantation, so they closed up their big home. Mrs. Nancy Turner, their servant, my foster mother, would generally move into some other home, of some of the De La Vergnes' friends. This time it was into the home of a friend living between Colorado Springs and Manitou, not far from, the famous Garden of the Gods.It was summer and my two brothers had outfitted themselves with two horses to haul a covered camp wagon and an extra horse to be used in case of emergency. As I was out of school on summer vacation I was allowed to go along, as they promised they would be back before school started. So we headed out of the Springs through the famous Ute Pass and deep into the Rockies. I rode horseback on the spare horse quite a bit as it was uphill. We probably only made about ten miles a day. In a week or so we began to get into real rugged mountains and poor roads. Small game was plentiful, grouse, rabbits, squirrels and so forth. Now and then we would see a deer and occasionally a bear. My oldest brother soon found out that we needed a more powerful gun than we had brought, so he sent word to Father to ship a high-powered rifle to a town we expected to go through.After about a couple of weeks out, we found ourselves in very bad mountainous country and one of the wheels of our camp wagon broke. We could not reach the post office and we were running out of money, so my brother had to go to work in a nearby gold mine and earn enough money to get the wheel fixed. We crossed a valley where antelope and small game was plentiful. So my brothers killed quite a bit, cut it up, and used up our salt in salting it down on the floor of the wagon. We intended to bring it home. Then we found out that we were lost. One day we reached another valley where we ran into a big cattle roundup. Ranchers in the mountains had allowed their cattle to roam at will and once a year they would have what they called a roundup. From five to ten cowboys from some big ranch come in v/ith a cook and a wagon which they called the grub wagon. Each year a big ranch has to have a big roundup in which the cowboys cover probably a ten-mile valley and drive all the cows into one bunch called a roundup. Then for about a week individual cowboys on ponies would ride into this herd after a calf, and the pony will chase that calf through the herd of maybe 2,000 cattle until they get it by itself, then rope it, throw it down, tie its legs and press a red-hot iron with a brand or initial of the ranch on its hip, and then turn it loose. This has to go on until every newborn calf has been branded. It nay take from two days to a week to accomplish this. We went on, finding ourselves going uphill toward the top of a mountain, nearly out of the state of Colorado. On top we had to camp and it was snowing hard. They let me sleep in the wagon, while both brothers stayed up all night keeping the big bonfire going. In the morning we turned around and started for home. Pretty soon the meat game that we had salted down in the bed of the wagon to take home began spoiling, and we began throvjing it out as we went along. In a few hours we found we had wolves, mountain lions and other animals following us, devouring this game. We had run out of food and hadn't passed a town in a week. All we had to eat was navy beans, no salt, flour, dried peaches, coffee, no milk or sugar. In a day or so we passed another camper who told us how to get on the right road that would take us to Denver, seventy-five miles from home. That was fine. After a while we began passing farms with growing crops and orchards and watermelons. We began eating what we could pick up along the road, and before long everybody but the horses were sick. Our folks had sent us letters, money and a gun, which we never got, and we were quite relieved when we finally reached home. I was two weeks late in getting to school.

DIXON

How much older than you were your brothers?

JOHNSON

I was the youngest, my sister was two years older than I, Noble was four years older, and Virgel was six years older.

DIXON

Then they would have been about fourteen and sixteen. What an experience.

JOHNSON

Yes, that was quite an experience; it's a wonder we hadn't got hurt, because [there were] mountain lions and bears and everything else. Of course, people don't realize but the wild animal is as scared of you as you are of them and they won't attack you until they get cornered. They'll run from you, you see. You don't have to worry unless you get one cornered, and then you're up against it and you've got to fight. We'd be riding along and there would be a big gully here and over there we would see a big mountain lion and a bear walking along. Don't go after them unless you've got your gun and are ready to do some business. They'll run from you.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: TWO, SIDE ONE (JULY 28, 1967)

Lincoln Motion Picture Company

JOHNSON

My entrance into the motion picture business was not one of choice but of incidence revolving around my relationship to Noble Johnson, my brother. In 1915 Noble and others in Los Angeles, California organized the $75,000 Lincoln Motion Picture Company to produce and distribute nationally photoplays of and by Negroes. I was employed as a postal clerk in the Omaha, Nebraska Post Office and had been, as a side issue, showing the Lincoln films in the theaters in Omaha, Kansas City and others catering to Negro patronage. I was asked to assume the position of general booking manager of the corporation. At that time, as the first Negro postal clerk ever employed in the Omaha, Nebraska Post Office, I was working the shift that started at 3:30 P.M. and due to end at midnight, but at times we were ordered to work from one to two hours overtime in addition to one hour's time going and coming on the streetcars. I was married, with one infant child, and rooming in a two-story house, the home of a retired quartermaster sergeant of the Army, Ike Bailey. In 1916, the first showing of the Lincoln films outside of the state of California was made in two or three small neighborhood theaters in Omaha, Nebraska catering to Negro trade and owned by whites. August 14 and 15, 1916, the National Negro Business League held its annual meeting at the Lincoln Electric Park, 20th and Woodman, Kansas City, Missouri, and as a special attraction [showed] the Lincoln Motion Picture Company's first production, The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, a two-reel drama featuring Noble Johnson, the star, his assistant, Lottie Bowles and Clarence Brooks. I personally handled the showing and had the pleasure of meeting two of my former associates, Robert R. Moton and Professor W.T. White of Hampton Institute. Professor White at that time was principal of a Kansas City, Missouri grade school.At this time the national demand for Lincoln films was so great that I rented the den in the house of Sergeant Ike Bailey, 2816 Pratte Street, engaged a part-time stenographer and spent from 8 A.M. till 2 P.M. daily, transacting national business as general booking manager of the Lincoln organization. My first appointment was to make a contract with Tony Langston, the dramatic editor of the Chicago Defender, one of the largest, if not the largest Negro weekly newspaper. He was given complete charge of representing the Lincoln films in the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio on a commission basis and to supply publicity of the Lincoln films in each issue of the Chicago Defender. As [I was] an unexperienced business manager, Mr. Langston must be given the credit of teaching me the fine points of film distribution. In this manner was established the first national booking organization of Negro films ever perfected. It included for St. Louis, Missouri, district manager W.H. King of the St. Louis Argus; New Orleans district, D. Ireland Thomas, 531 South Ramparts Street; Atlanta, Georgia, Reuben Black, 192 Auburn Avenue; Philadelphia district, Clarence Edward Wells, 526 South Sixteenth Street; and New York district, Romeo Dougherty of the New York News, In addition, two traveling representatives was employed, Ira McGowan of Chicago and Joseph LaCour of Omaha, Nebraska. Both men were placed on the inside of rival organizations, and Mr. Lacour later became a national man of note in journalistic fields, in Washington D.C. and New York City, both getting their start in the Lincoln Motion Picture Company.As general booking manager it was my duty to see that all of these officers were supplied with copies of each Lincoln film, cuts, posters and advertising matter. The demand for showing was so great that it became necessary for all contracts to be cleared by wire by my office. At times a film might become damaged, which meant telegraphic instructions from my office, canceling a showing at some smaller theater and ordering the film sent to cover a showing elsewhere.A system had to be established whereby smaller theaters who could not afford to pay our daily rates could also show the Lincoln films. This was done by having two traveling representatives, one to carry a film with him, screen it to the manager after the regular show, and if he wanted it, to make him a deal to let him show it at a 60/40 percentage--we to get the 60 of the gross receipts and supply the film and some literature, he to get 40 percent, show the film and purchase some literature such as billboard, lithograph posters and so forth. Under this arrangement we would set dates a week ahead. On the day of the showing we would have another representative arrive with the film. He would stay in the box office and after the showing count the returns and get his 60 percent. In this manner we gambled with the theater owner, thus allowing him to show Lincoln films, a rental which he could not afford to pay otherwise. If for any reason, rain and so forth, there was no showing, we were the losers. In those days traveling salesmen could obtain mileage books good on all trains for 1,000 miles. We also had to worry about daylight-saving time. In some states it was in operation, so a traveling salesman would have to be very careful or he would either be one hour early or one hour late at the depots. So the general booking manager had his hands full, especially having five productions on the market at the same time, and five or six branch offices and two traveling salesmen to be supplied with prints of various productions. This same procedure was followed by the next two big film organizations releasing Negro films, the Micheaux Film Corporation of Chicago and the Reol Film Company of New York City. The following list [list incomplete] is of the Negro films the Lincoln Motion Picture Company made, produced, and released through the nation, and also a war film we purchased from the French government and released. Our most noted actor, Noble M. Johnson, only appeared in the first three productions: The Realization of a Negro's Ambition , 1916, three reels; The Trooper of Troop K, 1917, three reels; The Law of Nature, 1918, in three reels.In 1918 I received a letter dated August 28, 1918 from the French Pictorial Service, 220 West 42nd Street, New York City, as follows in part: "Replying to your favor of the 21st, I beg to advise you that we are sending you by parcel post special delivery one reel depicting colored troops at the front in France. The film we are sending you is fully titled, as per enclosed list, and you can use the authority of the French Pictorial Service for your advertisements, also that of the Cinematographic Section of the French Army. We hope your initial showing in Chicago will be very successful, and as soon as we have more pictures of Negro troops we will promptly take the matter up with you. Very truly yours, French Pictorial Service [Signed] H.B. Coles."This film was shown by our representatives throughout the United States. In 1919 we produced and distributed a one-reel Lincoln news pictorial film including 1,000 feet of twenty-five scenes of various incidents and personages such as Scene 1: the place where Madame C. J. Walker began her business in Denver, Colorado; Scene 5: Roscoe Simmons meeting J.T. Smith, president of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, and J.B. Loving in Los Angeles. Simmons was a delegate to the peace conference for the Chicago Defender. In 1921 the Lincoln Company produced and released nationally a one-reel pictorial of 33 scenes taken at Fort Huachuca, Arizona of the famous United States Tenth Cavalry, taken by Harry Gant (who just died), our cameraman. We spent two days at Fort Huachuca. The entire regiment turned out for us, going through various performances. I roomed at the residence of Major Chaplain Oscar J.W. Scott, ranking colored officer of the regiment and the oldest colored Army chaplain in the Service.The following letter was received: "Gentlemen: I wish to express my appreciation of the excellent film, A Day with the Tenth Cavalry at Fort Huachuca, Arizona which you sent us. The photography, the titling and the arrangement are all fine. I'm expecting in February a visit from the Chief of Cavalry and I would like to retain this film until after his visit when it will be returned to you, although it requires no revision. In making this film you have done us a real service and in behalf of the regiment I wish to thank you. Very Truly Yours, Edwin B. Winnans, Colonel, Tenth Cavalry."

DIXON

How long did your films usually show, one night or two or three nights?

JOHNSON

Oh, a week. You run for one night at the small houses. But the Chicago big houses would take it a week.

DIXON

At that time they were just beginning to get into the longer runs.

JOHNSON

They'd take it for a whole week. It's got to be something that will draw good, you see. They get something they think, they know is real good why they take it for a week; otherwise, they take it for one or two days. I want to go into a little more detail on that. The first Lincoln motion picture [was] The Realization of a Negro' s Ambition. The incorporation certificate of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was issued by the State of California January 20, 1917. Films and supplies owned by the company were appraised at $15,623.68 by Henry McRae, manager of production of the Universal Film Company, and Harry Carey, a star of said company, and another party. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was incorporated for $75,000 with a paid in capital of $16,915, par value of stock $1.00 per share, April 30, 1917. A permit was issued to market 25,000 shares of common stock. Prior to incorporation, the Lincoln Company had produced a two-reel moving picture, The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, and a three-reel picture, The Trooper of Troop K. The Realization of a Negro' s Ambition was a two-part drama of love and adventure, pictured with a good moral, a vein of clean comedy and beautiful settings. This production revolutionized the standard of future photoplays and was the first successful class-A Negro feature film produced, minus all burlesque and humiliating comedy. At $15 per day rental, practically every theater catering to Negro trade showed this film, and also many churches, schools and institutions, including Tuskegee Institute and the National Negro Business League at its meeting August 14, 1916, at the Lincoln Electric Park in Kansas City, Missouri. Noble K. Johnson, the premiere Afro-American screen actor who had been appearing on the screen since 1912, was the star, supported by Clarence Brooks who later won national fame in Arrowsmith with Ronald Colman in 1931, Beulah Hall, Lottie Bowles, Gertrude Chrisman, Bessie Matthews, George H. Reed, A. Burns, and A. Collins.Robert R. Church, Junior, of 30 Beal Street, Memphis, owner of a theater and said to have been the richest Negro in America at that time, in a letter dated March 28, 1917 had this to say: "Your two pictures, Realization and the Trooper of Troop K, shown at my theater, the week of March 26, are the best Negro pictures I've ever seen. I have been disgusted with most Negro photoplays, and until I booked your picture it has been more than two years since I have shown one in my house. I unhesitatingly endorse both of the pictures and wish the Lincoln Motion Picture Company all of the success they are justly entitled to. Yours very truly, Robert R, Church."The second film produced by the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was The Trooper of Troop K showing the remarkable ability of the Lincoln management to adapt itself to the news events of the day. Because of the recent crisis and the massacre of the Negro troopers of the famous Tenth Cavalry, the Lincoln Corporation produced a very thrilling and realistic reproduction of this historical event, featuring in detail the mowing down of the charging troopers' ranks by the deadly machine gun fire, and the heroic rescue of Captain Lewis S. Morey by the unknown and unhonored troopers of Troop K. It depicts in gripping scenes the unflinching bravery of Negro troopers under fire and how, greatly outnumbered, they sacrificed their blood and life for their country. Interposed in the picture are scenes of romantic love, comedy and human interest. This thrilling film was made possible because the firm was able to round up quite a number of ex-Cavalry troopers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, and also Mexicans, cowboys and horses from the firms in Hollywood who make it a business to supply the big film companies with almost anything they need. Lincoln was able to rent guns, uniforms, cannon, and so forth to equip the Negroes and Mexicans they hired and everything they needed to make them soldiers. Going a few miles out in the San Gabriel sandy creek beds, they were able to reproduce a natural Mexican background. Over 300 people were used in this production. Only three of the regular Lincoln actors were used: Noble Johnson as Shiftless Joe, the star; Beulah Hall as Clara Holmes; and Jimmy Smith as Jimmy Warner. Jimmy Smith became quite famous later in taking James Lowe in an Uncle Tom' s Cabin film to London, England.The Trooper of Troop K was a national success, and hundreds of letters were received from all over the nation similar to this one from Robert Moton and Emmett J. Scott, principal and secretary of the Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama, dated March 14, 1917. "You do not know how much pleasure and satisfaction our institute community received last evening for the showing of your two moving picture productions. The largest attendance which has assembled in the Tuskegee Institute chapel this year, composed of nearly 1600 students, over 200 teachers, Institute families, and persons from the town of Tuskegee and the village of Greenwood south of the Institute, greeted the showing of these two pictures. Personally all of us were very much pleased and gratified to note colored people carrying such important roles in moving pictures, I feel quite sure that our Institute should be most anxious again next year to have the same two pictures shown to our new student body. Your Lincoln Motion Picture Company is entitled to the gratitude of the Negro people everywhere for the effort being made to give Negroes places of distinction in moving picture industry. Yours very truly, Robert R. Moton, principal, Emmett J. Scott, secretary."Emmett J. Scott I will later treat with as Assistant Secretary of War--he was appointed Assistant Secretary of War and I went to Washington, but that's my first introduction to him.I have treated three pictures here; here's one more of the Lincoln pictures, and that will go into something else, The Law of Nature. In 1918 the Lincoln Motion Picture Company produced its third production, a three- reel social drama of the East and West, a virile production full of human interest and realistic western atmosphere. It deals in a gripping way of the true love of a real man and an innocent woman endangered by the sinister attentions of an ardent admirer. Noble M. Johnson as the star plays his last role under the Lincoln banner; his commitment with Universal Film Company and his costarrlng roles in the Bull' s Eye and Red Ace serials allow him no time to engage in other activities. In The Law of Nature Johnson is supported by a very capable cast of other Lincoln actors, including Albertine Pickens, female lead, Clarence Brooks, Estelle Everett, Stebno Clemento, Frank White, Elsworth Saunders and Sallie Richardson.Among the hundreds of letters of commendation is the following from manager Chester Paul of the Washington Theater, Chicago, Illinois where the film opened a four-day run Monday, July 22, 1918. "There is no use talking. They will all have to take their hats off to the Lincoln Company. Their features are so far superior to the other all-colored productions that there is absolutely no comparison. I consider The Law of Nature as fine a story and as well acted as any one I have shown on the screen here in a long time, and that is saying a lot when you consider our programs are always very carefully selected. The Realization and Trooper showed progress, but [that] a story of the description of this last release would even be attempted is an indication of the great possibilities of the future, as this last effort certainly is an artistic and well portrayed success, I will always be glad to use the Lincoln Company's productions, as they are uniformly excellent and I consider them good box-office attractions."That was the last picture that Johnson played, with this company. Noble Johnson, noted film actor, who in 1915 with others organized the $75,000 Lincoln Motion Picture Corporation and became its president as well as star of the three first all-Negro film productions successfully exhibited all over the United States, reluctantly sent in his resignation due to his commitment with Universal Film Corporation as costar in the Universal serials, The Red Ace and The Bull's Eye. In a telegram dated July 31, 1918, Johnson sent to the Lincoln Company the following [message] relative to his resignation: "Nothing personal. Will retain my interest in firm but cannot devote the time to the business necessary for its success. Hence my resignation, which will afford a vacancy for someone more efficient and more capable and with more time and business experience. Signed, Noble Johnson."This was quite a blow to the Lincoln organization. To fill his place one of the other members was elected to the presidency. Dr. James Thomas Smith, a wealthy Los Angeles druggist who had previously been vice-president and treasurer.The above is what was made public, but there are other incidents behind the event that was never made public until now. Theaters all over the United States owned by both whites and blacks but catering to Negro trade were all showing the Universal serials, and other films starting such famous white stars as Francis Ford, Eddie Polo and others, in many cases because Johnson was in them, as an actor but not as a star. When the Lincoln films came out with Johnson as a star the same theaters would place the large colored lithograph posters in front of their theaters. In many cities there were two theaters side by side or in the same block. So the theaters which did not show the Lincoln films, with Johnson, did not get any business. Naturally these theater owners complained to the Universal Film Company, to the extent [that] while Universal was employing Johnson as an actor in support of leading stars they could not afford to lose business on their big stars who were drawing far bigger salaries than Johnson. The result was that Johnson was called on the carpet and advised that if he wanted to continue as a Universal actor he must stop allowing himself to be shown in Negro films. Naturally Johnson had no other choice to follow but to resign from Lincoln, to stop appearing in Lincoln films, and devote his entire time to his position with the Universal Film Company, which position was the highest of any Negro in films. But the public never knew that, you see.I'm going into a new [subject] now, Oscar Micheaux. This is a story, true in all details, of one of the most colorful characters in the history of the Negro motion pictures. His record, while none too savory, is at least too interesting and valuable to be overlooked.Oscar was born in Metropolis, Illinois in 1884. At the age of twenty-five, Oscar purchased a relinquishment of a homestead in South Dakota. Five years later he had succeeded and was the owner of a considerable amount of land, his homestead consisting of 800 acres in the Rosebud Reservation. Not much is known of his early life, of his schooling and his family, other than that he had a wife and a brother named Swan. He evidently received enough education to write a very interesting book, The Homesteader, based on his experience and in which he substituted Negro characters in place of the original white persons with whom he had been in contact. In 1915 Micheaux established headquarters in Sioux City, Iowa, formed the Western Book and Supply Company, Publishers, and began personally covering the city and surrounding farms selling his book, The Homesteader.In 1918 George P. Johnson, brother of Noble M. Johnson and the general booking manager of the $75,000 Lincoln Motion Picture Company of Los Angeles, of which Noble was the president and also the star, was living in Omaha. He wrote Mr. Micheaux suggesting the idea that he let the Lincoln Film Company produce The Homesteader. In a letter dated May 18, 1918, Mr. Micheaux says in part, "Have decided to pay you a visit in your office in Omaha tomorrow, Sunday. I expect to arrive at noon." In another letter dated June 9, 1918, he writes, "In reply to your recent letter, I plan to send my wife to her home on an extended visit and will then consider moving to Omaha and cooperate with you further in regard to the matter we have under consideration." Papers were drawn up and ready to be signed when Micheaux insisted that he come to Los Angeles and supervise the filming of the story. With no connections or actual experience of film directing, Lincoln could not agree to such a proposition. Hence, the proposed deal fell through.So in 1920 Micheaux decided to organize a company and produce The Homesteader as a film himself. He organized the Micheaux Book and Film Company of Sioux City, lowa and Chicago, Illinois. His first move was to go back to all the white farmers and people in Sioux City, Iowa, to whom he had sold The Homesteader book, and sell stock in his film organization at $75 per share. In this manner, capital was secured to produce The Homesteader as an eight-reel film with an unknown actor, Charles D. Lucas as star and Evelyn Preer and Iris Hall, two well-known actresses from the Lafayette Players Stock Company. The film was billed as "A powerful drama of the Great American Northwest into which has been deftly interwoven the most subtle American problem, the race question."Micheaux had a good appearance and was quite a talker, and on the strength of his first book and film, through various manipulations and ups and downs, was able for a number of years to produce twenty-five or more films, some in combination with his brother. He was the author of several books, some of which were produced in films. His brother Swan joined him in 1920 as manager of the Micheaux Book and Film Company, Incorporated, 312 South Clark Street, Chicago, later at 538 South Dearborn Street, Chicago. Swan was promoted to secretary and treasurer and general booking manager. In March '27 Oscar and his brother came to the parting of the ways, with Swan heading another film company. The firm changed its name to the Micheaux Film Corporation with offices at 200 West 135th Street, Chicago and in February, 1928 went into bankruptcy with assets of $1,400 and liabilities of $7,837. I will only mention here the list of most of the films that he made. He made The Homesteader in 1919; Within Our Gate, 1920; The Brute, 1920; The Symbol of the Unconquered, 1921; The Gunsaulus Mystery, 1921; Deceit , 1921; The Virgin of the Seminole , 1922; The Dungeon , 1922; The Devil's Disciple , 1926; The Conjure Woman, 1926; Birthright , I926; The Spider's Web , 1926; The Broken Violin , 1927; The Millionaire , 1927; The Exile , 1931; Harlem After Midnight , 1934; Lem Hawkins ' Confession, 1935; God's Stepchildren, 1938; Thirty Years Later, 1938; The Notorious Elinor Lee , 1940; Daughter of the Congo; Marcus Garland ; Wages of Sin ; and Body and Soul . I have no dates on them. He had some nice work in here.Birth of a Race: The following section is an article written by George P. Johnson and sent to Negro newspapers in 1918.After more than one year of troublesome times, The Birth of a Race made its initial bow for public favor Sunday evening December 1 [1918] at the Blackstone Theater, the home of the Chicago elite. In this most fashionable theater in the most cosmopolitan city of the nation was released what is destined either to be one of those epoch-making photodramatic productions of the "Griffith class," or one of the most colossal tragedies in the history of the screen.More than a year ago the idea was conceived by a group of some of the best-known wits and colored friends of the Race to promote a mammoth photoplay entitled The Birth of a Race as an answer to D.W. Griffith's great picture of Thomas Dixon's story of Reconstruction Days. With this idea in mind a Corporation was organized under the laws of Delaware with a capital stock of one million dollars divided into 100,000 shares, par value $10. Headquarters was established in Chicago and Edwin L. Barker, formerly of the Barker-Swan Film Service, was elected president. The financing of the proposition was entrusted to the stock brokerage firm of Giles P. Corey and Company of Chicago as fiscal agents.Very elaborate literature was circulated, including a prospectus which gave as its argument, "Organized for the production and exhibition of the master photoplay, The Birth of a Race , an entertaining motion picture of racial understanding. The true story of the Negro — his life in Africa, his transportation to America, his enslavement , his freedom, his achievements, together with his past, present and future relations to his white neighbor and to the world in which both live and labor." Among its list of officers and prominent persons "interesting and assisting" appears some of the names of the most noted men in the nation: Julius Rosenwald, J.C. Napier, Bishop I.B. Scott, Mrs. Booker T. Washington, William H. Taft, William D. Jelks, and so forth. The Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago was named as the producers.A national stock-selling campaign was inaugurated with alluring investment ads in leading white Sunday and daily papers, worded in part as follows: "If The Birth of a Race returns as much as The Birth of a Nation, every hundred dollars you invest will return one thousand dollars. If as much as Traffic in Souls , every hundred dollars will give you three thousand dollars. Every thousand dollars, thirty thousand dollars. Write for full details." And so forth. Stock salesmen also scoured the country selling indiscriminately to both whites and blacks, with the result that prior to March 16, 1918, 7,000 stockholders had invested approximately $140,000, the entire amount of which was spent in production work in Tampa, Florida, alone, with only one-half of the production complete. It was then estimated that it would take $450,000 more.Seemingly the endorsements of ex-President Taft, Julius Rosenwald and other prominent men was secured as to the theme of the picture but not in commendation of the stock project. January 1, 1918, the Blue Sky Law of the State of Illinois went into effect, and under this law Giles P. Corey was arrested, fined $1,000 for the violation of the law, pled guilty, and paid the fine. About this time The Billboard came out with an expose of the methods of the corporation, which resulted in a repudiation of the use of the names of Mr. Taft and Mr. Rosenwald in the stock-selling campaign. About this time the Selig Company dropped out and arrangements were made with the Frohman Amusement Company of New York to complete the production.The firm started work in Tampa, Florida and filmed the wonderful prologue of Biblical events in episodical form, including scenes of the Christ period, the Noah period, and the Creation. This part alone cost $140,000 and is considered by critics to be excellent pictorial work, considerable credit for which is to be given George Frederick Wheeler, formerly of the Triangle Film Company, who in association with John W. Noble did the direction and research work.For reasons not given to the public, the Frohman Amusement Company quit production in the middle of its contract. An attempt was made to continue the production work through independent filming by various parties. Owing to war conditions a change in the plans was made and certain phases concerning the advancement of the Negro was dropped out. The second part was converted into a modern war drama, very different in treatment and effect and according to critics "melodramatic in the extreme and full of inconsistencies."Hence after months of trouble in production, the production was finally made ready for the Rothdaker Film plant in Chicago, and released to the public at $1.50 per admission in Chicago's finest theater, which was leased for one month at $6,000. Its change in treatment has so converted it into a war propaganda film that the original idea of moulding public sentiment in contradistinction to that of the Griffith production has been entirely lost. Critics differ as to the merits of the production. Genevieve Harris in the Chicago Evening Post writes, "The result is a truly great photoplay. . . The Birth of a Race is a picture worth seeing. It is a long picture but there is little of it that you would want to sacrifice. It is a fine piece of photodramatic production, a clean, sincere, and beautiful picture drama." The New York Variety Chicago correspondent has a different idea and writes, "The most grotesque cinema chimera in the history of the picture business had its debut and in all probability its demise. ... As long as the stockholders patronize the film, business will be done. After the stockholders have seen the picture its day will be done. That is, unless by some amazing freak of public taste and press manipulation it should get over." The Chicago Billboard writes, "The picture is perhaps the worst conglomeration of mixed purposes and attempts ever thrown together." It is to be regretted that such a fine conceived idea should have reached such an ignoble end. Financed by public subscription and philanthropical bequests and produced without thought of financial profits would have enabled the undertaking to have exerted its beneficial influence through the successful promotion of better understanding, sympathetic and helpful relationship between the North and South, white and black, as to deserve the highest commendation of the entire world.

DIXON

Was what you just read written right after the production, or did you write it later?

JOHNSON

Oh, no, this was written [before]. It's very old. I run a press bureau, and I fixed this up and sent it all over the United States to the Negro press. It's twenty or thirty years old. You find those references about it in those papers, but you won't find all that information. The King of Kings Cecil B. DeMille produced what is without doubt the greatest Biblical production ever made up to that time. The King of Kings , a pictorial study of Christ, the name being changed from The Deluge, as first planned. The temple of Herod, in which many scenes are laid, was built on the studio stage while those besides the Sea of Galilee were filmed on Catalina Island. The film was in production three months at a cost of $18,000 per day, $4,000 of which was for extra actors.Among the large cast of actors were Sam DeGrasse in the role of Simon; H.B. Warner as Christ; Jacqueline Logan as Mary Magdalene; Victor Varconi as Pontious Pilate; Rudolph Schildkraut as Caiaphas, High Priest; Julia Faye as Martha; Ernest Torrence as Peter; George Siegmann as Barabbas; Joseph Schildkraut as Judas; and Joseph Striker as John the Disciple.As extras eleven Negro actors were selected because of their physical proportions as the finest specimens of manhood obtainable, among whom were Sam Baker, fighter; Reginald Siki, wrestler; Floyd Shackleford; T. D. Smith; Mack House; and Noble Johnson. Noble Johnson was the only one named in the cast because of his record in Lubin and Universal films and because of his ability as a horseman. His role was to drive five wild fractious zebras hitched to a chariot of Mary Magdalene.Curtis C. Taylor, a prominent Negro lawyer of Los Angeles, wrote the follov;ing letter dated October 12, 1927, to producer Cecil B.DeMille. "My Dear Mr.De Mille: I have just witnessed a performance of your truly great film The King of Kings now showing at Grauman's Chinese Theater. The picture is very inspiring and as a whole is a work of art; but there is one thing which could not fail to impress me in a most striking manner, and that was the fact that at one of the most critical points in the production you failed to follow the truth as outlined in history. I refer to the point where the Messiah was unable to bear his cross, and a man came to his assistance and bore it to the crest of the hill for him. Even the most casual student of history knows that the man who performs this noble act was Simon, the Cyrenian and a black man. I see no reason why your technical advisers or whoever was responsible for the continuity of scenes should not have known this fact, and I see less reason why, if this fact were known, it should not have been shown in the picture. I am wondering then if this was an oversight on your part or on the part of those responsible for it, or was it, as is so often the case, a deliberate attempt to take all credit and all worthwhile achievements away from the black man and put it upon the shoulders of those who are not entitled to it. Kindly remember that the world is indebted to the black race for Dumas who gave the world The Count of Monte Crlsto, Camille (now playing at the Criterion) , and other classics of literature. In fact, the world would be poor indeed if the achievements of the black man in literature and the finer things of life were taken away from it. In view of these things I am surprised that a producer of your rank should allow such an inexcusable error in historical facts in so great a production as The King of Kings. I would appreciate a reply from you on this matter. Very truly yours, Curtis C. Taylor."On November 5, 1927, Mr. De Mille replied as follows: "My dear Mr. Taylor: I appreciate very much your interest in writing me under the date of October 12, and in reply wish to assure you that I am entirely in sympathy with the position you take as to the work of the Black Race in literature. In the case of Simon, Cyrenian ( The King of Kings ), you state that the most careful student of history knows that he was a black man, but I cannot find any foundation for this statement. There is so much legendary data on the subject, but no fact, at least, has come to my knowledge. Had I had sufficient historical foundation, I would have been very happy to have had the character of Simon played by a black man. With kind regards I am, Cecil B. De Mille."

DIXON

How did you come in possession of the two letters?

JOHNSON

Oh, it was published in some of the things [I have], that's what I do all the time, clip and file. I have it where I can get my hands on it. I've been doing that for forty years. I've got an immense amount of stuff. William Foster, Dean of Negro Motion Pictures Few know that the Negro writer who wrote in the Chicago Defender Negro weekly back in the early days under the pen name of Juli Jones was the dean of Negro film production in the United States. He was none other than William (Bill) Foster. William Foster came to New York in 1884 and settled in the old Fifteenth Ward. Having been raised around horses he had secured his first position as paddock man and docker for Jack McDonald, a noted horseman of the '80's. In a short time Mr. McDonald recognized Foster's valuable knowledge of horses and promoted him to commission man at a salary of $10 a day. During the '80's, Foster was affiliated with such well-known characters around New York as Andrew Thompson, trainer; Charles Jordan, owner; and Bill Walker, the Jockey, who rode the famous Timbrook.In those days Mr. Foster knew the records of every racehorse and prizefighter in the history of the sporting world. It was this that inspired him to become a sportswriter in later years under the pen name of Juli Jones. At the turn of the century, Mr. Foster extended his interest to the theater and became the publicity man for the William and Walker shows In Dahomey and In Abyssinia. Remaining with them until they disbanded he then joined Cole and Johnson's A Trip to Cooptown . In 1910 William Foster moved to Chicago and organized the first all-Negro motion picture company. His initial production under the banner of the Will Foster Motion Picture Company was The Railroad Porter, a comedy starring Lottie Grady, Jerry Mills, and other famous characters of that time. This film was the first racial comedy made and it inaugurated the "chase" idea later copied by Lubin Company, Keystone Cops and others. Other films made by Foster were The Butler ; The Grafter and the Girls ; The Fall Guy; The Barber ; Birth Mark ; Fool and Fire ; Mother ; Brother ; A Woman' s Worst Enemy; and The Colored Championship Baseball Game.In 1912 the William Foster Music Company was organized. This company also handled pictorial posters of colored institutions and churches. His next venture was circulation manager of the Chicago Defender, the largest Negro weekly newspaper. After joining Robert S. Abbott's newspaper staff, he built up the largest circulation of any Negro weekly in the world. During the Chicago race riot in August, 1919, Mr. Foster and Phil A. Jones, the paper's youthful general manager, exhibited great courage and heroism by delivering the Defender to agents despite the bullets which greeted them on every corner from mobs in the stockyard district. Throughout the several weeks of rioting they never missed an issue or a delivery, although the paper was published in the center of the disturbance.June 1, 1917, Foster wrote a letter to Noble Johnson, president of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company of Los Angeles, saying in part, "I am laying a plain question to you. Is there a possibility to make a success in producing colored film dramas and comedies with colored actors, to be shown in colored theaters? Will time change conditions [so] that colored films will become popular from a novelty view in white theaters, as colored acts are in vaudeville? As for myself, I am at a standstill, waiting for something to turn up. I would like to know your position in handling outside films and if you could handle my releases. I am again congratulating you for your wonderful effort, I am also wishing you success. Your success means mine in a direct way. Yours respectfully, William Foster."In 1925, Mr. Foster resigned his position with the Defender and established the Haitian Coffee Company which continued until 1927. At this time Mr. Foster and Count A.J. Gary founded the Chicago Daily Times, which had a successful run. Having written several short stories, Mr. Foster in the later part of 1928 set out for Hollywood, California, where he, with persistence, crashed the gates of Pathe Studios and became the first Negro director of pictures. Here he directed pictures for Buck and Bubbles, famous song and dance comedy team. Later he opened the Foster Photoplay Company office here and wrote a series of shorts for Stepin Fetchit, Clarence Muse and Buck and Bubbles.His book of friendship reads like the register of Negro celebrities. Numbering among his friends were the late Charles W. Anderson, James Weldon Johnson, Lester Walton, Bill Robinson, and hundreds of others.In 1918, on September 5, when I was in Chicago on other business, I had a talk with R.W. Hunter, a Tuskegee Institute student whose father was a wealthy farmer in Alabama who was backing him in a new Negro bank in Chicago of which he was the president. Hunter stated that he and Tenan Jones, a wealthy saloon man, were seriously considering backing William Foster of the Foster Film Company and that the company would soon resume operations. He also wanted to know if the Lincoln Motion Picture Company would handle their films. In a talk with Foster he said that Hunter and Jones would back him for $10,000 to produce Negro comedy films if he could get a market for them.Coming to Los Angeles in 1928, as heretofore stated, he organized the Foster Photoplay Company, Incorporated, for $25,000, offering for sale 14,000 shares of his capital stock at $5 per share. The officers were William Foster, president; Mahlon C. Cooley, prominent local physician, vice-president; Norman O. Houston, wealthy official of the successful Golden State Insurance Company, secretary and treasurer; with offices at 4015 Central Avenue, Los Angeles. They issued a four-page advertising sheet in which they say, "No selling commission will be paid out and 90 percent of every dollar is guaranteed to go into actual production costs." There is no record of this company having made any productions. William Foster died April 9, 1940 at his home on Compton Avenue, Los Angeles, leaving his wife Ella B. Foster, seventy-eight years old. A quite unusual event was that Phil Jones, at one time general manager of the Chicago Defender back in 1919 was present at his bedside. Trip to See Emmett Jay Scott , Assistant Secretary of War During the war years, 1918-19, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company had several transactions with various departments of the government. Probably the most important and interesting was in 1918. Living in Omaha, Nebraska, earning a living as a postal clerk and as a side issue holding the position of general booking manager of the $75,000 Lincoln Motion Picture Company of Los Angeles, California, of which he was also a stockholder, he [George Johnson] received a telegram one day from Harry Gant, the Lincoln Company's cameraman and also a stockholder that he, Gant, had attended a closed meeting of prominent Hollywood film officials in which the matter discussed was regarding information that they had received that the government was considering appropriating ten million dollars for films for the boys overseas. Mr. Gant and the Lincoln officials considered that if this was true that the Negroes, one-tenth of the population, should get one million dollars of that sum invested in Negro films for the Negro troops, and as Lincoln Motion Picture Company was not only located in Los Angeles but were the largest producers of Negro motion pictures in the country, should be awarded the contract. As the matter was a hush-hush affair, the Lincoln management wired Johnson to go to Washington at once and discuss the matter with Assistant Secretary Emmett Jay Scott. Mr. Scott had seen several Lincoln films at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and he knew that we had the ability.Using my vacation time, at least as much as I had left unused, I left immediately for Washington. Mr. Scott was an extremely busy man and I knew I could not get to see him without some assistance. I recalled that Ernest T. Atwell, a former official at Tuskegee, was also in Washington. Through his assistance I applied for and was issued a special identification pass, number 303077, dated September 27, 1918, which granted me a conference with Mr. Scott.Passing through guards and about ten secretaries, I was admitted to Mr. Scott's office. Mr. Scott shook my hand, spoke of the Lincoln films he had seen at Tuskegee, and asked what brought me there. Hurriedly I explained my mission. He looked over the material I had brought, including photos of Noble Johnson in his many characters' makeups as Mexican, Indian, and so forth, in the many film productions in Lubin, Universal and other film organizations. He remarked that Noble made a great Indian, and if the deal went through we might also make films for the Indians.He was a little worried about the smallness of our number of actors and questioned their dramatic ability. To ease his fear I told him that I was quite sure that, if necessary, I could get the cooperation and assistance of the highly trained dramatic actors of the New York Lafayette Players under the management of Robert Levy of New York City. That interested him, and he said he would like me to go to New York and bring Mr. Levy so he could talk to him. I went immediately to New York to Levy's office and explained the situation. Levy put on his hat and we returned to Washington in a few hours. Mr. Scott was satisfied by Mr. Levy's remarks, and Mr. Levy returned to New York immediately. Mr. Scott then said, "Johnson, this deal has not been fully decided upon, and in my position I cannot advocate anything. I sit as a judge-advocate. But if this deal is favorably decided upon, it will have to come through me for my signature, and if and when it does, I will notify you of my decision."I had previously told Mr. Scott that I was away from the Omaha Post Office on a leave of absence, and if I had to go to New York to get Mr. Levy I would be late getting back to my job and would probably get in trouble. He asked what I wanted him to do about it? I said, "Well, if you will just send a telegram to the postmaster saying I am being detained I'm sure he would accept it." He scratched his head and said, "Well, I don't know." But after thinking awhile he called in one of his secretaries and dictated a wire to the postmaster saying, "Mr. Johnson had been detained on a matter of important business. Signed, Assistant Secretary of War." [laughter] I said thanks, shook his hand and left for home.When I got back to work, the superintendent of mail and my bosses came around and shook my hand and said glad that I got back okay. That wire sounded big and surely saved my hide. Five or six months later I received a wire from Mr. Scott saying the entire proposition had not been approved and hence dropped, I was, however, able to purchase a French war film of Negro troops in France which we showed all over the United States. It was a one-reel purchase from the French Pictorial Service, 220 West 42nd Street, New York City, H.B. Coles, manager. Several months later I received a letter from the Division of Films, Committee on Public Information, West 48th Street, New York City, New York, dated November 4, 1918, as follows: "Dear Sir, Your favor of October 5th received. The Omaha Monitor which printed the editorial August 24th regarding a seventy-million dollar appropriation by the government for motion picture production was evidently misinformed, as we have had this statement investigated and find no foundation whatever for the same. Thanking you for your interest and information regarding the Hampton Institute. Very sincerely yours. Division of Films, Rufus Steele, Editor." So that blew up. [laughter] Lincoln Motion Picture Company In 1920 the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was a leading film organization in the United States, with production facilities in Los Angeles, California. A general booking manager distributed through six branch offices and two traveling salesmen, five Negro films, two of which were pictorial, to the national trade. Its president and star having had to relinquish his position but not his stock interest due to commitments with the Universal Film Company, Dr. J.T. Smith, vice-president and a wealthy druggist of Los Angeles, was elected to the presidency. The national demand for more Lincoln productions was so great that the Lincoln management, not to wait on returns from films produced to make another one, accepted an offer for financial backing offered by a white financier in Los Angeles, California, but not until this financier, P.H. Updike, investigated the character, record and ability of the Lincoln organization's general booking manager and also stockholder, George P. Johnson, living in Omaha, Nebraska. Mr. Updike had a brother, owner of Updike Coal Company in Omaha, whom he instructed not only to investigate Johnson's standing but to also have a personal talk with him. The result was satisfactory and the deal went through. The Lincoln management [asked] that ideas be submitted for productions, and the one by George P. Johnson was selected as the best. The title given to it was By Right of Birth . Before starting production, the Lincoln management wanted Johnson to be in Los Angeles during production. As a government postal employee, Johnson had to get a leave of absence. From his position he had been working too hard, from eight to nine hours a day as a postal clerk and even more time as general booking manager, supervising six branch offices. Leaving a wife and an infant daughter alone in a house, Johnson left for Los Angeles, taking a copy of the last film and showing it on percentage, which means he had to be in the theater that was showing it, collect 60 percent of the receipts, and then take the film and move on to the next town.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: TWO, SIDE TWO (AUGUST 9, 1967)

JOHNSON

Of the one dozen or more sent in [ideas for productions by the Lincoln Motion Picture Company] the story by George Johnson was suggested as the best and the film title given to it was By Right of Birth. As to how good their selection was is best stated by the following from the national magazine The Billboard, in the issue of July 16, 1921, in part as follows: "This firm has just completed a six-reel drama By Right of Birth, dealing with the mistakes which come through racial identity. It is a powerful drama of modern life and incidents."Before starting production, the Lincoln management wanted Johnson to be [there]. A leave of absence was secured from his position where he had been working hard from eight to ten hours a day as a postal clerk, and nearly as much as general booking manager supervising six branch offices. Leaving a wife and infant daughter alone in the house, Johnson left for Los Angeles, taking with him a copy of their latest film, A Man' s Duty, and showing it on percentage, which means he had to be in the theater at the showing to collect his sixty percent of the receipts, and take his film, and move on to the next town. On his trip out he showed the film in Topeka, Kansas; Muskogee, Oklahoma; and Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso, Texas, In the meantime, the Los Angeles office had had Johnson's story worked into scenario form by a very competent Negro writer, Dora L. Mitchell. A very strong cast of actors had been carefully chosen, headed by Clarence Brooks, a member of the Lincoln Corporation and star of A Man's Duty, and later nationally known for his work in the United Artist production in 1931, Arrowsmith with Ronald Colman; Anita Thompson, female lead; Lester Bates; Lew Meeham; Grace Ellenwood; Ruth Kimbrough, a baby; and Webb King, a Lincoln actor. In one scene we had a college track meet in which one of the runners [was a man who] is now superintendent of the largest postal building in Los Angeles. In another scene of a society set, Mr. and Mrs. Booker T. Washington, Jr. were present. He at that time was in the real estate business in Los Angeles. When completed, the question was where to show it. Our backer, Mr. Updike, was worried as he did not see how we were going to make money showing the film in small Negro theaters. So it was up to Johnson to convince him. Johnson tried to rent the Philharmonic Auditorium, the largest seating capacity in the city, but the film Over the Hill had it leased and was planning an extended run there. The next place was a church, the Embassy Auditorium at Ninth and Grand Avenue, at that time called the Trinity Auditorium. It had no motion picture machine or curtain, and had a seating capacity of 1527 seats, some of which could not be used for motion pictures. The Trinity was rented for two nights, June 22 and 23, 1921, for $500, in addition to the cost of putting in a curtain and motion picture machine. We proceeded to have ten blueprints made of every seat in the house, numbered. We then engaged ten of the prettiest girls we could find, giving each one the blueprint showing all the seats numbered and the prices, and sent these girls out two weeks before the showing. Two days before the showing they were all sold out. The night of the showing we had a footman in uniform outside for auto patronage and a prologue of music by Webb Spikes' band with thirty pieces, and a program of songs and dances. In the audience we had representatives from two new Negro newspapers, three white papers. Sunshine Sammy, and quite a number of noted white and colored actors from Hollywood.The Los Angeles Examiner of June 23, 1921 prints: "Negro Actors Do Well In Picture: By Right of Birth, the Lincoln Corporation's sixth film production, shown last night and to be repeated tonight at Trinity Auditorium, is unusual in more than one way. It offers proof that colored players can develop histrionic talent above that required for straight comedy.... Important action is played straight away without wasting time on preliminary scenes--a commendable quality not to be found in all... pictures...Finally, there is crude strength about the story, showing that the colored author, George P. Johnson, had his theme in mind from beginning to end. Every detail of the plot supports the theme partly expressed in the title--the right of the transplanted race to a little pride of its own. Anita Thompson and Clarence Brooks, colored, handled the leading roles... Both are fitted to their parts, and Miss Thompson's work is deserving of real praise...."The Daily Herald, Los Angeles, June l8, 1923 writes "Produced at the Berwilla Studios, under the supervision of well-known directors, supported by a cast of white, Indian and Spanish characters seen in many of the best productions, and produced by the Lincoln Motion Picture Co., the oldest Negro producing company in the world, the production "By Right of Birth," the sixth produced by this corporation, is indeed a creditable showing in a new field. The Lincoln management is due considerable credit in their ability to handle a six-reel photoplay, typically racial in appeal, yet free from racial propaganda such as has been characteristic in several similar productions attempted by other concerns. So rarely have we ever considred the Negro in pictures other than in comedy roles that the showing of a six-reel dramatic production featuring colored actors and actresses in serious roles... is attracting more than usual interest along film row."

1.5. TAPE NUMBER; THREE, SIDE ONE (AUGUST 18, 1967)

Pacific Coast News Bureau

JOHNSON

Following the closing of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company corporation due to the discontinuance of the operation of many Negro theaters during the flu epidemic, George P. Johnson, their general booking manager, who also had charge of publicity and was as well employed in the United States government as a postal clerk, organized the Pacific Coast News Bureau for the dissemination of racial news of national and international importance. [The following quote is from the first letter sent out to the national press to announce its formation, services and rates. ] "To millions of colored Americans who may be living in uncertainty and unhappiness elsewhere, the thousands of acres of virgin territory in the great west and southwest offer unlimited possibilities. The thriving western cities with their cosmopolitan civilization teem with possibilities for the Colored American who seeks an opportunity to enjoy life in perfect freedom. But to the average Negro, the reader of your journals, the west and southwest is still an unknown quantity. Obtaining his information from the propaganda press dispatches of the white journals he is unable to obtain any reliable and authentic news dispatches of the opportunities, possibilities and achievements favorable to the Negro in this wonderful country.... [News items of national and international racial interest will be included, including that of the Negro in film. The service will be given to the Negro press by the Pacific Coast News Bureau, the only Negro national news outlet west of the Mississippi River. ] For the past few months we have been sending out sample news dispatches, absolutely free; and which have evidently met the approval of the Public and the Negro press as practically all the Negro papers have published our dispatches either direct or copied from other journals."Motion picture news comes direct either from personal observations or connections with the film industry, as for example the following letter from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Culver City, dated October 31, 1927: "Mr. Johnson, Pacific Coast News Bureau, 1131 East 41st Street, Los Angeles, California. My dear Mr. Johnson, I am sending you an exclusive story to be released to your services on the Negro players who are lately taking part in Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer 's pictures. The story mailed to you last week was also sent to Negro papers generally. This was done by mistake, as it was intended to be released to your service. I will appreciate it if you will be kind enough to send me clippings so that we may check on the approximate use of this material. Very truly yours, Joseph Polonsky, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer"Our subscribers are most of the leading Negro journals in the nation, and include the following. The Afro-American, 628 Eutaw Street, Baltimore, Maryland. "August 27, 1927, Pacific Coast News Bureau. Gentlemen. Enclosed please find check for services due in August. "The Chicago Bee, Editorial Department, 22621 South State Street, Chicago, December 8, 1926. "Pacific Coast News Bureau, 12012 1/2 Central Avenue, Los Angeles. Gentlemen. I am very much pleased with rendered service you have developed there. It is the best written and best prepared of any the colored bureaus have put out. I am sorry that geographical conditions prevent your being able to cover a larger field. Very sincerely. Chandler Owen, General Manager." The New York Amsterdam News, Editorial Department, New York City. "July 13, 1926. Gentlemen. At last I am resting easy. News from your bureau has been coming to me and I have been in a stage referred to in ring parlance as hanging on the ropes, because I wanted to know just who was getting out that splendid dope from the coast. Hoping then that I will in the future hear from you by special delivery. Sincerely, Romeo L. Dougherty, dramatic editor." [Letters in this section not checked against originals. Punctuation supplied by editor.]The above are just a few of the letters received, showing how the Pacific Coast News dispatches are being received by the same national Negro press who also subscribe to the National Negro Press Association. Following are samples of the type of materials the Pacific Coast News Bureau dispatched weekly to the national Negro press in various cities.

DIXON

When did you send this out? Was this sent out about the first of 1928 or toward the end of '27?

JOHNSON

Well four or five years along in through there, yes.

DIXON

I mean this particular dispatch that you just read.

JOHNSON

Yes, along about that time. "Filmland Amusement Notes. Hollywood (Pacific Coast News Bureau) [No date]. Wandering through the studios.... Listening to Wallace Berry tell how he started his career in the theatrical profession as "chambermaid" to Ringling Brothers' herd of 28 elephants for $5 a week when he was 16 years old.... Recalling boyhood reminiscences with Lon Chaney of the days when he and the writer were playmates at the Lowell school in Colorado Springs, Colo.... And of hearing of many of our former school mates whom Lonnie has not forgotten. . . . Richard Dix in a darkened makeup with mustache and Spanish sideburns, attired in sombreroes, chaps, and the gay trappings of the vaquero for his character role in "The Gay Defender" . . . . Called out of bed at 6 a.m. to witness the black and tan cabaret scenes in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers' "The Big City" bringing together again for the first time since the "Miracle Man" Lon Chaney and Betty Compson. . . . Over 100 colored actors were called out by Chas Butler, colored manager of the Central Casting Bureau office, for the scene, the finest and most elaborate cabaret scene of colored actors screened in Hollywood . , . . And Oh Boy, you should have seen that hula dance by Mildred and Mona Boyd, heading a bevy of the finest looking chorus of colored Hawaiian beauties in screenland... And there was Hazel Jones and Pearl Morrison, Geo. Reed, Kid Herman, Ernest Wilson, Raymond Turner, Nathan Curry, Hayes Robinson, Virgil Owens and many more of the colored actors.... Mingling among the audience was Ernest Torrence in knickers who came over from another set on which he was working, to look 'em over... On the boulevards velvets were very much in evidence--tones of yellow and gold being popular. The beaded gown is apparently more popular than ever, and there seems little change in the lengths of the skirts except in the period type costume, with its full skirt and irregular hem... On the FIRST NATIONAL lot there was Estelle Taylor, Hungarishly attired, taking a screen test for "The Whip Woman" which will feature Don Alvardo as the man. Estelle' s resemblance to Bebe Daniels is startling."New York Banking Interests Involved In Pacific Coast Race Restriction Litigation. $7,000,000 Negro Realty Syndicate Deal Opposed By $5,000,000 White Financial Combine. By Geo. Perry: Los Angeles. Never before in the history of the Race has any single Negro realty deal been opposed by such a combination of wealth as is behind the opposition forces who are backing the condemnation movement that has been instituted by a group of white representatives of financial interests whose combined holdings in the vicinity of the Negro subdivision, totals fully 500 million dollars. Headed by H.W. O'Melveny, director and officer in 17 banking institutions and representative of such interests as the powerful Dominguez estate, owners of 24,000 acres in this vicinity; the Mana de Los Reyes de Francis estate; and the Susana De Amo interests, the combine includes Jay Lawyer, Chas. H. Cheney, Frederick Law Olmstead and the New York banker Frank Vanderlip as representatives of the 16,004 acre Palos Verdes estate covering 26 sq. miles, valued at $15,000,000, purchased in 1913 by Vanderlip and four associates, which lies 5 miles direct south of the Negro sub-division; President Robinson of the 1st. National Bank of Los Angeles; the O.R. Johnson Corporation; the Hovey-Bandy Corp. and other powerful financial interests. $5,000,000,000 Opposition: This combination of interests whose combined investments in the territory adjacent to the colored sub-division totals fully $500,000,000 are, under the camouflage of a public demand for the establishment of a 320 acre public park, 132 miles from Los Angeles in an undeveloped high class prospective residential section in the vicinity of which are five other public parks; waging a battle in the Los Angeles courts to prevent Black Americans from retaining permanent possession of a $7,000,000 syndicate deal involving 213 acres of a 320 acre tract which the syndicate proposes to develop into a high class restricted Negro residential sub-division.Purchased For $575,046: Starting negotiations in the early part of 1925 for the purchase of 213 acres of extremely valuable property lying adjacent to Hollywood and directly in line with the expansion of Los Angeles towards the sea. Dr. Wilbur C. Gordon, colored physician and financier, thru his colored broker J.W. White obtained possession of the property Feb. 18, 1926 at a consideration of $575,046 by depositing $191,000 in money and securities in the Commercial National Bank. A trust was executed in favor of Dr. Gordon as beneficiary and a deed in trust was made in favor of the Bank. $7,000,000 Syndicate Organized: A group of white financiers were then interested by Mr. White and in association with Messrs. White and Gordon a sum of $7,030,485.76 was raised through a syndicate deal for the purpose of marketing this subdivision named Gordon Manor in honor of its colored founder. Contracts were then let for improvements; one for $458,439.16 for street improvements, curbing, ornamental lights, etc; another for $47,650 for an independent water supply and fire hydrants. A building contract was next closed with the State Housing Finance Corporation, providing for the financing and erection of 1,000 stucco houses at an average price of $3,500 each. Among the number were three houses ordered by colored investors for which plans have been drawn, to cost from $22,000 to $36,000 each.Case In Court (Something is missing here), When All Activity Was Stopped Thru Filing of Condemnation Proceedings. Bond Issue of $1,014,961.20: The bond issue placed by the county authorities amounting to $1,014,961.20 has just been declared valid in a decision by Superior Judge Walter Guerin and the issue sold to the Anglo- London-Paris Co. and Dean Witter and Co, for a premium of $32,581.50. The bonds mature in 30 years and draw 7% interest. It is stated that the issue is already oversubscribed. While Dr. Gordon has not made public just what settlement was made with him it is understood from good authority that the Gordon interests will receive close to $700,000 from the sale of bond issue as payment to them under the condemnation proceedings. The Gordon Manor will hereafter be known as Alondra Park, the most costly segregation measure even passed in the West."This spot referred to in this article, written about 1930 was condemned and is now a large city park known as Alondra Park. It is now in the heart of the city surrounded by fine homes, business establishments, schools and the International Airport.

DIXON

My goodness, I didn't know that had happened, I just knew that it was there.

JOHNSON

Very few people know. Here is another one."$100,000 Race Beach Resort Faces Foreclosure, Only Colored Beach on Pacific Coast Must Raise $25,000 or Lose Title, Los Angeles, October. [About 1926.] (Pacific Coast News Bureau): Southern California's greatest single resort asset, the 63 miles of Pacific Coast beaches adjacent to Los Angeles fully 50 of which is privately owned, has but one single stretch, 1500 feet in length available to the 75,000 Black American citizens of this district. For years a small stretch of beach strand in front of a bathhouse owned by a Black American, Charles A. Bruce of Manhattan Beach, provided the only real bathing facilities for Southern California's colored citizens. After several threats of lawsuits, condemnation proceedings and various pretexts, this resort was finally closed last year thru the establishment of a zoning law placing Bruce 's Bathhouse in the noncommercial zone, thereby prohibiting him from serving meals and renting bathing suits. Later in the fall election $325,000 worth of county bonds were voted for the purchase of 1800 feet of this frontage at an appraised value of $75 per front foot.Santa Monica Beach Lost: In Santa Monica, the elite of the beach resorts, a Black American owns a hotel and bathhouse several blocks from the beach. Colored bathers using a 100-foot stretch of beach the width of a street that terminated in the ocean, were compelled to walk to and from the bathhouse one-half mile away. In 1921 250 feet of property facing this promenade controlling this beach frontage and upon which now stands the exclusive $800,000 Edgewater Beach Club was offered to the colored people for $15,000. A syndicate was formed with 100 colored investors subscribing to 100 units at $150 per unit; a contract and deed was executed and placed in escrow in the bank. But the deal fell through when syndicate members failed to keep up their payments. The joker in the deal made each unit purchase an individual contract with forfeiture clause whereby failure of any single unit holder to complete payments jeopardized the entire title. Over $300,000 in cash, covering payments, interest and taxes paid, was refunded to syndicate members in cancelling the deal.$100,000 Foreclosure Pending: The latest beach venture includes 1500 feet beach frontage comprising a total of about seven acres lying a half a mile from Huntington Beach and about 35 miles from Los Angeles, and is without doubt one of the most beautiful stretches of ocean frontage on the Pacific Coast. Last year Harold C. Clark, white, offered the colored people this property on terms that if they would organize a beach club and pay to him $10,000 cash to be raised thru $100 subscriptions from 100 charter members, he would deed the property to the syndicate and invest $150,000 in buildings and improvements. The Club was to be operated for a period of 10 years by the syndicate, with Clark receiving 85% of the net profits during this period. Clark was also to be allowed to sell 5,000 life and perpetual memberships at an average of $60 each, 15% of this membership revenue to be given to the syndicate as a maintenance fee for the Club. At the expiration of 10 years Clark was to receive l0% of all the money remaining out of the accumulations derived from the fifteen percent maintenance fee. The syndicate was given a contract in the form of a lease (to counteract racial opposition by showing white ownership) wherein for the consideration mentioned the syndicate would operate the Club for 10 years. The deed was executed in favor of the syndicate and placed in escrow subject to the terms of the lease. At termination of lease either through fulfillment or default, deed to become effective and title to pass to the syndicate.$10,000 Cash Raised: The 100 charter members supplied the $10,000 cash and Mr. Clark started building operations, sinking piles and erecting foundation and framework for a very attractive stucco clubhouse, dance hall, and bathhouse with lockers and showers. Last Labor Day, colored beauty parade drew 10,000 colored people and 2,000 automobiles, the largest racial gathering at a colored resort in the history of the West. A few months later the entire structure burned down, set afire so it is claimed by some white objectors to a Negro resort in this section. Others claim a more serious charge.Places $19,000 Mortgage: Instead of using his personal capital to finance the buildings destroyed, it is claimed that Clark, unable to get bank capital, secured building finance through deals with the builders who were impressed with the money-making possibilities of the venture. With the buildings destroyed, pressure regarding payments forced Clark to place a $19,000 first mortgage against the project. The holders of this mortgage started foreclosure pro-ceedings...."

DIXON

Were these sent out as dispatches from your press bureau?

JOHNSON

I sent these all over the United States. Noble Johnson While thousands in the years from 1915 to 1950 have witnessed Johnson's film performances in hundreds of film productions of the old Lubin Company of Philadelphia, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company Negro films, Trooper of Troop K, By Right of Birth, Hollywood's Thief of Bagdad, Ten Commandments, Four Horsemen of the Apocalyose, and many others, very few knew that he was an expert dog trainer, operating kennels at 11179 Acama Street, North Hollywood for a number of years. When the new movies came in, performing dogs on the stage had to be taught how to obey hand signals and many other things, as explained in the following article from Kennel Review of December, 1933.Leading a Dog's Life in Hollyvjood By Clarke Irving: While Hollywood, motion picture center of the universe, abounds in gold, in fame-seeking aspirants, there are nevertheless those who emote before the talking cameras purely as a hobby or because the money they obtain in this manner can be used to further other interests more to their liking than a screen career. Well, at least there's one! He's Noble Johnson, one of Hollywood's foremost character actors. A name listed well up near the top of the "excellent" lists in the casting director's office of all the studios. For more than eighteen years he has been actively engaged in motion pictures, yet acting is his second love, as it were. His hobby, his first love--his life--if you please, is dogs! Dogs, their care and their training. And his two-acre ranch in North Hollywood is a "heaven on earth" for dogs. Great, massive Danes, and sporting dogs and ordinary small house pets. Almost all of them highly-bred, expensive dogs belonging to Moviedom's famous, and from the tiny Mexican Chihuahua to the 185 lb. Harlequin Dane, they all love him just as they do their own masters. His kennels, known as the Noble Johnson Boarding Kennels, are unique in that he specializes in boarding and training. In no sense of the word is his place a hospital, although no hospital in the land gives its patients better treatment than the dogs get at Noble's when needed. And he will take only those dogs which he can handle. "No crowding" is his slogan. The love and care given to Noble's canine boarders are evidenced in the perfectly trained product he turns out. It is his boast, too, that he has yet to see the dog, which through regular daily drills executed with love and kindness could not be taught good manners and obedience. Some of the "screen" dogs which have been boarded and trained at the Johnson Kennels are Zora, an Afghan Wolf Hound bitch belonging to Gary Cooper, lanky Paramount star; a Giant Schnauzer bitch owned by Paul Sloane, director on the Paramount lot; Irish Setter belonging to Richard Arlen, Paramount star; Max Factor, the make-up expert, entrusted two champion harlequin Danes; Ruth Chatterton's two Cocker Spaniels; a Springer Spaniel belonging to Ralph Forbes; the dogs owned by Richard Bennett, Charles Bickford, Mischa Auer and several other leading screen players and executives are today the proud owners of trained dogs from the Johnson Kennels. One of Johnson's most interesting boarders is a stone-deaf English Bull Terrier, about eight months old. His owners struggled for six months to overcome the handicap of his deafness. Being highly recommended by leading veterinarians, Johnson was soon suggested to them as a last resort. Training him solely by sign-methods picked up from the Mexican sheepherders years ago' in his home state, Colorado, Noble has within two months' time brought the deaf terrier to a position where he will obey as well as any dog, and not only that but he has a repertory of tricks that would put many stage dogs to shame. Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the son of Perry Johnson, in his time one of the nation's most famous racing-horse trainers, Johnson entered pictures through his ability to train horses and dogs, which he learned from his father and from the Mexican sheepherders on the vast Colorado ranges. Noble came into motion pictures as a result of his ability to train horses. A trick he performed in his first picture in the old Lubin Film Company, western thriller called Eagle's Nest. They needed a man who could drive a runaway team down a steep mountain trail and none of the' early-film-day players dared tackle the job. Some of the more important films in which this eminent actor has appeared are King of Kings, Ten Commandments , The Thief of Bagdad , The Four Horsemen , King Kong, and he is now appearing with Richard Barthelmess in Massacre, after finishing a part in Eddie Cantor's new production, Roman Scandals. Truly, here is one actor in Hollywood who is a topnotcher, and he'd get a whole lot farther up the ladder of screen fame, too, if he gave more time to his acting and less to his dogs. But then, it wouldn't be Noble Johnson any other way."Noble Johnson, in the years 1915-1918, appeared in about forty film productions, including ten or more with the Lubin Film Company of Philadelphia, three all-Negro productions of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company of Los Angeles in which he was not only the star but also head of the corporation, and the rest (with the exception of Griffith's Intolerance) with the Universal Film Company of Los Angeles, including two serial productions, The Red Ace of thirty reels and The Bull' s Eye of thirty-six reels, and those of other leading producers. In the following years, to and including 1950, he appeared in 155 film productions. His personal representatives included William H. Cohill and Ben Hershfield who represented no actor whose salary was less than $1,000 per week. He was personally acquainted with nearly every big star and director in films of those years. He was married, had no children, and invested his money in real estate acreage in and around Los Angeles. As a side issue he became an expert dog trainer, operated his own kennels and trained dogs for the Hollywood millionaires as well as movie stars, both for obedience and viciousness and film dogs, to obey signals by hand signals instead of by voice. He is the third eldest in a family of a father, mother, sister, two brothers. He lost his mother in the childbirth of the youngest brother. Since then he has lost his father, sister, and oldest brother. He has been retired about fifteen years and living with his wife in various locations in northern California, Oregon and Washington, buying and selling property. As it would require several volumes to record in detail his complete record and experiences in films, only the most noted of the films he has appeared in have been mentioned. The complete information contained in this [manuscript] relative to the early history of the Negro in film and of Noble Johnson's record and life history cannot be found in any library in the world. It is a collection compiled by George P. Johnson, his brother, on which he has spent forty years in compiling, consisting of books, magazine articles, newspaper clippings, programs, advertisements, photographs, stock-selling prospectuses, letters on firm stationery, and personal letters and signatures. Steel card files are full of names and information on thousands of Negro actors and productions in which they appear. His collection also'consists of hundreds of later-day Negro actors and productions; it is not invaluable as most libraries have information of such actors as Belafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr. and so forth. On file of the early-day actors in films, very little information is obtainable even in the largest library. Following is detailed information on some of the most noted film productions in which he has appeared, as the entire list would include a complete volume in itself. In Film Culture magazine. No. 36, 1965, a special issue on The Birth of a Nation , the author Seymour Stern states that Griffith employed quite a number of Negroes not only in The Birth of a Nation but also in The White Rose, 1923, The Greatest Question, 1919, Dream Street , 1921, and One Exciting Night , 1922. In The Birth of a Nation [he] claims to have employed Mme. Sul Te Wan whose name appears in the cast as the first "bit" Negro player in the history of the screen. He overlooked the fact that Noble Johnson had been playing for a number of years as an actor in the Lubin films made by the Lubin film studios in Philadelphia, and also in Intolerance, made in Hollywood. The author evidently did not know of Johnson's having appeared in Intolerance , for on page 15 he writes, "Why is there not so much as a passing mention of, or reference to, the Negro in Intolerance, which appeared for the first time on September 5, 1916, a year and a half after The Birth of a Nation and more than two years before The Greatest Thing in Life? I asked this question of Griffith years before he died, insistently and repeatedly; no answer was forthcoming. The Negro fails to appear in Intolerance , in scene or subtitle." Intolerance was Johnson's first film appearance in films on the West Coast. Because of his physical stature, his ability as a boxer, a horseman, and his experience and reputation with the Lubin Company, he was engaged by the Universal Film Company as a full-fledged actor to appear in their serials, The Lure of the Circus , The Red Ace , and as a costar opposite Eddie Polo in their great Bull' s Eye serial.Ogden Lawrence in his "Screenland" column of January 26, 1918, writes: "Some Bad Man: Noble Johnson, who appears as Sweeney Bodin, a cattle rustler in the Universal serial Bull' s Eye, is attracting widespread attention by his clever work. A fearless horseman born and bred on the plains of Colorado and completely equipped with an intimate knowledge of the character he protrays, Johnson has created a screen figure that is most unusual. His villainy is so perfect that one is forced to admire the deep, dark, daring treachery of the renegarde cowhand, whose only thought throughout the serial is to "put one over" on the hero. This Johnson does on so many occasions with such manifest hatred that we admit we would not care to meet such a character without the protecting carbine of a troop of cavalry. In the language of the day. Noble is 'some bad man.' "In the Red Ace serial opposite Marie Walcamp, Universal star Johnson has the Indian role of Little Bear. To show his versatility, Johnson wrote the Indian' s Lament , a Gold Seal three-reel Universal film with Marie Walcamp as the star and Johnson playing opposite her as Sleepy Horse, an Indian. Other Gold Seal films followed, such as Who Pulled the Trigger, a melodrama founded on the Leo Frank case with Universal's ace director Henry McRae and Marie Walcamp, star; The Caravan, a two-reeler, followed, written and directed by Raymond Wells, with scenes laid in Egypt along the Nile and Johnson in the role of an Egyptian with a cast composed of Claire McDowell, Jay Belasco and Lena Basquette.Johnson's versatility as a makeup artist kept him in great demand. One film was produced with only two in the cast. The Lady from the Sea , 1916, with Claire McDowell in the role of a shipwrecked white woman cast upon an island occupied by a lone African native. Claire McDowell played the mother in the first Ben Hur, and John Gilbert's mother in The Big Parade . Her real name was Mrs. Claire McDowell Mailes, and she died in 1966, eighty-nine years old.After several years wlth the Universal Film Company with whom he became nationally famous in their serials, Lure of the Circus , The Red Ace , and The Bull ' s Eye , costarring with Eddie Polo, then in the Universal Red Feather series with Jack Mulhall and Ruth Stonehouse, in the seven- reel Universal Jewel superproduction Under Crimson Skies , noted for the terrific fistic battle between Elmo Lincoln and Johnson for leadership of the beachcombers, the Metro Film Company secured Johnson for their sensational Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921, with Johnson in the role of Conquest. In the first million-dollar motion picture' to reach the screen, Metro's adaptation of Vincente Blasco Ibanez' The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a pictorial triumph, a picture of tremendous proportions. It was one of the greatest silent films ever produced and was a film that launched the stellar career of perhaps the most popular movie idol who ever lived, Rudolph Valentino. The film was directed by Rex Ingram, with his wife Alice Terry in the female lead, opposite a comparative unknown whose salary had never exceeded $350 per week, Rudolph Valentino. The most remarkable scene of the film was the symbolism of the Four Horsemen, representing Conquest, War, Pestilence and Death, shown in the air riding across the screen. But few of the millions who witnessed this remarkable scene knew that the rider of the horse representing Conquest was none other than the well-known Negro film actor, Noble M. Johnson.Following The Horsemen, Johnson in 1921 appeared in The Conquering Power with Rudolph Valentino; The Homeward Trail , Universal, with Harry Carey; The Girl He Left Behind, Universal, with Harry Carey; Wallop, Universal; and The Bronze Bell , Paramount. In 1922, The Cowboy and the Lady, Famous Players -Lasky; Loaded Door , Universal, with Hoot Gibson; The Ghost Breakers , Famous Players- Lasky; Universal serial, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, starring Harry Myers as Crusoe and Johnson as Friday, in one of the few roles as a Negro that he had been cast in.In 1922, Johnson wrote the story, Tracks, which was produced as a six-reel film by Western Picture Corporation and distributed as a Noble Johnson production by Playgoers, through Pathe, with Joseph Franz, director. The cast consisted of Bill Paton, Beatrice Bernham, George Burrell, J. Farrold McDonald and Noble Johnson. A story about the Texas rangers. In 1923, Johnson appeared in The Drums of Fate , Lasky, with Mary Miles Winter, star; Roman Scandals , Warners, with Eddie Cantor; Courtship of Miles Standish, Associated Exhibitors, with Charles Ray; Burning Words, Universal, with Roy Stewart; ln the Palace of the King , Goldwyn; and Cameo Kirby, Fox, with John Gilbert.Cecil B. De Mille's production of The Ten Commandments , story by Jeanie MacPherson, produced by Famous Players-Lasky in 1923, was a tremendous spectacle of beauty and grandeur, with the noted cast of such noted actors as Theodore Roberts, Julia Faye, Charles de Roche, Estelle Taylor in the prologue, and Richard Dix, Leatrice Joy, Rod La Rocque, Nlta Naldi, Robert Edeson and others. Step by step, in the finished picture the audience was led up to the dramatic moment when the dead child of Pharoah is brought before the King and he faces the grim reality of the predictions of the leader and lawgiver of the Israelites. The slave who brings this child before the King is painted from head to foot with gold. Under the light of the studio arc he gleams with an uncanny radiance that can be transferred to the screen. Every inch of his body was covered with gold paint for a record period of nineteen and one-half hours, and yet he still lives. To physicians, note of the achievement of Noble Johnson during the making of Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments came as one of the most remarkable scientific developments of the film. Painting the body with actual paint, especially gold paint, has caused the death of scores. By a special preparatory process, however, Johnson was able to defy the paint jinx for from twelve to nineteen hours and to give to the screen a majestic portrayal of a huge bronze bodyguard to Pharaoh Rameses II in spectacular scenes concerned with the Biblical prologue to Cecil B. De Mille's new picture. The value of the gold paint used was over $600 and some thirty-two pounds of it was required. Although Mr. Johnson escaped strangulation of the pores by his discovery, he could not have escaped death had his body been pierced to an artery by a scratch. Virulent blood poisoning would have set in immediately. To prevent this, he was protected from outside contacts at all times when not working by a special tent. In the 1923 Ten Commandments Johnson was the only Negro in the large cast. In 1956, another Ten Commandments was produced in Technicolor and wide-screen vista-vision starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, and Debra Paget. In this version over 100 Negro extras portrayed ancient Ethiopians. Among the Negro cast was Woody Strode as King of Ethiopia; Esther Brown in the role of Tharbis, sister of the King; Barbara Bartlett, role of the Ethiopian maiden, Loray Galle (former Loray White) as slave girl; Baunie and Daunie Comfort, twins, handmaidens to Debra Paget; Rommie Loud and Doug Peters, litter bearers; and Dick (Night Train) Lane, Dan Towler and Harry Thompson. Those are all athletes that people know, college and pro football players.In 1922, Carl Laemmle, president of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, announced to the press and public why, in his forthcoming serial The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe , featuring Harry Myers as Crusoe and Noble Johnson as Friday, he was not using his great serial star Eddie Polo, who had done such remarkable work in the Universal serials The Lure of the Circus and The Bull' s Eye . He had published in the national trade journals the following statement: "Statement On Robinson Crusoe . Laemmle Wishes To Set Trade Right On Situation: In order that there should be a thorough understanding of the situation which has been the subject of rumor and speculation for the last few weeks in the trade, Carl Laemmle, president of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, has issued a frank statement in regard to the forthcoming Universal serial, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe , as it affects our former star, Eddie Polo. Mr. Laemmle's statement is as follows: "l don't believe in keeping information under my hat which will be of value to my loving picture exhibitors. The statement which I am making may hurt me and may not, but I am making it in the belief that a full knowledge of the situation will help every exhibitor in the United States who runs serials . This statement is about my former star, Eddie Polo, and the serial which I am about to release under the title The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Recently Eddie Polo and Universal came to a parting of the ways. Mr. Polo asked for his release and we gave it to him. At the time of this parting, Uni versal had made all of its plans to make a serial entitled Adventures of Robinson Crusoe . All of these plans were carefully gone over with Mr. Polo because we intended to star him in this serial. The continuities and synopses of some of the episodes were made and Mr. Polo was enthusiastic about the possibilities of the serial for him. So enthusiastic, in fact, that when he had obtained his release, he immediately started to produce a Robinson Crusoe serial with his own organization. We are now informed that he has changed the title of his picture, but that the story which he intends to sell on the state rights market has not been changed. We are going ahead with our Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and have engaged Mr. Harry Myers to play the part of Robinson Crusoe and Noble Johnson to play the part of Friday. I feel that we have made an excellent selection and that Mr. Myers' widely known capabilities will be a tremendous asset to the character of Robinson Crusoe and the value of the serial itself. I feel, however, that it is only just and proper that I notify the serial exhibitors of the United States that there will probably be two Crusoe serials on the market. I make this statement without any prejudice. Those who like Eddie Polo will be glad to know it, and those who have come to appreciate the modern requirements of serial stories such as Universal is now producing after months of research and careful reconstruction and the kind of exploitation for which Universal is noted, will also be glad to have this knowledge which I am imparting."In 1924, a glorious fantasy of the Arabian Nights was produced in film form in The Thief of Bagdad , starring Douglas Fairbanks. Headed by Fairbanks, the cast includes Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Julanne Johnston, Anna May Wong, So-Jin, Etta Lee, Brandon Hurst, and others, including Noble Johnson in the character of an Indian prince. To those who do not knovr, Anna May Wong's right name is Wong Lew Song and means "Two Yellow Willows." So-Jin 's name is So-Jin Kamayama . Topsy and Eva, made in 1927, is of interest as it is one of the very few films among the 150 or more films that Noble Johnson appeared in, in forty some years in motion pictures, in which he is cast as a Negro, other than those of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which he organized and starred in, in 1915. In Topsy and Eva he plays the Uncle Tom role, with Vivian Duncan in the role of Little Eva and Rosetta Duncan in the black-face role of Topsy. Topsy and Eva was produced by United Artists, directed by Del Lord, and had a cast, besides Johnson and the Duncan sisters, of Gibson Gowland, Marjorie Daw, Niles Asther, Henry Victor, and Myrtle Ferguson. The entire company consists of thirty-five people and the company was on location at Lake Tahoe where most of the scenes were made.In the setting of When a Man Loves , in the Paris of Louis XIV, the greatest lover of the screen, John Barrymore, and Dolores Costello film the Warner production When a Man Loves , made in 1927, with scenario by Bess Meredyth, directed by Alan Crosland and supported by a large cast among whom were Warner Oland, Sam DeGrasse, Holms Herbert, and Noble Johnson in the role of an Apache.King Kong , in 1933, was another sensational film in which was shown a thirty-foot gigantic ape running amok in New York City, hurling automobiles at the Stock Exchange building and making his last stand against civilization atop the tower of the Empire State Building. With a fragile young woman in his paw, he fights a squadron of Army airplanes plucking one out of the air and hurling it into the street below. The directors of this sensational film were Marion C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and the cast: Faye Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Noble Johnson and others.In The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu , in 1929, Paramount- Famous-Lasky produced a 100-percent talkie. The gripping thrilling mystery melodrama, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu was a screen adaptation of the Sax Romer story of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, a real thriller with a great cast headed by Warner Oland as Dr. Fu Manchu, O.P. Heggie, Neil Hamilton, Jean Arthur, Claude King, Evelyn Selby and others, including Noble Johnson in the role of Li Po, Chinese servant and bodyguard, and, incidentally, Johnson's first talkie.In 1927, C. Gardner Sullivan presented the Donald Crisp production, Vanity, with a cast composed of Charles Ray, Leatrice Joy, Mayne Kelso, Louise Payne, Helen Lee Worthing, Alan Hale and Noble Johnson. One of the biggest scenes in the picture is a thrilling fistic battle between Alan Hale and the ship's cook, Noble Johnson, while the terrified Leatrice Joy watches in horror. Incidentally, Helen Lee Worthing, white, later married a prominent Negro physician in Los Angeles.In 1932, Universal Films produced The Mummy. Film Culture magazine, Volume One, No. 1, January, 1955, on page 25 publishes as follows: "In 1932 Universal 's third movie monster emerged from the corridor of time--Boris Karloff as The Mummy . Directed by Karl Freund, it was a wonderfully stylish nightmare in the tradition of the German fantasies of the '20' s. Karloff, a mummy restored to life when his tomb is defiled, promptly sets out to acquire as his mate Zita Johann, whom he believes to be a reincarnation of an Egyptian princess whom he loved ages earlier. Despite the valiant assistance of Noble Johnson, he is defeated and crumbled into dust."Those are some of the bigger films that Johnson's been in. You can't mention them all, he's got hundreds of them. I just picked out the most well-known films.

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: FOUR, SIDE ONE (OCTOBER 10, 1967)

From Tape IV onward, the interviewer was Adelaide Tusler, See Interview History for explanation.

TUSLER

Mr. Johnson, you have stated before that you were living in Omaha and working in the post office in the year 1915 when the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was formed, which your brother Noble Johnson and some others were instrumental in starting. Is that right, you were living in Omaha at that time?

JOHNSON

Yes. I was living in Omaha, working in the post office, 3:30 to midnight. My brother Noble Johnson was employed with Universal Film Company and a white camerman, Harry Gant, was also employed--they had been cowboys together years before. In talking they evidently got it into their heads to make a Negro picture, so they proceeded to form a company. They got two more white fellows in it, a fellow named Lee Shumway and I forget the other name; Clarence [A.] Brooks, a colored fellow; Dr. J.T. Smith, a wealthy colored druggist; and Dudley [A.] Brooks. They formed a corporation, got it incorporated in the State of California.

TUSLER

Did you know about this at the time it was forming?

JOHNSON

No, I didn't know it till they got it pretty well all organized. Then they made a picture (I wasn't here at all, I didn't know anything about it), called The Realization of Negro's Ambition .

TUSLER

That was their first picture?

JOHNSON

That was their first picture.

TUSLER

And what year was that?

JOHNSON

That was 1915 . They went around town and got a lot of society people and different people to be in various scenes in a kind of a little social drama. They made it and showed it here in the city, and people liked it very well. Then right about that time there was this Mexican battle down here in Mexico of the Tenth Cavalry, the Battle of Carrizal, and they decided that they would reproduce that as The Trooper of Troop K. So they went around town and found a lot of colored ex-troopers, Tenth Cavalrymen, and they found a lot of Mexicans, and they v;ent to the costuming companies that supply costumes for the movies and rented costumes, they rented guns, horses, machineguns, everything, got all organized, and they went out here in the San Gabriel Wash. In those days the San Gabriel River had no dams and it was probably a mile wide sand. There was another white man in it; he was one of the white officers of the colored troops. The Mexicans fought the colored troops, quite a realistic battle out there, all filmed. When they finished that they brought it to town and showed it here in the city. It created quite a sensation.

TUSLER

Where were they showing it?

JOHNSON

In colored theaters, little colored theaters; ten, fifteen cents to get in; small houses downtown.

TUSLER

There was no distribution wider than Los Angeles.

JOHNSON

No, not then. Then they figured people liked it so well that they ought to get it out further. So they wrote me in Omaha and asked me to book it in Omaha, to show it. They sent me a copy of the picture and I booked it in one all-colored theater, and another white theater in the colored neighborhood. It ran two or three days and they were very excited about it. They had representatives of the papers there--they had a colored paper there, and they boosted it up and everything. Then they wanted me to see if I could get it any further. Well, I knew the advertising man of the largest Negro paper in the United States, the Chicago Defender , a fellow named Tony Langston. I wrote him a letter and sent him some advertising and he wrote back and said, "You send me a copy of the film, I'll run it." A white organization owned five or six theaters on State Street in Chicago--one firm owned them all. He said, "I'll rent it to them at night and if they like it, why I'll book it. I'll handle it for you." That's all he said then. Well, I sent him the picture, he ran it at night, the fellow liked it, so they booked it for a whole week. And of course we had posters--we sent to the Otis Lithograph Company in Cleveland, Ohio to publish us big posters outside. We had what they call "stills," photographs, put in front, and programs. We sent them all that. The picture created such a sensation in Chicago that he wrote back and said, "I'd like to be your agent and open a Chicago office, and I will be the manager of the Chicago office." So we made a deal. He was to be the manager of the Chicago office and have complete control of the states of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

TUSLER

And you were in charge then of what?

JOHNSON

I was doing it all then, everything was sent to my office in Omaha. I was rooming in the two-story home of a retired colored soldier and he had a den. I offered to pay him $10 a month for the use of the den and I used it as an office. And then that went so good that this Langston from the Chicago Defender says, "You write to the New York News to Romeo Dougherty who has the same position as I have here." (The New York News , one of the biggest colored papers in New York City.) So I wrote him and made him the same proposition, and so we opened up a New York office with him as manager. He had control (he had an exclusive contract, we made contracts with him) for the states of New York, New Jersey, and about five states around there.

TUSLER

But you were still in charge in Omaha?

JOHNSON

I was in contact with them and I had to send back and order new prints made. And then I had literature made with the general booking offices of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company at my Omaha address. That proceeded on a bigger scale until we had offices in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, St. Louis, New Orleans, mainly connected with Negro newspapers.

TUSLER

One lead led to another.

JOHNSON

Yes, each manager told me about another one. And they all put me on their mailing list, they would send me their paper, too. Well, now it commenced to get quite complicated because each one of those fellows had to have a print of the film. The negative is kept home and you make prints, and every time we established a new office we had to have a new film for that office. The negative never leaves Los Angeles, it's in the files; they take it out and make a new picture. Then on top of that we had to design literature, advertising matter, billboard signs, sheets and everything. All those transactions and that correspondence came to me and not to Los Angeles.

TUSLER

They didn't do any of this part of it.

JOHNSON

Not a bit of it.

TUSLER

They did the production of the film and then you did all the distribution.

JOHNSON

Yes, I did all the distribution.

TUSLER

And publicity.

JOHNSON

It got rather complicated; I had to hire a secretary to come in and do that. The complicated thing [about this was] that a man would make a contract for a picture to play in a certain town on a certain date--he has to give it ahead in order for them to have three or four weeks to advertise. Well, then I had to see that each one of those guys had a film. If there was any mistake then I had to wire one fellow in the smallest place to cancel their showing and send that film to another bigger place, which meant that in a year or so I was getting twenty-five to fifty letters a day and ten and fifteen telegrams a day. I would get up at about six o' clock and working until 12:30, take a bath and be on the job downtown (it took me forty-five minutes to get to town) at 3:30 every day. In the summertime I would get off at 12 and I'd get home in about forty-five minutes. In the wintertime there would be three or four feet of snow on the ground, and the streetcars would stop running and I would have to walk. Then sometimes we'd work one hour or two hours overtime, and lots of times I would walk home through three feet of snow at two and three and four o'clock in the morning. Then I had to get up and still keep this correspondence going. So then they made another picture, so we had about three films and about six prints of each film. I had to have all that on record; I had to have card files, and each man had to tell me where he was booking his picture. I had to know where each film was at any particular time because some accident might happen here. If it did I had to wire another fellow and tell him to cancel his [showing] in a small house and send that film to another place for a larger house. Then I had to design literature, design advertising; we advertised in all the big Negro papers in the United States.

TUSLER

You were responsible for that, too. They didn't do any of that in Los Angeles?

JOHNSON

They would just keep making the films and if there was any repair work, the films had to be sent back and they repaired them; one film was burnt down one time. That went on for two or three years, a couple of years, I guess. They first started out by paying me a few dollars. Well, I demanded an interest in the corporation, so I was made one of the directors, getting an equal stock interest. It was incorporated for $75,000 in the State of California.

TUSLER

And your brother was the president of it.

JOHNSON

My brother was the president of it at that time.

TUSLER

The other men whom you mentioned in the beginning, were they also part of the organization?

JOHNSON

Well, yes, but none of them did any--well. two of them appeared in one of the pictures. The white camerman photographed all of the pictures at the same time he was photographing Universal pictures. My brother was working in serials with Eddie Polo and Francis Ford, the Bull's Eye serial, Red Ace, big serials where he's fighting, scrapping all the time. Then a little later I told him that I didn't like the [Lincoln] films outside of The Trooper of Troop K — the military atmosphere of that picture brought it over. But the first picture was a drama that took acting, and we didn't have the proper actors. I told him I didn't like any of the pictures and so I said everybody will write a scenario and submit it. We had about five or six men connected, I said, "Everybody write an idea of a picture and send it in-- we want something better."

TUSLER

This was your idea, to do this.

JOHNSON

Then I wrote one and they accepted mine--mine was By Right of Birth . The first picture was a three-reel picture and now we were making five-reel pictures.

TUSLER

Was the second film. The Trooper of Troop K, three reel?

JOHNSON

Three reels, yes. There was another one, A Man' s Duty . Then the next thing, they accepted [my idea]. They wanted me to come out here and be here for the making of it. Of course, before that, I had made several trips back east talking to the big fellows. One was Robert L. Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier . He also had a big office in the city of Pittsburgh; Robert Levy, a white man, who had owned a big stock company of Negro actors that later made pictures; and Brown and Stevens, bankers of Philadelphia.

TUSLER

What was their interest in it?

JOHNSON

Well, I was talking to them (probably later) to expand and get more finances, to make it a bigger national proposition.

TUSLER

To invest in the company, to enable it to expand?

JOHNSON

To get bigger. But I did more later on that. The thing they wanted me to do now was to come to California. Well, I faked a leave of absence. I had to get it on sickness; I had the doctor say I was sick and got a leave of absence and then I worked my way here. I took one of the pictures and I stopped at Topeka, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Tulsa, Oklahoma and Muskogee, Oklahoma; and Fort Worth, Texas, Dallas, Texas and El Paso, Texas showing the picture. Now what we had to do in some places (we charged $25 or $50 or something a day and some of those smaller houses couldn't pay it) was gamble with them--we'd play it on percentage. To play it on percentage meant that that you would furnish the picture and the advertising which went with the picture, and they had to furnish the newspaper and the outside advertising, and furnish the house. But we had to send a man with the film. I would carry the film with me. I had to be on the door to take tickets to get our percentage. We played sixty- forty; we got sixty and they got forty. You had to have a man on the door. Later on, we had men all over the United States doing that. But at this particular time I was doing it, I was working my way out here. So I stopped at each one of those places and showed the picture, and was on the door at night and took my percentage, and then left the next morning and got out here.

TUSLER

How did that work out? Was it financially successful?

JOHNSON

Yes, because I was lucky I didn't run into rain. Some of these times when you show a picture on percentage, if you get a heavy rain that night, you're out. Then later on we put other men out on a percentage basis. In those days you could buy a one-thousand mile ticket for a traveling man and you could get off and on any train you wanted to. But that was an expensive way of doing business, but it's the only way we could get into the smaller houses and little towns with Negro theaters that only had maybe 25,000 or 30,000 people. For the big towns we had no trouble at all. We had three or four traveling men that didn't do anything but that. They just went from one little town to another. But that required two men. One man had to go and take a film and after the show, show it to the man so he could see it. Then you'd sign a contract with him to show it one, two, three, four or five days and set the time for a week or two weeks from that. Then at the day of the showing, another man had to come along with the film (this other man didn't carry any films--all he carried was the contract. He just kept going from one town to another). But another man had to come along on that particular date, stay on the door, get his percentage and leave that night, if he could get out of town after the first showing. That kept him moving. Out of Omaha, when I was there, I had to keep track of all of these men. They all had to report to me; they reported to me by wire. I would get fifteen or twenty wires a day. I got so many wires that for a while they would give them to me at the post office and the postmaster came to me one day and says, "It looks like you're trying to make this your headquarters." I said, "No, all these letters and telegrams are addressed to my house. These boys just know I'm here and they come and hand it to me instead of sending them out to the house." So they were on my trail for doing too much business. Then when I got out here we went right to work.

TUSLER

This was approximately 1917?

JOHNSON

Just about, yes, about two years after we first opened up.

TUSLER

And the occasion for your coming was having written the scenario that they wanted you to oversee.

JOHNSON

Yes, they wanted me to be here at the making of it.

TUSLER

Did you actually write the whole scenario, or did you just plot out the story? Was it a complete script?

JOHNSON

Oh, no; I wrote the story and they made it into [a scenario] --they did that here, they cut it up into scenes. I wrote the story and they thought it was interesting. The story told mostly about two white people coming here in a camp wagon over the mountains and running into a wreck. In the wreck the people had got killed but there is a little live baby. They took the baby, came on to California and adopted the baby, and later found out it was a colored baby. But they kept it and it grew up into a beautiful girl. Then she went to college and she fell in love with a colored boy, of course, and it went on. We were lucky to have a little comedy in it. There was an Indian woman (I forget her name. Minnie, I think) who played in a lot of the big pictures, and we got her to play in our picture. The supposition was that the baby was an Indian and not a Negro, and later on as she grew up she turned out to be a Negro. Then she fell in love with a Negro boy and we show the college track scenes. And then we got up into society and we showed a dance--we had Booker T. Washington's son, and we threw a big party out at the studio and invited all these people to a big dinner at the studio. While they were there we put the girl and my brother in there and got a scene of the whole thing. We paid these people about ten dollars apiece and a big dinner. That was one scene.

TUSLER

How did the story work out?

JOHNSON

I forget now just what it was. They later married.

TUSLER

It had to do with racial conflict?

JOHNSON

It had to do with the relationship of Negro and white and Indian. There was a lot of comedy in it. There were some law scenes in it about the adoption services. I don't quite remember all of the story right now, but it had the two white people who had come out in the wagon, they were white; the lawyer was white. The girl and her lover and most of the other people were colored. We had a track scene while they were in college together. I asked for the best colored runner in town. They told us to go down to the Los Angeles High School to a boy named Smith, and we got him. A month ago I went downtown to the biggest post office, new building in town, and I saw a man sitting in there. I motioned to him to come over. I wanted to talk to him--he was the superintendent of that building. I said, "Smith, do you remember the first time I met you?" And he said "no." I said, "Well, it's back when we went to your high school and got you as a runner to come run in our picture." About twenty years or more ago. So he laughed about it.

TUSLER

What was the name of that film?

JOHNSON

By Right of Birth.

TUSLER

And this came out in about 1917.

JOHNSON

Just about. But that was costing a lot of money and we needed more money, so we got hold of a white man here named [P.H.] Updike. He was in stock and he had a brother that ran a coal company in Omaha. So he submitted the plans to this man and wanted him to put up the finances. He wired to Omaha for me to go up and see his brother, the manager of a coal company up there. I went up to talk to him. He talked to me, feeling me out and everything, and he wired back to his brother it was okay. Then his brother put up the money. Then when I came out here and the picture was made, he come to me and he says, "Well, I still can't see how you're going to make any money at this. How can you make any money showing a picture for ten cents apiece like they've been showing them?" I said, "It isn't going to be anything like that." I said, "Write me a check for $500." He wrote me out a check for $500 and I went to the Los Angeles Investment Company, first trying to get the Philharmonic. But Over the Hill was playing there. I want-ed the next biggest place in town so the Los Angeles Investment Company owned the Embassy on 9th and Grand, It was named Trinity at that time. It's a big white church on 9th and Grand. It didn't have any curtain or any motion picture machines. I paid $250 a night for two nights. Then we had to have motion picture machines put in and a curtain put in. Then I got six colored girls. I made photostatic copies of every seat in the house and I marked every seat (Two seats we lost on account of their being out of sight). I had blueprints made of every seat in the house and every seat priced, and I gave them to these six girls, sent them out, and in a week they had sold every seat in the house from 75 cents to $1.50 a seat. Then we got a footman put outside, we got a prologue, we got Sunshine Sammy and a number of singers, and my brother got a whole lot of Hollywood people to come. We had the representatives of both newspapers in town. I had a footman outside for carriage trade and we stood them up two days . Updike was doing the financing. He said, "Well, that's more like it now. Of course, you can do that because this is your home." I said, "Well, I'm going to show you two more times that we can do it anywhere." I told him to give me another check. I hired two Greyhound busses, I put a whole colored band and orchestra in one bus, I put the two stars male and female in the busses, and went down to Riverside. I leased the Riverside Theater, the only theater in town, a white theater, and there wasn't a handful of colored people down there. I put billboards up all over town, great big sheets up in the middde of the street, took boys and scattered bills in every house in town, took space in the newspapers, and played it for one night to standing room. So we came back and he was all smiles. So I said, "I'll give you one more chance." So I took the star, man star, Clarence Brooks, and we went to Omaha. I leased the Boyd Theater, the biggest theater in Omaha, and I did the same thing there, stood them up, couldn't get in, it was all one night. When I came back he was satisfied. He advanced us the money we needed to go through with it. We made about ten prints of the picture, sent it all over the United States and created a sensation. Then we wanted to go higher, a little stronger the next time. But he got to gambling in wheat and grain and lost quite a bit of his money and he couldn't finance us anymore. So we sold some stock and we got money enough to make. Right at the time our pictures were doing so good in Chicago, they were showing on the main colored street in Chicago, the same houses were also showing Universal pictures. One colored house would have a great big poster outside with Noble Johnson, star of this Negro picture. A house two doors away would have a great big sign out there with Noble Johnson and Harry Carey in the Bull's Eye serial of Universal. Well, that word got back to Universal, so Universal called my brother in and they told him that they couldn't allow that. "You'll either have to make up your mind vjhether you want to stay with the Lincoln Company or whether you want to be a Universal man. We can't permit you to." Because the theater man was paying ten times the amount for Universal film he was paying for Negro films; yet Noble Johnson, being a Negro, was outdrawing the white actors on the colored theaters. So that took him out; he had to send in his resignation to the Lincoln Company.

TUSLER

The competition was really hurting.

JOHNSON

Yes, it was hurting them bad, you know. He should have known better. But when it started out he didn't know it was going to get that big. They started out more as a plaything, not so much as a money-making proposition. They just wanted to see what they could do, make a colored picture. They didn't have the slightest idea that it would hit so big. It would be showing in New York and Chicago in opposition to Universal pictures. So he couldn't do that, and he had to send in his resignation. Our vice-president, a pretty wealthy colored druggist named Dr. Smith, took over the presidency then.

TUSLER

Did the other people remain the same?

JOHNSON

Yes, they remained about the same, yes, except that we used some different actors--we picked up different people. Some of these actors had had experience and some of them hadn't, but we did pretty good. That's the last picture we made. The next trouble then was that we commenced to run into--what is this disease they had, closing up the theaters?

TUSLER

The flu?

JOHNSON

That isn't what they called it then; what did they call it?

TUSLER

The grippe?

JOHNSON

The theaters were being closed on account of it--I don't know if it was influenza or what that was, but different places were being closed up there. And [also] losing him was a very damaging blow to us. The other actors weren't nationally known actors like he was, just fellows we picked up.

TUSLER

What year approximately was this?

JOHNSON

That was about '18, I guess. 1918 or '19, I forget the exact years. We just had to discontinue it, that's all; we couldn't keep it going on that basis.

TUSLER

The company was actually dissolved at that time.

JOHNSON

Dissolved, yes; they just dropped it.

TUSLER

Very shortly after your brother had to leave it.

JOHNSON

Yes. We didn't make any more pictures, but we worked on that picture probably a year or more until the flu epidemic closed up so many of these theaters.

TUSLER

This picture you are talking about is the one you wrote. By Right of Birth . So that was really the last film.

JOHNSON

That was the last film, yes.

TUSLER

How many did they actually make, altogether? Was it four?

JOHNSON

I think we made five. Realization , Trooper of Troop K, A Man ' s Duty . . . . Then during the war, there was another big event that we thought we were going to get. The white cameraman we had, Harry Gant (he had lived up to a few months ago--I went to his house and saw him a few months before he died), was in a meeting [with some] white officials during the war. There was some talk there that the government was going to appropriate ten million dollars for propaganda pictures to go overseas. They wired me about it, in Omaha, and said if they're going to do that, the Negro ought to get a tenth of that [to be] produced into Negro pictures for the Negro troops. So they wanted me to immediately go to New York and see about it. Well, I took my vacation. Our pictures had shown at Tuskegee, Alabama, at the biggest Negro school in the South at that time--Booker T. Washington, and his secretary was Emmett Jay Scott. I have letters where they commended our pictures highly and wanted more; they showed all they got and liked them, had a big crowd. Booker Washington and also Scott. Later on Scott was appointed Assistant Secretary of War, special assistant to handle matters connected with Negroes. He got a leave of absence from Tuskegee and opened up an office in the War Department. So he was my man to see. So I went to Washington, and I didn't know how to get to him. Well, there was another Tuskegee man, a teacher at Tuskegee named Ernest Atwell, and he was there. I got ahold of him and we sat up all night talking, and I said, "Can't you get me to Mr. Scott?" He said, "Well, I'll try. Scott is a very busy man." The next day he called up: "Scott will see you." So I went up there and I had to get a pass; I got the pass (I've still got it). Going in there's a great big room about 100 feet long with about fifteen secretaries sitting on each side, and he's in the back. With my pass they let me through, and I walked through all those secretaries and went back there and went in his office. He closed the room, shook my hand, and said, "Well, I'm glad to see you. I certainly like your pictures. " "Yes, I have had letters from you." "What brings you here?" Well, I sat down, I showed him all the pictures we had, pictures of my brother, makeup and different things that he hadn't seen. I said, "We got this information privately down there among the big moguls in Hollywood that they are going to appropriate [money to make] pictures for the troops. We thought if they did, as a Negro troop we ought to be able to produce those Negro pictures," Well, he looked at the pictures and things. "The only thing is, I don't think you have enough real dramatic actors in your troop. I said, "Well, Robert H. Levy is in New York and he has the Lafayette Stock Players. They have been playing all over the United States in dramatic stock playing," They later came out here and played on the stage and then they made films later. He said, "l know Levy." I said, "I know he will cooperate with us and go in with us with his dramatic players." They were very fine. He said, "l would like to see Levy." You go to New York and bring him back, I'd like to talk to him. I said, "I'm here on a leave of absence from the post office, and I've got to leave tonight to get back to Omaha in time. " He said, "That's too bad, you've come this far." I said, "Well, I'll go get him if you'll just write a little note to the postmaster or something, and tell him I am being detained." He scratched his head and said, "Well, I don't know." So he called his secretary and typed a telegram, "Mr. George P. Johnson is being detained here in Washington on some very important business. Emmett J. Scott, Assistant Secretary of War." [laughter] Oh, that sounds big, you know. I went to New York — I never saw daylight, I went under the Hudson River, took a subway to the Times Building and went up to the top floor and talked to Levy. He put on his hat, we came back and went to Washington, I never even saw daylight. So he talked to Levy and Levy said, "Yes, I'll go in with Johnson. I'll furnish all my actors if you want them." And I left for home. When I got back, the superintendent of mails and all of them came to me, shaking my hand, and said, "Yes, I see you made it back all right, that's all right, that's all right, we got a wire, that's all right." They'd have eaten me up, you know, if they hadn't gotten that wire. That wire made it sound big--it didn't amount to nothing but that I was being detained by the Assistant Secretary of War, and that was big, you know. We heard no more about that for six months. Then I got a letter from Scott saying that the deal had never materialized.

TUSLER

Did the whole thing fall through? They made no appropriations?

JOHNSON

They probably made it, but not on that scale. They made pictures for the war, yes. But while I was there I went to the French government and I bought a French film of the Negro troops in France that we showed all over the United States. I bought that from the French, I think it was the French Pictorial Service; they had an office in New York for that purpose. We distributed that all over the country. And then we made another picture. I got a permit from the War Department. The Tenth Cavalry were in training in Fort Huachuga, Arizona, and I got a permit from the War Department to go down there. I took the camerman along, Harry Gant, a white fellow, and we went down there and spent two days. That whole regiment turned out, and they paraded and jumped and did everything for us there. We made a picture called A Day with the Tenth Cavalry, and we shipped that all over the United States.

TUSLER

This was a documentary?

JOHNSON

That was a documentary, yes.

TUSLER

Was this a Negro group?

JOHNSON

Negro troops, yes, the famous Tenth Cavalry. It's the same group that fought the Battle of Carrizal--a later bunch of men, but it was the same Tenth Cavalry. They were very famous and that picture just went like hotcakes all over the United States. Tuskegee and everybody, they all liked that fine. And then we got letters; I have letters from the commanding officer. We stayed there two days and they turned out for us and treated us like kings. We made another newsreel of various prominent Negroes. One was Roscoe Simmons, the great orator, and Major Loving, and Negroes visiting around town here. We just made a newsreel, one reel, and showed that too, all over the country.

TUSLER

When you went to Arizone with the cameraman to make this picture, did you have something to do with the construction of it?

JOHNSON

I did the business end of it down there. I made the contact with the major and the different officials there to let the troops [make the picture]. Somebody had to give the troops authority to go out. You just can't walk in and [have] 200 or 300 men get out there and act all day long. They paraded and jumped and shammed battles and did all kinds of things for us, you know, for two days. [We] roomed in the house of the chaplain. But they treated us fine; we had dinner, played around with the fellows, and they had me get up and make a speech, and I hadn't made a speech in my life! That was our two days. Of course we made money off it because it didn't cost us anything. We got it free.

TUSLER

How long a film was that?

JOHNSON

That was just one reel, 1,000 feet.

TUSLER

What was the longest picture you ever made?

JOHNSON

By Right of Birth was five reels.

TUSLER

That was the last and longest one you made. That was the trend then, wasn't it, films were all becoming longer?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, it was getting better. We had more experience in them, and you had to have a story, you had to carry it all the way through, and most all the films [that were] any good at that time [did], because they filled a whole program, whereas when you put in a one- or two-reeler they had to get a lot of other stuff. If you show a five-reel special they don't need anything else with it, that makes a whole program. When you put in a one-reeler or a two- reeler then they have to have other things to go with it.

TUSLER

Were all your pictures a financial success?

JOHNSON

Well, they were, if we would have had the right type of organization to handle it. We lost the money on the distribution of it. You see, here is what a white man does: he makes a picture, he puts $10,000 or $15,000 in the picture. All he does is walk across the street and turn that over to a distribution company at so much, and the distribution company advances him $10,000 on the next picture. That's all he has to do; he doesn't have to worry a bit about showing the picture unless it's a big company that has their own distribution. A whole lot of these companies, especially individual companies, don't have any way of getting rid of their picture. But all they have to do is make it and then [turn it over to] these other companies that don't make pictures, all they do is distribute them. You go to that company and he looks at your picture and he estimates the gross amount he will make. Say, he'll figure he'll make $75,000 off of that picture, and he's got the United States rights to it. Then he'll advance you $25,000 on another picture, so the producing company can keep their producing people working all the time. Now, we had to make a picture and then we had to close down everything and take the same man we made the picture with and go out and spend money traveling all over the United States, trying to get money enough to make another picture. But we were out of business all that time.

TUSLER

You couldn't use a distribution company to distribute your pictures?

JOHNSON

There wasn't any. There wasn't any, none that handled colored pictures.

TUSLER

You mean the white organizations...

JOHNSON

Oh, the whites wouldn't handle it at that time. They would handle them later, ten or fifteen years later, when some of these other guys got to making Negro pictures, much bigger and more expensive pictures. They did handle some of them. There wasn't many of them that would advance you money like that. White man has no trouble at all--he makes his picture here, he walks across the street to a distribution agency, and they take it and have complete charge of it at a certain percentage, and they don't have to worry, they just keep their studio working all the time.

TUSLER

Did you attempt to deal with any of the distribution companies? Did you approach them?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, we approached them, but of course at that time Negro pictures were used to... Now, if we had made... We were the first company to make a standard high-class picture. Now [that's] where we lost money. If we had started out and made a lot of slapstick, chicken-eating, watermelon Negro pictures like they had been making, and then gradually gone into our type of picture... But then we made something that had never been made before. We were the first company to make a picture, a drama, of this type. And that's why we had the trouble. We were pioneers and the pioneers always lose, you see.

TUSLER

There were other Negro companies?

JOHNSON

Oh, there were other companies, yes. I've told about it in the other part of this thing. [William] Poster made Negro films back in 1910; he was the first Negro to make colored pictures. The first colored pictures were made at that time. But all the pictures up to that time, even the whites', pretty near all of them, were just slapstick comedies, you know. Octavus Roy Cohen's pictures: Octavus Roy Cohen was a great writer, his stories were all in the Saturday Evening Post . Their pictures were made, but they were cheap Negro pictures. All they could think of then for Negro pictures was chicken-eating, watermelons, shooting craps and all that kind of stuff.

TUSLER

Were they designed for a Negro audience?

JOHNSON

No, no, the whites took them; they liked them. Whites didn't like our type of picture. They hadn't been used to the Negro being put in a high-class social picture.

TUSLER

The white audience liked it as long as it fit the pattern of the old stereotype.

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, watermelon eating and all that kind of stuff, until later on; but they never did take them good. Later on, the same Levy made the Lafayette Pictures and Micheaux, a colored man, made a whole bunch of good pictures, and they were really those same colored actors that had been employed in white pictures. But still the white houses wouldn't take them on the same basis that they would take the other ones. They just hadn't been trained to it.

TUSLER

So one of the reasons why Lincoln Company had to close down was not only your brother's going over completely to Universal, but it was this.

JOHNSON

Oh, no, that didn't close us down, but it hurt us. We couldn't replace him, nobody as big as he was. Yes. But we could have kept going if we had had [distribution] . You see, the distribution cost us too much, by the time you send two or three men out to sell the picture and you don't get much [box] office, supposing it rains. We were working on too close a margin, you see. We didn't have any backing behind us to amount to anything.

TUSLER

And you couldn't reach out to get certain stars that you would have liked to have hired, perhaps.

JOHNSON

No, we couldn't pay anybody. All these people we got working for very little money. Well, there wasn't many stars then; colored men had no chance to be a star because the white firms never had any colored actors. The only reason my brother got in--he never got in as a colored man--was that he was employed by the Lubin Company years ago because of his ability as a makeup artist. In his first picture he was an Indian; he made a perfect Indian, he made a better Indian than a real Indian did. At Universal, out of fifty pictures, I don't think he played a Negro part in more than about three. He was Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom' s Cabin , and he played one or two Negro parts. He played in Robinson Crusoe with Jackie Coogan. But mostly his parts were others; as a great makeup artist he made up as an Indian or a West Indian or a South American or pretty near anything they wanted to make up.

TUSLER

But in the Lincoln Company films he played Negro parts.

JOHNSON

Oh, in the Lincoln Company he played naturally. He didn't need any makeup, no. Of course, we were featuring Negro films, that was our business. But he got in pictures accidentally and made good, and then he got out here just in time for Intolerance. He got in Intolerance , and then he got in Thief of Bagdad and he got in Ten Commandments and he got in all those big pictures. But he didn't get in there as a Negro. He got in there as an actor. In the early days they were very, very prejudiced against the colored. They had all been trained up. Even the shows, for a long time, the shows would say Bert Williams was always black-faced. And even not until you got up to fellows like Paul Robeson, who was a wonderful singer. He got by, but that's been the trouble all the way through. You never had the finances and you never had the really trained actors. A few that could act couldn't get the parts. Clarence Muse acted a long time but on account of his color he never could get a big part. He was in lots of big pictures but always as a servant or waiter or something like that, you see. They didn't put you up. That color line, color business is bad. Now you get way up to the later day actors.

TUSLER

Do you think it's quite different today?

JOHNSON

Well, it's quite different. They're giving them more play, like Poitier; they've played Poitier on an equal basis with a white actor, whether it's a woman or it's a man, it doesn't make any difference.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: FOUR, SIDE TWO (OCTOBER 17, 1967)

TUSLER

Mr. Johnson, you and I have just been talking about how the Lincoln Motion Picture Company got started, and I would like to mention on the tape that in your personal collection of documents, all of the materials relating to the founding of the company exist, the original legal papers that had to do with the drawing up of the company and all of the factual material. I'd like to ask you today to talk on the tape a little bit more about where the idea for the company came from, whose idea it was, and how did these men, your brother Noble Johnson and some of the other founders, get together? How did they know each other and where did the idea come from?

JOHNSON

well, my brother Noble Johnson had been working with Universal Film Company. At that particular time they were making The Bull ' s Eye serial with Eddie Polo, and the cameraman was a white man by the name of Harry Gant. Harry Gant and my brother had known each other before as cowboys before they ever got into Universal. They didn't go into Universal together; they just happened to be employed [there], and then they were friends already. I don't know, but just one day they got to talking about making a picture and so they went downtown and talked to the wealthy druggist, Dr. J. T. Smith. There were two other young fellows there that were interested who were named Clarence and Dudley Brooks, brothers. They talked it over and decided they would try it. So they fixed up a cast--my brother was the lead and Harry Gant would do the photographic work. There was another white fellow, an actor friend of his that they got in, who was named Shumway, Lee Shumway. They talked it over, and they hired an attorney, Willis [D.] Tyler, a very noted Negro attorney who was also a friend, and they decided they would go ahead and make one. Well, the first one they made was The Realization of a Negro' s Ambition . It was just a small one--I think it was a two-reel film.

TUSLER

Can I ask you before we go on, how did these people know each other? How did your brother know Clarence and Dudley Brooks? Had they been in pictures together?

JOHNSON

No, neither one of them had ever been in a picture before. I think Dr. Smith knew them better than my brother. I think Dudley had a little money--he was connected with an Italian liquor firm, and so I think Dr. Smith interested them.

TUSLER

How did your brother know Dr. Smith?

JOHNSON

Well, my brother would come around town some, and Dr. Smith had the largest drugstore in town, quite a center place for professional men to meet. Doctors would all come in there to order, and policemen and detectives and different people would come in. Smith was very well known. I don't know how my brother and he first got acquainted. They became quite good friends.

TUSLER

But it wasn't a connection through the motion picture industry?

JOHNSON

No; Smith and none of these other men had ever had any connections with pictures at all. They hadn't even thought about it.

TUSLER

So what was their interest in it?

JOHNSON

Well, they just brought up the idea and it hadn't been done. You see, all pictures heretofore made had always been what they call Negro slapstick comedies. It had always been a colored man making a monkey of himself and all that kind of stuff, and they got the idea that if something different was made it might take. It was the first picture made without any of what they called slapstick comedy, crap shooting, watermelon, chicken stealing, which is what most all the others had. They didn't think they could use a colored man without all that kind of stuff. So that's what made the success of that picture, because when it went out it showed them in society and in business offices and in some of the homes, and it was something that the Negroes had always been wanting but a white man wouldn't make. And that made it very interesting. It did very good right around here and probably in San Francisco. But then there was no money. These houses at that time were ten cents admission. But it did well enough to encourage them to make another one. The next they made they decided to make more thrilling and more interesting. That time luck came with them because the Tenth Cavalry was in trouble in Mexico with the Mexicans, and they had the Battle of Carrizal, as they called it, where there was quite a bit of fighting and quite a number of them killed. So they decided to reproduce that as the next picture. Instead of writing a scenario, they just wrote a little story around this battle. Then they started to work by going down to the costume supply company in Los Angeles that supplied all the studios, and they rented uniforms for soldiers, Mexican sombreros and other things for Mexicans, guns, Gatling guns, and they went out and rented horses. They went down on Central Avenue and rounded up twenty-five or thirty ex-Negro-cavalrymen who had been in the Army before as cavalrymen, and they rounded up forty or fifty Mexicans down in Mexico town and put them in costumes. They went out in the San Gabriel Wash (the San Gabriel River then was about a mile wide and when it wasn't raining there wasn't water in it, it was sand) and had a sham battle between the colored troopers (the "Troopers of Troop K") and the Mexicans. It is quite realistic and very interesting, and it is short, I think three reels.

TUSLER

So none of these people were experienced motion picture people except for your brother and Harry Gant. Their interest in it was as you'd say to bring out a new type of Negro motion picture and also as a financial investment. Now how did they organize the company?

JOHNSON

They just were around Smith's drugstore and Smith called in Brooks. Smith had a balcony in his drugstore where he used to serve couples ice cream and stuff, and we rented the balcony and I used it for an office for quite a while. We wouid meet up there, have a regular meeting and then talk it over, and each guy would suggest something. They'd keep a record of the minutes and decide on just what to do.

TUSLER

Your brother was the president.

JOHNSON

Yes, they elected him president, and they elected Clarence Brooks secretary.

TUSLER

And Dr. Smith?

JOHNSON

Vice president, I guess. What is Dudley Brooks?

TUSLER

Dudley Brooks, it says on this letterhead stationery, is the assistant secretary.

JOHNSON

Well, they just gave every one of them an office of some kind, you know.

TUSLER

And Dr. Smith's drugstore and the place above it were your offices. This is the address here?

JOHNSON

1121 South Central Avenue. At that time the Negroes on Central Avenue didn't go further than about 12th Street. Now they are out to a hundred-and-something street, but then all the Negro business section was between 8th Street and 12th Street on Central Avenue. Smith had the largest drug store and later on he opened up another one further up on Central Avenue. He got quite wealthy and he died about ten years ago. He left his wife quite wealthy. He had no children. His wife became a paralyzed cripple. She can talk, she's in no pain, but she's confined to her bed. They live in what used to be a millionaire's mansion on Wellington Road, [she and] a sister ninety years old taking care of her. She will have nobody in the house. It's a two-story house with about eight or nine rooms.

TUSLER

Dr. Smith remained a druggist all his life, except for this period when he was also associated with the motion pictures?

JOHNSON

Yes, but that didn't interfere with his druggist work. We did that at night, you know, and like that. He was the most educated and had the most business experience of anybody connected with it. I think he came from Georgia and I think he was a college graduate, and then he had been very successful in business.

TUSLER

And he was the treasurer as well as the vice-president, and then later became the president after your brother had to resign.

JOHNSON

When my brother quit he became president.

TUSLER

But he never had anything to do with the actual production end of things?

JOHNSON

No. Only in deciding whether we should make a picture or not. As far as the producing of the picture or anything like that, selecting the cast or anything, that was left entirely up to my brother and Gant.

TUSLER

How were these decisions made? What part did Smith have in deciding what picture was to be made?

JOHNSON

Oh, well that would come up in the meeting. We would talk it over and of course vote on it. The idea came from somebody else but just being an officer he had to vote on it,

TUSLER

Everybody had a vote, all of the shareholders.

JOHNSON

But none of them knew anything about pictures; they left that entirely to Harry Gant and my brother and another man named Lee Shumway. Shumway was only in there from a money standpoint; I don't think he played in any of the pictures, and he didn't stay in long. He sold his stock to some colored person later on.

TUSLER

Why, do you know?

JOHNSON

Well, I don't know; he was an actor and probably didn't have the time to fool with it.

TUSLER

Of these people who founded the company, did any of them subsequently become involved in the production or the acting?

JOHNSON

Clarence Brooks. I think Dudley was probably in the first picture, but after that Clarence Brooks was in one and he later starred in a picture, maybe in A Man ' s Duty and maybe another one. Then later went on he acted quite a bit. The best thing he ever had in pictures was Arrowsmith with Ronald Colman. He had a very good part there. He has played in other colored pictures made by other colored companies.

TUSLER

Did he make a career as an actor then?

JOHNSON

Yes, he did. He ruined his life by doing it. He made a picture, and after Lincoln stopped producing he still attempted to be a motion picture actor. He played around the studios, trying to act. After Lincoln got out, later on, about ten or fifteen years later, other colored pictures were made and he got in them. Lincoln pictures made a picture with him in it as a star, and we traveled all over the United States--he would appear in person on the stage. But it went to his head to make him think that he was a big actor. Then when things went bad, instead of going and getting himself a job, he continued to try to be an actor. The result was that he wasted practically the rest of his life in an effort to become an actor, when if he had gone into the colored insurance company that started here he would have been very well fixed, because he's a very good salesman. He's got a very good personality and was a very good salesman. Then he ended up by getting a job with the water delivery people, Sparkletts, in Pasadena. He had a position there as manager of a warehouse that made dinners to send out to wagons that go around to these factories at noon and sell dinners and things there. But he didn't last long. He's still alive, living in Pasadena with a wife and one child--he lost two. But he's not in very good health. He married a girl that saw him on the stage in Cleveland, Ohio, and fell in love with him and come back here and married.

TUSLER

He was quite a young man when all of this happened?

JOHNSON

Yes, he was young. He had been a good salesman, a good talker and a nice looker. He had a much better chance in business than he had trying to get into [pictures], but he kept going around to the white studios and trying to get parts. He'd get little minor parts, but it kept him from getting a good job.

TUSLER

Did he do a good job for the Lincoln films?

JOHNSON

Yes, he did a very fine job for the Lincoln Motion Pictures. He was a good talker and he did a lot of traveling. He did a lot of selling, too. He was with me a couple of times when I traveled in the United States with him, showing him in person when I showed the picture. We showed the picture in Chicago, New York, Washington, St. Louis-- all those big towns with those big theaters, and he would appear in person on the stage at the same time his pictures was playing.

TUSLER

That was the last production, wasn't it?

JOHNSON

That was the last production, yes.

TUSLER

By Right of Birth.

JOHNSON

It might have been the one ahead of that, too.

TUSLER

You didn't distribute that particular film in your usual way from the Omaha office?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, yes. We did more with that picture than with any of the others. But I had salesmen, I had branch offices in all the big cities, and I had men there that were responsible for showing it in their surrounding two or three states. They would do it; all I had to do was keep them supplied with material. Now where the trouble comes in is when you're showing a picture you have to have prints. Now we had five pictures and five prints of each picture and about ten offices. That's about fifty prints, and I had to keep track of them. That information had to come daily to a central office. At times I've had cases where there would be a fire and I would have to cancel that by wire and give it to another man. Then there would be other cases where a film would get lost in transportation and a big house had it booked; I'd have to wire a small house to cancel theirs and ship it immediately to the big house to protect the big house. The big house had it booked for a week. The little house had it booked for one night. So I was working eight hours a day in the post office and yet I was getting an average of five to six telegrams a day and twenty-five or thirty letters a day, keeping track of all those films. I had to know where each one was each night.

TUSLER

What were some of the financial arrangements that were made when the company was founded?

JOHNSON

We put out page ads in the colored papers--a number of these colored papers were owned by theater owners so we'd pay them and let them have the film; otherwise we had to pay cash for the advertisement. We did quite a little business of selling stock in the mail nationally in different states, but not to the extent we should have because we didn't have the finances to do it in the shape it should have been done. That's a big job and would require a specialized office with special salesmen having nothing to do but to look after that, and we were working on a shoestring basis, feeling our way. None of us were experienced in it; we didn't know what we were doing. And then we were probably five or six years ahead of the game. We didn't have enough experience.

TUSLER

And you lacked the basic financing to branch out.

JOHNSON

Yes; well, we used that to make the other pictures, you see. Each picture was made from the financing then. We didn't borrow any money until we got to the final big picture.

TUSLER

That's when Mr. Updike came in.

JOHNSON

That's when Mr. Updike came in. By Right of Birth. After we made three or four pictures I complained and said that the pictures weren't big enough; they weren't good enough and they weren't big enough. They wanted at least a five-reel picture. I wrote back and had them decide that everybody would think of a subject and write one and send it in, and let them decide from a picture-making standpoint which was the best. Well, they all picked on mine. Then they wanted me to come out here to see it produced, to be here for the production of it, to have something to say about the production end of it. So I had to fake a sick leave of absence from the post office. I went to my doctor and had my doctor give me an order that I had to come to California for my health, and so I got a year's leave of absence. I had copies of the other pictures and I worked my way out by showing the pictures in Topeka, Kansas; Kansas City and Muskogee, Oklahoma; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Dallas, Texas; and Fort Worth, Texas, working my way. I was all right until I got to San Antonio, Texas, and I showed it in a Mexican theater where nobody could speak English. I had quite a time showing it there. But then I came on out here, and as soon as I got here they started production on it. I was in the studio. One of our big scenes required a cabaret scene with a girl singing, so we invited all the prominent colored people in Los Angeles, about fifty of them, doctors and lawyers, and young Booker T. Washington and his wife were there. We furnished all the food they wanted, had an orchestra, and then one of our actors, a girl named Lottie Bowles and my brother did some scenes in that setting. I think in making that picture they had to borrow some money from Mr, Updike.

TUSLER

That was in addition to the original financing of the company. You mentioned that it was incorporated at $75,000; where did this money come from?

JOHNSON

The original men all put up some--I don't know, probably $500 apiece or something like that. Then they got the other by selling stock.

TUSLER

Was that a successful campaign, would you say?

JOHNSON

Well, yes, to a certain extent, but not big enough. We made money on it; we got in money, but not big money, you see. So many of them would only buy five or ten shares, or something like that. By the time you pay your expenses it didn't net anything, didn't amount to anything. I don't know how they originally got hold of Mr. Updike--I wasn't here; but he was a big stock man in wheat and they got hold of him some way or another. They told him that I was doing most of the work out there [in Omaha] so he wanted to find out what kind of a man I was, and that's when he wrote his brother [to investigate]. Later on after the thing was over we went back to [get him to] put up some more money for some new picture we were planning on, but he pretty near went broke gambling in wheat and he wasn't able to finance us in the next picture. He wanted to. We wanted to make a series of pictures--it ' s too expensive to make one picture; you can use the same cast, the same time and the same studio and everything, and make three or four of them far cheaper than you can make one. Our overhead in making By Right of Birth was too heavy. Although it was good, we wouldn't have made anything out of it if it had been sold on the same basis that the others were, But Mr. Updike realized that, so the first thing he did was ask me how was I going to get any money out of it. Our other pictures had been sold in these little Negro theaters for ten cents apiece to get in. Then I explained to him that I wasn't going to handle it that way. "We got one of the best pictures ever made but," he said, "l can't see it. You've got three or four little colored theaters over here on Central Avenue and if they had to pay a quarter they'd think it was a terrible lot." So then I explained to him that I wasn't going to show it that way, I was going to show it big. Meantime I had been downtown to see what was the biggest place I could get, and the Philharmonic was the biggest in town. But Over the Hill had it tied up. So the next big place was the Trinity Auditorium on Ninth and Grand--I don't know if it's still there. Big church. [From the] Los Angeles Investment Company the rent was $250 a night. So I went to Mr. Updike and told him to wrote me out a check for $500, and I went down there and rented it. It didn't have any curtain and no machine in it. I had to have a machine and curtains put in. I made blueprints of all the seats--I marked them from 50 cents to $1.50, and got six girls [who] took the blueprints, went out and sold the house completely out before the day of the show. I had advertisements in the Times and the Herald; I had big banners in the middle of the street; I had boys out passing bills all over town. I had a footman outside for carriage trade, had Sunshine Sammy and several movie stars from Hollywood on the stage, a prologue, and we sold the house out for two nights.

TUSLER

So it was a great financial success?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes; Mr. Updike would like to have a fit. "Well, that's more like it," he says. "But," he says, "you can do that easy here, this is your home, everybody knows you." I said, "No, they can do it anywhere." He didn't believe me. So I made him give me another check and I rented two Greyhound busses and a colored band of about twenty pieces, and I took Clarence Brooks, the star, and went dowm to Riverside and rented the only theater in town, a big white theater. There were very few colored people in Riverside in those days, and there aren't many there nov;. And I sold it out completely.

TUSLER

To a colored audience?

JOHNSON

No, no, all white. There wasn't fifteen colored people in the house. No colored people around there.

TUSLER

How did they receive it?

JOHNSON

Fine, crazy about it. They clapped and went on. We brought it back and he says, "That's more like it; I'll do it again and then it's up to you." So I took Clarence Brooks along and we went to Omaha, my home town. I rented the Boyd Theater, the second biggest white theater in town, and I did the same thing. About a third of the house was colored, the rest of the house was white. We made money on it, brought it back, and then he advanced us the money we wanted to finish the picture and get our man on the road. The prints, you see. You make a negative picture — your money is in your negative; you never use your negative, the negative stays in the vaults and you make positive prints. I had five branch offices, and I had to have five prints, for each branch office a print. He put up all the money and went through it.

TUSLER

Did Harry Gant film that picture as well?

JOHNSON

He filmed them all. We never used any other cameraman except Harry Gant.

TUSLER

Did he leave the company when your brother left it?

JOHNSON

No, he stayed with it until we had to close up. The flu epidemic came on later and closed up a lot of our theaters; still the white theaters wouldn't take it, and a lot of the colored theaters were closed up in the South for the flu epidemic. That's what really caused us to close up. My brother would have still been in it except that in Chicago, on State Street, there is about five Negro houses, side by side, all doing big business, all owned by one group of Jews. They had been running Universal pictures all the time, and my brother was being shown in The Bull' s Eye serial with Eddie Polo, a twenty-six episode serial with fighting and shooting and cowboys. My brother was head of a gang and he and Eddie Polo were fighting all the time. They were crazy about it. And so they would have a big banner up in front outside, "Noble Johnson and Eddie Polo in The Bull's Eye serial. Universal." Then when our picture got there they'd go out and put up on the side of it, "Noble Johnson in the all-Negro picture By Right of Birth. " Well, these theater owners commenced hollering. They wrote back to Universal and said, "Here we are paying five times the amount for the Universal pictures with Noble Johnson in them, and here you let a colored house come next door. They are all leaving our house and going into the colored house to see the same star. We can't do that." So Universal wrote back--they hadn't said anything before because there had not been competition between the colored and the whites, and if they hadn't been showing at the same time, there probably wouldn't have been then. But they wrote back to Noble and said, "We can't allow that. We are paying a big price for you in Universal pictures and here you come along with a colored picture at one-tenth the price. You'll have to make up your mind what you want to do: Do you want to stay with the colored company or do you want to stay with Universal?" So there was nothing he could say. He had to stay with Universal because he had a big contract. He played with them for years.

TUSLER

Harry Gant stayed with the company through all those years and he was himself not a Negro.

JOHNSON

But he was very liberal; the race question didn't bother him much. He and my brother had been chums and cowboys, eating and sleeping together as cowboys. I was out at his house six months ago; he lived in the San Fernando Valley. He died since then; he had been retired for about eight or nine years and he and his wife were living alone out there. I used to write him all the time. Once he tried to write a book, and he came here and I started typing it for him. Then I told him it wasn't any good and he never did finish. I told him he had a good idea but it wasn't enough merit to worry about. I had bought a lot of stuff and was typing it here for him.

TUSLER

He and your brother knew each other as cowboys before they worked together at Universal.

JOHNSON

Yes, long before they worked together.

TUSLER

Was the fact that they were working together at Universal just coincidental?

JOHNSON

Just coincidence. Harry Gant I guess he had been a Universal cameraman before my brother came here. His first picture was Intolerance, a Griffith picture.

TUSLER

Where were they cowboys together?

JOHNSON

Oh, in Colorado and Wyoming, Montana, all around in there. My brother rode the range out there--he was a champion cowboy, and then he used to be a runner. He used to run against horses uphill. He knew the famous Lon Chaney. I went out to the studio one time to see him--well, I went out there to see the advertising manager, and when I was talking to him, he says, "By the way, they are making the Negro picture out here, The Road to Mandalay--do you want to go out on the set and watch it?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Lon Chaney is directing it." I said, "Sure I want to go out there." So we went out there and we stood on the stage. Lon was standing over a ways and they were resting right then; a big colored cast there. And I told this advertising man, I said, "Wait here a minute." And I walked over and stood beside Lon Chaney and I nudged him. He turned around and looked at me and said, "Hello there, Virge, how are you?" I said, "This isn't Virge, this is his younger brother." "Oh, I know you too." We shook hands and talked about Colorado Springs. We knew him and we went to school together--my older brother and I knew him. His mother and father were both deaf mutes. We knew him as a young kid in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Then he had been working with Noble, seen him a lot on the stage there, and they worked in lots of pictures together. He knew him well. But I looked more like the other brother, you see.

TUSLER

What arrangements did the Lincoln company make for the filming of its pictures--where did this usually take place?

JOHNSON

They were made at the Crosby Studios, Hollywood. We rented the studios, rented them for a week, you know, and they furnish everything.

TUSLER

You got all of the equipment, the cameras, everything?

JOHNSON

Yes, everything. The only thing you have to do was have your film processed--I forgot what firm did that. You take your negative and have it processed, and get prints off it. You never show your negative, you see, you lock that up in the vault. But we lost that. We had a big fire out there and lost our negative. That cost us a lot of money because we could have sold our negative. They got burnt up in a fire.

TUSLER

At the Crosby Studios?

JOHNSON

I think it was Crosby, I'm not quite sure. It might have been in storage in some other place.

TUSLER

Do you mean all the negatives, or the negative for one particular film?

JOHNSON

No, all of them. We couldn't make any more negatives out of that; we had to use our prints and then they commenced to get lost.

TUSLER

So none of the films that your company made exist.

JOHNSON

We have none of them. Not a one of them. Not a one of them.

TUSLER

Are there stills from any of them?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, stills from all of them. I have stills and I may have some of the other advertising matter here. Things like that, just printed stuff; I have no celluloid. Well, I have got one can but it has been spoiled. After it closed down, Smith (I don't know what it is, I don't know where they went), but one day years later I was at his home and he said that there was a can of film. Well, they had that sent over here, and it's been spoiled. It has corroded. I might get a few strips out of it that I could show on a camera but as for being of any value, it is of no value whatever. That was through the carelessness of Clarence Brooks and Dr. Smith in not keeping track of those films because they were all shipped from here and that was one thing that cost us a lot of money. If we had those negatives today we would make money on them. Some of them burned up in this fire down here; I don't know now which ones they were, I'd have to go back to letters telling me about it. There was a fire out there somewhere and they burned up. These others were the last picture, they hadn't been put into a vault. That was just the prints; the negatives must have all been burnt up in that same place. I never heard of it since. I could make a fortune on it if I had it today.

TUSLER

Was that the usual mode of operation for the time, for a small company like yours to rent studio space?

JOHNSON

Oh, the studios there, that's all they do is rent. Well, you see, any small firm will get together and get some money and go make a picture. You can rent everything; you can rent a studio, and then they have costuming companies where you can rent any kind of a costume you want. They have everything in God's world, from old spinning wheels to uniforms in 1876. They outfit all of these studios that want to go there. Some studios do nothing but make pictures for other people; they don't make them for themselves at all. They rent them; because there is too much involved, you see. They don't have the machinery stuff, and it isn't worth that. That's the advantage the white man had over the Negro in making pictures. You see, in the first place we were too early. Being a pioneer we were too early. What the average man does, he makes a film; he invests $25,000 to $50,000 in a film; he makes it; and then he walks right across the street out there and goes into a distribution firm. That's another firm that doesn't make films at all. All they do is distribute them. Now this firm will look at his picture, and if he likes it he says, "I'll take it, I'll show it all over the United States at so much money, and I'll advance you $20,000 on the next picture. You're making five pictures and I've got a contract to make all of them. You make this picture, and then I'll take the contract to distribute it all over the United States and I'll advance you $20,000 or so on the next picture." Now this man can keep his studio working. One picture is being distributed and the cast is still working on another one, whereas we made a picture and then we had to stop operation and take everybody connected with the picture and try to distribute it. If we had been working at a later date it would have been far easier, you see.

TUSLER

Would you say that the Lincoln Company had an influence on other Negro motion picture firms?

JOHNSON

Oh, they started up like hotcakes. I've got file here after file on Robert Levy--he had a big, highly-trained, dramatic stage company of some of the best actors in the country, very highly trained. He turned them right into making pictures. There is another fellow, Oscar Micheaux, who homesteaded in South Dakota and wrote a book, The Homesteader, about his life in South Dakota, a very good book. He walked all over Iowa and South Dakota selling his books to white farmers. I heard of him and wrote him a letter, and told him to come to Omaha. He did and we had drawn up plans to produce his book using Noble Johnson as the homesteader. We got down to everything before signing except that he wanted to insist that he come to Los Angeles to produce the picture. Well, we disagreed on that because he didn't know anything about pictures; he never even had been in a studio and we couldn't take the chance of having a man who knew nothing about pictures come there. He was at my home, stayed a couple of days, and I had been in correspondence with him. That gave him the idea then of making a picture, so he walked back through Iowa and sold stock to the same white people that had bought his book. I have a list of a bunch of their names because I wrote them to find out if they wanted to sell their stock. I wanted to find out the details. I have letters from them here where they offered to sell me their stock. They said that he was crooked, that he would sell stock and then he'd close up the company and go organize another one and sell stock in that. But anyway, he kept on until he got his picture produced in Chicago. He selected Evelyn Preer, one of those highly trained dramatic actors, for his lead and he produced the book in a picture that was a very good picture. But he had a crooked eye all the time. He's a good talker, and he collected money by talking and showing his book and talking, and then he'd make another picture. But the money he had made out of one picture, instead of paying some of his stockholders off, he'd beat them out of it and start another company, make another picture. So he kept on. He made fifteen or twenty pictures, very good.

TUSLER

What was the name of his company?

JOHNSON

Micheaux Film Company. First the Micheaux Book and Film Company, and then later on the Micheaux Film Company. I had a brother-in-law that I had been using and I made him go get a job with Micheaux; and I had another man in St. Paul that had written me for a job and I sent him to get a job with Micheaux. So I had two men in Micheaux' s organization to keep track of what he is doing all the time. Well, he worked — he's a great talker and he put out ten or fifteen films, very good, and ten or fifteen books, very good. But he died broke, didn't have a cent, because he was crooked. He never paid anybody back anything. Every film was made under a new organization. I got his whole life's history here, I could write a whole book on him. He's very good. Well, Robert Levy was a Jew and he organized a stock company in New York City which was very fine. His players have been here, they played in stock here, and then they played in white motion pictures, and then he produced about ten very good colored pictures, all dramatic, very good.

TUSLER

So did these two companies get their start, would you say, as a result of the activities of the Lincoln Company?

JOHNSON

Yes.

TUSLER

They got the idea from you.

JOHNSON

Yes, because it was the first time there had ever been any colored shows shown over the country with colored people as lawyers, doctors and society people. Everything had been chicken eating, watermelons, crap shooting, dancing, like Stepin Fetchit and all that kind of thing.

TUSLER

Were there a lot more Negro film companies then in the later years?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, quite a lot of them. And not only white ones. I've got a list here of white ones; they were highly capitalized. Big corporations, some of them a million dollars. Most of them were skin-game stock-selling schemes. I have a record of a whole bunch of them--I got their literature and everything, I wrote everybody and kept all that stuff. I have it here. I could write a wonderful book on it because I got their letterheads and literature and all of it. I'll show you one here. [tape recorder turned off]

TUSLER

We've just had the machine off while Mr. Johnson and I were looking at some of his documents pertaining to the Micheaux Company and correspondence that the Lincoln Company had with it. Most of the films that Micheaux was making seemed to have to do with racial themes. I gather that this was also true of the Lincoln Company and probably of all the Negro motion picture companies. Would you say that this was true, that they dealt with themes that had to do mainly with the relation between Negroes and whites?

JOHNSON

No, I wouldn't say that's true. They were Negro actors but all their stories weren't [racial] as far as Negroes were concerned; some of them were just novels using a colored cast instead of white, that's all. It wasn't supposed to be a propaganda proposition, not a preachment of racial troubles. They didn't mention racial troubles. It was just showing productions of Negroes in the same types of pictures that the whites had been produced in, and Negroes had never before been produced in that type of stuff, showing the educated Negro, the doctor, the lawyer, the merchant, the rich Negro, and as he actually lived. That has always been a criticism by the Negroes of the country, that the white people based their idea of a Negro on the Stepin Fetchit [character] and the Negro himself was tired of seeing that type of picture. He wanted to see himself as he really was. That's why these pictures were all successful--because they couldn't see it in a white picture and the colored picture was the only place that would show it. In later days the white pictures have shown pictures of the Negro as he should be shown, but at that time they didn't.

TUSLER

They really weren't so interested in those days in showing the racial conflict.

JOHNSON

No, No. It wasn't a racial picture. They didn't treat of the preachment of whites against the blacks.

TUSLER

Why do you think that was so?

JOHNSON

Well, they got too much of that on the other side. They were trying to show the Negro as he lives, showing him that he lived and operated just the same as a white man. After all, it was just the color of his skin that was different, but he had the same ambitions and the same loves and the same fights, he ate the same food and he lived in the same manner, in as good a home as a hell of a lot of them had. That's the idea there. It wasn't a propaganda picture to show racial troubles; they are tired of that, they got enough of that in the white pictures. Very few colored films that I know, that the Negro had anything to do with the production of, were ever made on that basis.

TUSLER

That's more a white point of view?

JOHNSON

That's a white proposition. Some white people have the idea that that's the only thing. They didn't want to show life as it came out in [white] pictures. Look how Stepin Fetchit and some of those Negroes were promoted. Stepin Fetchit probably made close to a million dollars being a monkey on the stage. Yet they wouldn't show a man like Poitier or Belafonte or an educated Negro. They wouldn't at that time.

TUSLER

And the Negro community resented this, of course.

JOHNSON

Yes, very much so. A lot of publications are the same way--they will publicize anything that is detrimental but they won't say much about the millionaire man, the lawyer or the doctor or those men. Of course it's a lot different now than it was then. Then you couldn't get anything like that in their pictures.

TUSLER

So this was one of the main reasons for the Negro film company.

JOHNSON

That's what created the sensation when we made the pictures. That created a sensation all over the United States, because it is the first time it had ever been seen in films. And then they went like hotcakes. And then they started; they figured we were making a mint of dollars and there was a hundred companies organized in the next two or three years, whites and everything else. But the whites, most of them, were capitalizing on the deal and a good many of them were nothing but a stock scheme. I have literature here showing you that a lot of them were nothing but stock schemes, telling you they were going to do this and that, and then they didn't do anything--but they sold a lot of stock. Yet there were others that made very good pictures.

TUSLER

And the Lincoln Company really started the whole trend in this direction.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: FIVE, SIDE ONE (OCTOBER 24, 1967)

TUSLER

Today you're going to talk about your experiences in Tulsa, Oklahoma when it was still Indian Territory.

JOHNSON

Yes. In 1905 I was in the East and I was headed for Los Angeles, California to [see] my foster mother, the lady that raised me out of service. She was working for the same family that used to be in Colorado Springs; they were living in Los Angeles. My sister lived in Topeka, Kansas, so I bought a scalper's ticket just to Topeka, I wanted to see her, I hadn't seen her for a number of years. When I got to Topeka (I was only going to stay overnight and go on the next day) she told me that my father was coming through there the next day with a carload of race horses going into Oklahoma and asked me to stay another day to see him. So I did, and after meeting him he suggested that I go with him to Oklahoma until he got located and then I could go on to California through the southern route. So I did. The first stop we made was in Claremore, Indian Territory, the home of Will Rogers. But there wasn't enough rich men there so we moved on to Tulsa. Tulsa was a town of about 25,000, I guess, but it was a growing town. Oil hadn't been struck right in Tulsa, but in the Glenn pool and all around there, and big oil people were moving into Tulsa and establishing offices. Quite a number of rich people were moving into Tulsa. In Tulsa the Negro didn't have the location that they had in Muskogee and some of the other towns. [There were] only a few thousand [of them] and they were shut off on one side of town behind a railroad track with just a few small stores; they had nothing uptown, no Negro offices in town, or no business uptown.

TUSLER

Why was this so different from Muskogee?

JOHNSON

The Negroes had never located around Tulsa — Tulsa wasn't as good a farming country as Muskogee. Muskogee was a very fertile valley and as the Negroes got land they located in and around Muskogee because it is very fertile. You can grow cotton and you can grow other things, but Tulsa was hilly and not nearly as fertile. And then Muskogee was an older town.

TUSLER

You mean for economic reasons the Negroes preferred to live in the Muskogee area?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes — well, they had started there long before and it was in the Creek nation and those children all got 160 acres of land. In Tulsa they didn't and so Tulsa grew up then as just a small distribution town, but there was a lot of rich people there. So my father decided to stay there. He went around town and met a lot of millionaires; they had horses and they had no real trainer there, so he established himself there, stables and everything. Then in just about time for him to leave to go east he always would select, out of ten or fifteen horses, three or four of the best belonging to millionaires and take one or two of his own. He'd rent a baggagecar and take everything out of it, build stalls, attach the baggagecar to a passenger train and take his horses east to go in the Grand Circuit: in Cleveland, Glens Falls, New York, and Indianapolis, what they called the Grand Circuit of the racing season. This is a trotting horse season. But he had a very fine expensive stallion that he couldn't take, and so he encouraged me to stay there and look after it and a few of the other colts until he got back, and then I could go on to California. So I stayed there, and there wasn't enough work to look after the horses. A couple of them had to have exercise every day, and I'd hitch them to a cart and drive them around town in the country for ten or fifteen miles; and I had to feed them and look after them. But the time was lying heavy on my hands. I ran into a colored fellow, big, heavy, wearing one of these big five-gallon Stetson hats. He had been dealing in real estate with no office, just around, making leases and dealing in different ways. I got acquainted with him. He wanted to establish an office and he wanted an office man to be in the office to take care of the correspondence and answer any phones and talk to anybody that comes in. So we went uptown--he's a pretty good talker, and he talked himself into an office. He was the only Negro office in the whole town.

TUSLER

What was his name?

JOHNSON

William L. McKee was his name. He looked like a mixture of Mexican, Negro and Indian, a big heavy-set fine- looking fellow, aristocratic and important looking. So he traveled around and made deals and I stayed there in the office, looked after the office.

TUSLER

Did your company mostly serve the Negro community or did you deal with white people as well?

JOHNSON

Well, he dealt with all, colored and white, because there wasn't enough colored right there even now to do enough business. He dealt with Indians, colored, leasing land, handling oil land, handling oil leases and farming land. There wasn't much real estate business in the town--that didn't amount to much. Most of his stuff was land. He was gone quite a bit of the time, so time got heavy on my hands. There wasn't enough business coming in and I had to take an hour or two to answer the mail and look after things. I knew that the Negroes all over the United States didn't know much about Oklahoma. Oklahoma didn't have any big paper, and we got it in our heads that we'd run a paper. So I did something that I don't know as anybody ever did before. I went up to the white man running the Daily Democrat and I put an advertisement in the paper and also made him a proposition. I said, "We're fixing to start a paper and we just don't know how we are going to get it printed. How about letting me come every day and put a blue pencil around anything in your paper that I figure is interesting, and then when you tear the paper down each night, you take what I have blue penciled and put it aside on the shelf. Saturday when we get our weekly out, we are going to have you print it--and if you let us use that material then we'll give you some of our own material." I said, "Now ordinarily, when you don't have enough material, you buy stock material from another company that makes a business of doing that. But we don't get as good material as we'd get if I can select the best that you've got in your paper that particularly interests me and my customers." He said, "All right, we'll do it." So we started then, and got out a six-column, four-page weekly called the Tulsa Guide .

TUSLER

And that was in 1905?

JOHNSON

That's about 1906, I guess, about a year after that. Then I went around town and I appointed some agents, but my main idea was to cover the United States. I would spend all day when I didn't do anything else writing letters back east and down south, sending them sample copies and appointing agents down there. That went pretty good. We didn't have enough business in town to amount to much. We had a few grocery stores and a few doctors and a few lawyers and like that, but then a big department store would give us some and a few white people around town that wanted to deal with colored, doctors or lawyers or something, they'd give us advertising. But that wouldn't do enough. People in the East were not interested in anything about local news, so I wrote an article that about covers a whole page — Colored Immigration Bureau, I headed it. I decided to print it as a standing article in the paper under the heading Colored Immigration Bureau. It was two columns wide and fourteen inches long. It is too long to print here so I will merely give you the headings and the first paragraph.Colored Immigration Bureau: The following article is an extract from a twelve-page pamphlet issue from the Bureau's headquarters, for the purpose of influencing industrious and enterprising emigrants to come to the new state. The Indian and the freedmen, the native negroes, own the land. The native negroes have sold about one twelfth of their land mostly to white people. In the Creek, Seminole and Cherokee nations, the native negroes and their children each get 160 acres of land, in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, their freedmen each only 40 acres. The Indians cannot sell their land for 21 years, except by permission of the United States. The freedmen and their children, when they become of age, are allowed to sell all their land, except 40 acres, which cannot be sold for 21 years. The greater portion of the freedmen 's land belong to their minor children. Said land can be leased or rented. Land is worth from $5.00 to $26.00 per acre.Land To Rent Or Lease: There is a good deal of cultivated land throughout the Territory that can be rented for the third and fourth of the crop with house for tenants to live in. . . . The Indians: They are not savage, but they are civilized, educated people. A great many of them work like other people. They have not much business tact. They do not like the white people, but they like colored people and are very friendly to them. They are very good neighbors, A great many of them have intermarried with the colored people. The Kind Of Land: Some of the best and most productive land in the world is in the Indian Territory. . . . This is the greatest coal, gas and oil country in the United States. Kind Of Timbers: Nearly all kind of tim.ber such as hickory, walnut, oak, pecan, pine, jacks, cottonwood, etc. What Grows Here: Corn from 20 to 75 bushels per acre, cotton from one-half to one and a half bale per acre, oats, sorghum, ribbon cane, tobacco, potatoes, peanuts, peas, broom corn and all kind of the finest vegetables and melons grow here... Schools: Lasts nine months each year, separate schools for white and colored schools, besides the public city high. We have for the higher education of the colored youth, agricultural Normal University at Langston, O.T. Baptist College, Muskogee, I.T. Boley College.Advice To Those Who Wish Or Who Expect to Move Here: Do not give away your property, as you will need everything here. A few persons together can get a car and ship all their household goods, working tools, meat wagons, buggies, hogs, cattle, horses, etc. We do not have much credit in this country, but a cash system. If several families from the same neighborhood or town expect to move here, they should form a colony and send one or two men ahead to select places and land for the best.... Oklahoma and Indian Territory will soon be one state. The negroes are doing well in Oklahoma, and are free American citizens, but all the land is nearly already settled on, and land is high, so it would be best to come to Indian Territory, where you can get better homes and lands. We have enough land in this Territory not in cultivation to locate over 200,000 families, We hope to have at least 50,000 colored families here by Spring. If you love your children, wish to better your condition and be free people, get ready and come."

TUSLER

What was your purpose in printing this?

JOHNSON

Well, to get them interested in coming, give them a little idea of how to come, not to just jump up and come with nothing. The idea was to tell them a little about the conditions there, what to grow and what to bring, so that five or six of them or ten of them could get together and hire a car and come prepared to do business, you see.

TUSLER

You also had an interest perhaps in building up the Negro community there in Tulsa.

JOHNSON

Yes, getting it better. You see, they didn't own any of the land around there; the few people that were there were servants and things like that. They didn't own there. When you get to Muskogee it's entirely different. Negroes own everything down there. But here [in Tulsa] they didn't own anything. And oil hadn't got into Tulsa yet. It was coming but the white people, millionaires and oil men, knew it. They were coming there and establishing offices and getting prepared for statehood because they knew that the whites would move away from Muskogee--the Negroes were too well entrenched in Muskogee and the whites couldn't build up Muskogee without making the Negroes rich. They owned three- fourths of the land around Muskogee, acre after acre.

TUSLER

Did this action benefit the McKee Real Estate Company, too? Was it also partly an advertisement for the company?

JOHNSON

Well, yes, it helped him some — people would write him and I'd turn those things over to him and he'd correspond with them. And he could locate some of them but not like he would if he was in Muskogee. He located some around there on some town lots or rented them acres or leased them acres or something like that. It went pretty good; the paper was doing pretty good.

TUSLER

What was the distribution of the paper?

JOHNSON

It was sent all over Mississippi and Alabama and all over the South. I would buy the colored papers and get the addresses of people in the South and mail them sample copies all down through there.

TUSLER

You wrote to the colored newspapers in those states and got their mailing lists?

JOHNSON

Some of them you could buy on the newsstands but then others I wrote, the ones I wanted down in Mississippi and Alabama and the main southern states. Then I would appoint agents and they would go around and sell the paper on commission, and that was what got them. There wasn't enough news in there about what the Negro was doing. I'd get some pretty good news out of the white papers about the Negro, but I'd put in myself anything I wanted to put in about Negroes. I'd go around town and any Negro that would come from down South (maybe he was a doctor or a lawyer or he bought a piece of land) I'd have him give me names of Negroes living around him and I'd send them a copy of the paper. We were doing a pretty good business there for a while, but we couldn't get help. And then McKee still wasn't much of a man for city property--he had to travel a lot and he sold land to white people, too — he sold land to anybody, Indians, whites, anybody.

TUSLER

Did you have quite a large local distribution in Tulsa and around Muskogee?

JOHNSON

No, no. Most of it was by mail. It grew fast in town, but there wasn't enough people there to get it--after you get a couple of hundred subscribers, that's about all you get.

TUSLER

Was that about how large the Negro community was, a couple of hundred people?

JOHNSON

Yes... about, oh, probably 10,000 people, maybe not that many.

TUSLER

Of which only a few hundred were Negro?

JOHNSON

No, there was maybe 5,000 Negroes.

TUSLER

Oh, that many?

JOHNSON

But the town was about... I guess there wasn't that many then; no, probably there wasn't over 1,000 because Tulsa at that time itself wasn't over 10,000 or 15,000. Of course, it grew very fast after statehood. But Muskogee was the town for the Negro, you see, everything was down there. So we stayed there for a while. My father didn't like it very well; he wasn't doing as good a business as he thought he'd do. So we decided to move to Muskogee, and that's how we got down to Muskogee.

TUSLER

But that was a few years later?

JOHNSON

Yes. We stayed there, I guess, about four years. Most all of my business got to be mail-order business. I would appoint a man an agent and give him a commission. To sell property.

TUSLER

How did you get these agents?

JOHNSON

By reading the other Negro papers I would probably get fifteen Negro papers from all over the South, and I would read them carefully and select one or two people that I thought was all right and write them. They'd take it up right away; they'd get the paper free and they'd get a commission on anybody. Everybody down there wanted to know about Oklahoma, you see, and there was no place they could get it. Eastern Negro papers never said anything about Oklahoma .

TUSLER

And there was no other way they could get knowledge about the territory.

JOHNSON

No. There wasn't any. Oh, if Tulsa had been like Muskogee we would have done wonderfully well. But, as I say, they had the Negroes shut off behind a railroad track about two miles from town. They had a few buildings and a few stores and later on they got a theater there. But that was all. Later on they had a riot and burned the whole thing out. All of it.

TUSLER

But that was quite a few years later?

JOHNSON

Later, but even then it was bad. No, it wasn't so bad then but there was quite a few later. Later on, when I was in Muskogee, I went down to Tulsa to see a doctor that I knew. When I went to leave (it was a night train) he picked up a Winchester, I said, "What are you doing with that?" He said, "I'm going to the train with you. You can't go down there alone," He picked up a Winchester and escorted me to the train, about two years after that.

TUSLER

Why was that?

JOHNSON

Because they had always had trouble there in Tulsa. White people didn't want them at all, and the colored people were getting a little more aggressive, trying to move in a little closer and get around places. And so there always was a nasty feeling there. They didn't want them at all.

TUSLER

Did you experience this feeling when you lived there?

JOHNSON

No, they treated me fine, but I don't know why. I got in with this Democrat newspaper and the editor there took over that proposition I made him. Of course, then I was in and out of that paper all the time, and of course I was around town, meeting people. They didn't bother you on the streets or anything. They just made up their mind that they weren't going to let the Negro get much of a hold in Tulsa like they did in Muskogee. You see, they had made a mistake in Muskogee but they weren't going to make it in Tulsa-- they never have. Now Tulsa has grown — Muskogee was much bigger than Tulsa and and Oklahoma City was still much bigger, and yet Tulsa now is pretty near the biggest, next to Oklahoma City, and probably will beat Oklahoma City before long. It's wealthy; it's got oil all around it and it's got millionaires. All the millionaires around there moved to Tulsa. Now there was an instance there, it's quite interesting. My father had a trotting stallion named Puerto Rico, and he charged for breeding them. There was a horseman down at Sapulpa, Oklahoma, about twenty miles away, that wanted him to come down there so he drove him down. In driving a race horse like that you go very slow--you don't let him go very fast, you go about fifteen miles. And he bred him and then he was coming home, and he dropped dead. Well, the funny thing was that everybody in town had known this horse because I used to drive him all around town for exercise every day, ten or fifteen miles, and everybody knew him. There was a river there, about five miles from town, and there was a bend in it, and a big sandbar -right where the bend went around. When the river was high, it washed over there, but ordinarily it was just a little stream and left that big sandbar there in the middle of the river. They offered to trade him that sandbar for this horse. Dad just laughed at them and didn't do it and later, then, the horse dropped dead. But when I went back to Tulsa probably fifteen years later, on that sandbar stood one of the biggest oil reduction works in the country, and the town had grown clear to the river.

TUSLER

What was the name of the man who edited the newspaper that you dealt with?

JOHNSON

I think his name was Striker, I'm not quite sure; I haven't a copy of that paper, I have a copy of the Tulsa Guide but his name didn't appear on it. I think it was W.L. Striker, I'm not sure. He ran the Tulsa Democrat back in 1905, '06, '07, '08, along in those years.

TUSLER

What kind of news items did you use?

JOHNSON

Oh, there would be something there that would be telling about the crops, some farmer growing a fine crop, and he'd have the thing there; or maybe a big new building going in, or new farms, or anything that was of general use that didn't mention people's names--it was general news good for anything, it had nothing to do with white or colored. It was just interesting news pertaining to the state, state news, government news, anything pertaining to the state or to the crops.

TUSLER

Was this because you were thinking of the distribution of the newspaper in the South?

JOHNSON

Yes, I was doing it for that purpose but also I was doing it to help fill up the paper because we didn't have enough news, and I didn't have to pay much for it, he charged me very little for it. If I had had the material that he gave me from his paper and had to have it paid for, it would have cost me real money, but he was throwing it away, you see; he had used it in his paper and it was no good to him. That was a new idea, he had never had anybody approach him [that way]. It helped me fill up my paper. And then it turned into good stuff. Every now and then I'd see something big there and I'd have big headlines — there 'd be something that had happened, a state senator got killed or something big, and I'd have my headline clear across, [laughter] It made it different from any other Negro paper in the United States. Other papers never had that idea.

TUSLER

We should emphasize the point that this was the first and only Negro newspaper in Indian Territory at that time.

JOHNSON

In Indian Territory, yes. There was a paper in Muskogee. The first Negro newspaper ever run in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in all of Indian Territory. There was no other town in the territory that was big enough then to run a paper.

TUSLER

Did you make money with the paper?

JOHNSON

No. Not at all, it was too expensive. We couldn't enlarge enough, I couldn't get help, there was nobody there to help me, and then I wasn't particular about making Oklahoma my home, I just got into it and it was interesting and kept going. It took a lot of time. Then later, when my dad decided to move from Tulsa (he went to Muskogee and built a track in Muskogee), I said, "Well, I'll go down there." So I just gave it up, I didn't even try to sell it, I just stopped.

TUSLER

How big was it normally?

JOHNSON

Oh, I guess I would probably print about 4,000 or 5,000--a lot of them were giveaway, though. I'd send a bunch of fifty people and let them scatter them around. If I could have worked it up, if I would have wanted to make that a life's work and stay there, I could have built it up to be a very good proposition by getting good people in with me. Of course the idea was all right, but I didn't want to be in Oklahoma at all, as far as that's concerned, I didn't intend to make it a life's work and I got into it because I didn't have nothing else much to do. I had to stay there and watch my dad's horses, and this guy approached me and I thought--well, it would be a good thing, keep me busy. Kept me busy all right! [laughter]

TUSLER

How big was the size of each individual issue? How many pages?

JOHNSON

It would be four pages, ordinarily, and if we got something big we would add a couple of more pages to it, six pages. Six columns; that was about the average of most Negro papers, about four pages; six columns. His paper was the same thing only he had about ten or twelve pages while I had about two to four.

TUSLER

Did it grow very much?

JOHNSON

Yes. It was growing, and I had a lot of agents working. That would mean I would have to have an office staff, you see; I would have to have stenographers and a mail-order business. I could have done a big business there.

TUSLER

It never became a daily.

JOHNSON

No, no. It couldn't have been a daily for several years until later on when the Negroes came in there, when there got to be probably 30,000 or 40,000 Negroes there, but at that time there was just a handful there. In fact, the paper was too big then for just the town. If I wasn't getting business out of the town it couldn't have existed on the town supply. It wasn't big enough.

TUSLER

What would you say its influence was in bringing people into Oklahoma?

JOHNSON

Very good, because it was the only paper in the country that was telling the Negro in the South what was available to him. A lot of the news was about crops and agricultural stuff from the white paper, all about the production of cotton and corn and financial matters pertaining to that. That was good for these people down there because they wanted to know that. I couldn't have got that information at all. That came through the Associated Press, you see, and was put in his paper. But that was just perfect, what I wanted, you see.

TUSLER

Did you actually meet people who had come to Oklahoma because of your newspaper?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes; they'd look us up first thing. I guess a lot of them were surprised that we weren't bigger [laughter] because we had raised a lot of noise down south. Oh, yes, we were the cause of quite an influx around Tulsa. Tulsa got up to where they got 25,000 or 30,000 people later, but they never did get the foothold there. They are still segregated to a certain extent.

TUSLER

Roughly speaking, how many people would you say came into Oklahoma as a result of your newspaper's influence?

JOHNSON

Oh, I would suppose it would be 25,000 or 30,000. It went all over the South, I'll just give you an idea here. [tape recorder turned off]

TUSLER

All right. You've got there before you a list of newspapers with whom you exchanged the Tulsa Guide. What were some of the southern newspapers that were involved?

JOHNSON

The National Negro Voice of New Orleans, Louisiana; the Savannah Journal, Savannah, Georgia; the Tennessee News, Knoxville, Tennessee; the Southern Christian Recorder, Nashville, Tennessee; the Richmond Voice , Richmond, Virginia; the Atlanta Independent , Atlanta, Georgia; Tuskegee Messenger . Tuskegee Institute, Alabama; the Searchlight, Kansas City, Missouri; the Colorado Statesman , Denver, Colorado; the Black Dispatch , Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; the Omaha Enterprise , Omaha, Nebraska; Chicago Whip , Chicago; the Chicago Defender ; the largest Negro paper in the country, the Chicago Bee ; Toledo, Ohio Observer ; the Boston Chronicle . Most of these were southern papers. I won't read any more because there is quite a bunch of them here.

TUSLER

And they were all Negro?

JOHNSON

They were all Negro papers. All weeklies, some of them bigger, some small. But it got around, it got our name published; they would reprint articles we had and put our name behind it, the Tulsa Guide.

TUSLER

And you wrote the articles, except for the ones that came out of the other newspaper?

JOHNSON

Yes, I would write these articles, I would pick them out and write the things that were more interesting to them, you see. Of course they got the newspaper, they got everything that was in it. Lots of times we'd write special stuff for them and select stuff that we knew. [tape recorder turned off]

TUSLER

You have some more names of southern newspapers.

JOHNSON

Yes, these are all southern newspapers. People's Recorder , Orangeburg, South Carolina; City Times, Galveston, Texas; Express , Dallas, Texas; Industrial Era , Beaumont, Texas; Journal and Guide, Norfolk, Virginia; the Planet, Richmond, Virginia; Colored Virginian, Petersburg, Virginia; the Advocate , Charleston, West Virginia; the Durham Reformer, Durham, North Carolina; the Gazette, Charlotte, North Carolina; the Advocate, Mobile, Alabama; Forum, Mobile, Alabama; New Age, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Eagle, Washington, DC; Seminole, Jacksonville, Florida; Colored Citizen, Pensacola, Florida; St, Croix Herald, St, Croix, Virgin Islands; Southern Workman , Hampton, Virginia; Gate City Bulletin, Denison, Texas. That gives you a bigger list.

TUSLER

Did you make any attempt to publish names of incoming Negroes as they arrived in Oklahoma territory?

JOHNSON

Yes, yes, but only individually. We'd have an article, we'd talk to them. They pretty near all would come to the office as soon as they got to town, and then we'd put in an article about so-and-so's from that town, he's visiting in Oklahoma, and it would get back home. We'd always look that up and get any information we can get, talk to anybody there. Now and then we' d get some of them to write an article about what they had seen there.

TUSLER

If somebody wants to see these newspapers where can they be found?

JOHNSON

I have copies of probably fifty to one hundred.

TUSLER

Is this a complete file?

JOHNSON

It isn't complete--it couldn't be complete--that would be every Negro paper in the South, and there's a lot of them.

TUSLER

I mean your paper, the Tulsa Guide .

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, I have them. [tape recorder turned off]

TUSLER

We have just been looking at a file you have of the Tulsa Guide that runs from the very first issue, which was June 9, 1906, and stops with February 22, 1907. However, that wasn't the last Tulsa Guide that was published, was it?

JOHNSON

I don't rememiber when the last one was.

TUSLER

Do you have a complete file? I mean, are there more in addition to the collection that you have here?

JOHNSON

Well, they are individual--I have some loose ones around, I don't know; I just decided to file up to that amount, but I still have more. We went probably a year or two later.

TUSLER

So there probably isn't an absolutely complete file anywhere in the nation beyond what you have here.

JOHNSON

No, not anywhere; you won't find any copies anywhere. I am just lucky to have saved them all these years.

TUSLER

I should say so. You say that you stopped publishing it because it got to be too much work to carry on.

JOHNSON

Yes, too much work, and all in addition to that I had to turn it into a straight mail-order proposition; there wasn't enough local business to [support] a paper getting bigger and more expensive. You see, we were too big a paper for the town, and we would have to depend on sending agents out and developing the mail-order business. We outgrew the town. That's the idea there.

TUSLER

Your advertising was all hitched to the Negro community.

JOHNSON

Yes, but there wasn't sufficient advertising in town to support it. We had to get advertising from other places over the country, which we did. We got some, but we were too early; we were getting too big for our britches, too big for the town. Now, if we had been in Muskogee it would have been entirely different.

TUSLER

Were there other reasons why you stopped publishing?

JOHNSON

Well, yes; I never had any intention whatever of making that my home, I was still delayed from going to California to meet this lady, and then she died later on and I didn't get to see her.

TUSLER

Did you ever think of starting a newspaper in Muskogee — was that in your head at all when you went to Muskogee?

JOHNSON

No, because there were two of them there, and one of them was pretty good; he had been there a long time.

TUSLER

A Negro newspaper?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes. You see, Muskogee is quite a town, quite a place; they had 30,000 or 40,000 colored people and they had fine homes, fine buildings, fine schools, everything. But when statehood came in, it killed it. Tulsa got to be the big town then. Muskogee isn't much bigger now than it was thirty years ago, because the best white people moved away and a lot of colored people got put in jail or in the pen for mishandling infants' land, and stuff like that.

TUSLER

We'll talk about that when we get into the Muskogee topic. But there were, then, these other Negro newspapers in Muskogee at the same time you were publishing one in Tulsa.

JOHNSON

Then I think there was one in Oklahoma City and there was one in the colored town named Boley, Oklahoma. There were two or three [Negro towns] but Boley is still there, it has been there all this time. I think I have a copy of their paper.

TUSLER

Why was it an all-Negro town?

JOHNSON

Well, just a bunch of them went down in there and they owned all the land around there. The only trouble is they never got any real brilliant, smart people in there. They got a bank and they had some stores but there wasn't any particular reason for Negroes to go into a Negro town because the Negroes were too well fixed in Oklahoma; they owned property in town and out of town, buildings, acres, subdivisions; they should have been millionaires but they mishandled it. They didn't know the business.

TUSLER

These were Negro freedmen?

JOHNSON

Yes. Well, then others came in there and intermarried with them, and freedmen never did do much because they never did have much education. They weren't used to handling money; they got too much money and weren't used to handling it.

TUSLER

Before we leave the subject of Tulsa, you spoke about a very large riot that happened there. Was this quite a while after you had left Tulsa?

JOHNSON

Yes, I don't believe I've got the date of the riot. I knew a lot of men there; a fellow named Stratford owned a big building and a hotel and a theater, and they burned that all down. And I knew two or three doctors, lawyers and things, and they burned them all out there. I don't know how many people they killed, quite a few of them.

TUSLER

Where were you when this happened?

JOHNSON

Muskogee .

TUSLER

What was the cause of it, do you remember?

JOHNSON

No, I never did know. I guess the Negroes got tired of being pushed around. They never did get any hold in Tulsa; they still try to keep them back behind, and some of them were making money and were trying to expand out, and whites didn't like it. They'd have to encroach on the white man's part of town, and they didn't want it. They had made up their mind they didn't want it to be like Muskogee.

TUSLER

But as you said before, while you were living in Tulsa you did not experience any discrimination.

JOHNSON

No, they didn't bother anybody, you didn't have any trouble. There was no riot while I was there and you could go anywhere you wanted. Of course you were Jim Crowed — you couldn't go to theaters, there was no theater there you could get in. But you could walk the streets and you could buy in any store you wanted. They didn't have any streetcars so you weren't... down in Muskogee they had Jim Crow street cars for a while, but they didn't have that in Tulsa. So they got the head start on the Negro in Tulsa and then they decided they'd keep it that way.

TUSLER

Were there very many Indians in Tulsa when you were there?

JOHNSON

No; you see, Tulsa was in another nation, the Cherokee nation, and they didn't intermarry with the Negroes. The Creek nation intermarried very heavily with Negroes. That's why the Negro is so rich down there, because he had Indians intermarrying, and they would have lots of children and every child would get 160 acres of land. You see that's just three times as much — they only got forty acres of land in the Cherokee nation. Tulsa is in the Cherokee nation. The Osages were the richest Indians in the country; they had no servants, no Negroes, and they never would get educated. They'd go to school and become college graduates and come back home and put on blankets. Every one of them is probably worth thousands of dollars; just a few of them on the land and the oil divided among them. You see big Indians in blankets riding around in Cadillac cars and they never wanted to get civilized. But they are very wealthy; pretty near every one of them is worth $10,000 or more, every one of them, man, woman and child.

TUSLER

We have just brought over the file of the Tulsa Guide and have been looking at it, and find that apparently the first time your continuous article called the Colored Immigration Bureau appeared here was March 8, 1907 . After that time it appeared quite regularly. It says at the heading of it--will you read the sentence there?

JOHNSON

"The following article is an extract from a twelve- page pamphlet issued from the bureau's headquarters for the purpose of influencing industrious and enterprising immigrants to come to the new state."

TUSLER

Would you turn back to the first issue and describe, just for the record, what appears in the number one issue, dated June 9, 1906.

JOHNSON

"Vol. I, No. 1, the first issue of the Tulsa Guide, [Saturday] June 9, 1906. [Salutory] We have launched The Guide upon the perturbed sea of journalisn, believing there is room in the broad field of the twin territories to aid the growth and development of our splendid country, which we hope shall soon be granted the blessings of statehood. The power of the press is conceeded and a newspaper in the home or in the community is a power for good if it is the right kind. The Guide will give the news and as a medium it aims to bring into close touch the best interests of the territories in general, and of Tulsa in particular. In common with others as a race we feel a just pride in contributing our share in the upbuilding of the country, however humble that part. Because under statehood our ballot will be just as potent in behalf of good government as that of anyone. The Guide is republican in politics and heartily endorses President Roosevelt's kind of republicanism, which believes in a square deal to the humblest citizen regardless to race or creed. Touching the stirring events of the future, the great questions which will come up for settlement, whether in nation or state. The Guide will always be found on the side of right, as God gives it to see the right."A few of the headlines: "REPUBLICANS UNEASY ABOUT BLACK MAN'S POLITICS, Fear Expressed When Statehood Is Secured Democrats Will Make Race Domination An Issue." "NEGROES' HOPE IS EDUCATION, President Roosevelt Upholds the Dignity of Manual Labor."

TUSLER

On the inside do you have an editorial page?

JOHNSON

Sometimes we write an editorial.

TUSLER

What does it say on the masthead? "W.L. McKee."

JOHNSON

Yes; he was the proprietor; and D,W. Hutchins, editor; George P. Johnson, assistant editor; Lulu H. Sims, local editor, Well, that's just a lot of people we put in there to make them feel good.

TUSLER

Who was Mr. Hutchins? He wasn't actually involved in doing this?

JOHNSON

No, he was a lawyer, he was just a figurehead. We put McKee's name there because he was better known than I was at that particular time. Later on my name appears all over.

TUSLER

Was Hutchins a Negro?

JOHNSON

Yes, yes. He was a Negro lawyer.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: FIVE, SIDE TWO (NOVEMBER 6, 1967)

TUSLER

The last time you were speaking of what it was like to live in Tulsa during the early years around 1905, and you mentioned some of the differences between Tulsa and Muskogee. Today, you are going to go on and tell more about what those differences were and what it was like to live in Muskogee.

JOHNSON

Well, we'll start out this way. After spending several years in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Indian Territory, during which time I was partner in the first established Negro newspaper, a weekly, the Tulsa Guide , ever published in the Indian Territory, I discontinued after several years and moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma. I discontinued it after it had not expanded sufficiently to support the Negro business section and public hadn't expanded enough to support anything of that type. Muskogee was a far better location from the fact that it was in the Creek nation, and in the Creek nation the freedmen, that is, all the children of the slaves, got 160 acres of land. It is very fertile, very good land, cotton land, so they Negroes settled mostly in the Creek nation and surrounding Muskogee. Muskogee was a town then of probably 25,000 and on all sides but one, as far as you could see, it was Negroes' land. Business people came there: they had big stores, they had one bank and a dry goods store and two furniture stores, a hardware store, two jewelry stores, six drugstores, three printing offices, two undertakers, fourteen lawyers, fifteen physicians, two dentists, ten surgeons, two brick grade schools, one brick high school, four large three-story brick buildings and a downtown business section of several blocks. In addition to this they owned nice homes and acreage on all sides.

TUSLER

These are the Negro people?

JOHNSON

These are the Negroes. Some of them are the businessmen that came in there. But the property owners are freedmen. So it was a much better place. My father moved there too and established a race track and barns. I got into business there--I had the Johnson Investment Company, selling lots out of the city. I had an office in the three-story Negro building on the main street. I had a special tract opening up several acres cut into lots, and we'd sell the lots on $50 down and $10 a month. Then we did a lot of leasing business; people would come in and lease and rent, and it was just a general business of that kind, nothing big. I didn't invest any money in it, I just got the exclusive rights to sell this property. Southern Negroes with money came in and built. Dr. Brown from Mississippi built a three-story building, a very fine building. Downstairs was a dry goods store and on one side a gents' store, and it was just a block from the heart of the town. They had lots of schools, principals, teachers.

TUSLER

Were the teachers Negro also?

JOHNSON

They had all Negro teachers. The schools were absolutely segregated. There was no mixing even in the downtown department stores--they' d sell to you, but you couldn't try on shoes or dresses.

TUSLER

The Negro people couldn't?

JOHNSON

The Negro people couldn't, no. They wouldn't do that, but they sold to you. The result was that they established a very nice dry goods store of their own and a very nice gents' furnishing store. It was pretty independent. A lot of money was floating around then. One instance I can tell very readily is in my family by marriage. My wife's sister married a native and the native was one of four children. Each one of them had 160 acres of land and it was adjoining, which made one entire section of land. My sister's father was a carpenter and he went out and built a house on one girl's land. They had a nice home and they had draft horses and they had chickens, and they improved it. The other three children didn't improve their land at all; they were shiftless, borrowed money on it, and in five years lost it all. Now on the other hand, my sister's husband wasn't very energetic either — they got started pretty good, they had draft horses and cows and chickens, but they didn't keep it up and in a few years they lost it. They moved to Chicago and he went in the post office as a laborer and worked there. Now that's what happened in so many cases. The people didn't work to earn the land, consequently they weren't of the thrifty type. Some of them had nice homes and they had a few cars in those days and horses and chickens, but they weren't thrifty and they didn't take care of it, and in the course of ten years or more a great many of them got in debt and lost their money.

TUSLER

Into whose ownership would the land go then?

JOHNSON

It would go to whites. Yes, whites. You see, whites would come in there, quite a lot of white money came in there. Money came from eastern places to pick up that land because, as I say, they wanted the land, as the Negroes owned seventy-five percent of the surrounding land as far as your eye can see. On one side of the town it was white, but three-fourths of the other side of town was colored. It was very nice rock-bottom cotton land, good land. Well, the city thrived quite a bit; they had quite a social bunch there, they had lawyers, doctors, and everything. Ten miles from town, twenty miles from town, I guess, the government established a mission school for the freedmen's children. There was a girl, a teacher there, that I got acquainted with, and I used to go out Sundays to see her. It's about a ten-mile ride on a train and [then] a four-mile walk. She lived there and taught the children. Later on, this same girl came to town and became a teacher in the public schools in the city. I went with her and later on. when I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, sent for her and married her.

TUSLER

I gather from what you've said that though there was a larger proportion of Negro population than white, still there was very great segregation — segregation did exist there then.

JOHNSON

Yes, the whites controlled everything. They controlled banks, they controlled all of the essential business houses and the Negro didn't, while they did very good there compared to the other cities of the state. But then the whites got control of politics, the mayor and all the officers, and there were no Negroes in office at all.

TUSLER

Was there quite an attempt on the part of the whites to take over the property?

JOHNSON

Not at that particular time. A little later on when statehood was declared (this was Indian Territory days), they did--but then the whites had decided that they couldn't build a town up like Oklahoma City, and Tulsa was the town that was coming to the front. After statehood the majority of the well-to-do white people moved to Tulsa and established Tulsa as the biggest thriving town in eastern Oklahoma. Muskogee deteriorated. Here is another thing that caused it to deteriorate. A lot of these Negro children had to have a guardian. You see, they had valuable land, some of it had oil on it, and so they would appoint a guardian. They appointed a great many more Negro guardians than they did whites, but they were shyster lawyers and shyster guys that had come in there to profit off of the situation. Well, what happens is that if a man has three children, two, four, and six years old--now his land may be very good, he may have rented it and he may be getting good money off it; a lot of them built houses in town and rented the houses--each kid has to have a guardian, somebody appointed by the court to look after his property until he gets twenty-one. There were a few honest ones. But the game they played was that a boy would have an oil well on his property or he would have it farmed and making good money and he'd have four or five rented houses. This guardian in many cases was a lawyer. He'd keep the books, he'd collect all the money. The boy would come in and want a few dollars, after he got maybe ten years old, he'd want a few dollars to spend on a bicycle or something. The lawyer would let him have it and make him sign a statement. Well, the bicycle cost $20, he put on the statement $40. He'd pad the bill over the course of fifteen years. When statehood came, then the law called all these guardians in to give an accounting of these children's money. Quite a number of them couldn't account for it. They were sent to the penitentiary. I know two lawyers that committed suicide. They had a colored bank there and one of the bankers was sent to the pen. Instead of improving after statehood, it deteriorated. Hundreds of them lost their property--these guys were put in jail but they couldn't account for the money so that didn't help the kids any. They still lost their property, you see. A lot of them were shiftless. So many of them hadn't worked and earned this; it had been given to them by the government and in the course of ten years they lost pretty near everything around there.

TUSLER

Did you see this happen at the time you actually were there?

JOHNSON

Well, a good deal of it, I left before too much of it happened but I saw it going, and that's why I left-- because I didn't like the situation there. My wife was tired of the South and the prejudice. Now here's another interesting thing. Before statehood, there was no discrimination; you could ride on the street cars anywhere you wanted. As soon as statehood came in, they put the Jim Crow car on. Well, they put a sliding sign on the middle of a car, Negro on one side and whites on the other. If ten Negroes got in why they'd move the sign down there, and if there was only one, they would move it further down. Then the colored were mixed up so with Indians and whites that you couldn't tell who was who. One state senator that lived within sight of town had relatives that were Negro, Indian and white. My wife's family, my wife's mother, one girl and the beau she went with, you couldn't tell that they were colored. There would be times when we would go to town on the streetcar and the conductor would be in a quandary what to do. There would be about six of us together and about three of us look white and the others didn't. For quite a number of years they had serious trouble that way. Lots of times the conductor would get in a fight and they'd kick the conductor and take him off the car. They'd get in there and tear that sign down. The conductor couldn't do anything. If he started to do anything they'd throw him off the streetcar.

TUSLER

Was the conductor usually white?

JOHNSON

Always white, always white. They didn't employ any colored, and that caused a lot of trouble for quite a while there.

TUSLER

When you say "colored” do you include the Indian population?

JOHNSON

No, no, except in a marriage. Yes, there is quite a lot of intermarriage among the Indians, but these Indians I'm talking about are professional men, lawyers or doctors or professional men, who have intermarried--they would intermarry with colored and they would intermarry with whites. It was such a very big mixture that you couldn't hardly tell anything about it. In stores, the clerk would look at you and unless you were distinctly Negro he'd be afraid to open his mouth, he wouldn't say a thing. There was quite a little of that on account of all three races intermarrying.

TUSLER

What do you mean by the word "native?”

JOHNSON

Native is one that was born there. He could be either Indian or Negro. Lots of Indians come in there. But a lot of them, these freedmen, are Negroes that are born there. They were slaves of the Indian. At a certain date they freed all the Negroes and then they became citizens, and that's what caused the trouble. You see, down South, they have the law behind them and they can get it but here they didn't have the law behind them because the law couldn't tell who was who themselves. We just had to get along the best we could. They got so they didn't pay much attention to that sign--if you put it there, all right, but if you moved it the conductor didn't bother you.

TUSLER

The mixed marriages were quite a characteristic of life in Muskogee compared to life in Tulsa?

JOHNSON

Yes. Yes. There were very few freedmen in Tulsa. They didn't have the land they had in Muskogee. Tulsa had been settled by whites and the Negro had never got a hold in Tulsa. They established two or three little towns, one called Boley, a Negro town then and is still today. The state established a deaf and dumb and blind Negro institute out fifteen miles from Muskogee in a town called Taft. Well, that was a Negro town and by establishing that big school there that town thrived quite a bit. Now you did find some industry; farmers did farm and made money farming. You find some of that. But I'm speaking of the masses. If everybody in Muskogee had been educated and held their land and improved it, it would have been the richest place in the United States for Negroes, more than any place in the South, because they had the start. There was one fellow, Zeke Moore, that inherited half a dozen oil wells. He had one of the first automobiles there. But he would go around throwing money away like hotcakes. Then he did something and was sent to the pen. The day he got out of the pen there were representatives of five oil companies waiting at the gate for him to come out to sign land that he owned. He owned land right in the heart of the oil wells. He was an ignorant Negro, knew nothing, but he went around like a millionaire for years and years until he spent everything up. I saw him in Omaha, Nebraska , twenty years later, a tramp on the street. There was another girl, Sarah Rector, who got into very wealthy; she took care of her money and moved to Kansas City--she was living up to a few years ago, owning quite a bit of property. So there was a few of them that did it, but the majority of them just ran through the land. It was land they didn't earn, it was given to them and they weren't educated and it just ran wild.

TUSLER

There wasn't any concerted effort that you're aware of for the white people to get the land away from the Negro people?

JOHNSON

No, the ordinary white family didn't go to that. This all came from shysters coming in, lawyers and people coming in, taking advantage of it. They knew the situation and they knew it was easy to handle and they came in. Oh, you had quite a number of prominent citizens there who got along all right, they didn't have any trouble. And later on, now today, they don't have any trouble down there. They own quite a bit of property there now. Some of them are very substantial people — they protected their property, they built good houses on it, they farmed it and they made a good living, But there were many that didn't. Now, Muskogee isn't as big as it was at that time. You see, Muskogee grew on account of the fact that it was the headquarters of the Five Civilized Tribes. It meant that all the government offices in Washington that dealt with Indian affairs did it through offices in Muskogee. So that made it a playground for lawyers. Then when statehood came, that all went to Washington. Before that, every Indian and every Negro in the territory had to come to Muskogee to do business. But when they moved all that to Washington, we got rid of that bunch of shysters, they moved out, and Muskogee became an ordinary modern city.

TUSLER

What years are these you're speaking of?

JOHNSON

That was 1905 to about 1907 or '08. That's my time. Statehood came in about 1907.

TUSLER

Were you living there when it became a state?

JOHNSON

Yes, I was there. I went out and celebrated in the streets — it was just like a carnival, everybody hollering, shooting, Indians there in their blankets, and colored; they was shooting and hollering and bells were ringing just like Armistice Day. It was one of the biggest, loudest, and noisiest events I ever witnessed--a day never to be forgotten for those fortunate to witness it. Not having any money to invest and floundering around in various enterprises, none of which proved very successful, and not wishing to marry and raise children in a segregated atmosphere, I left Muskogee. My first stop was Wichita, Kansas. Not liking it there I went on to Omaha, Nebraska. Then later I sent for this schoolteacher to come to Omaha and I married her in Omaha. We had one child that died on account of being a six months' baby, and exactly on the same day [a year later] I had another girl. I put that girl in school as one year older because the record shows that Johnson had a baby girl born in a certain year and that's all it said, they don't name them. So she went through school as one year older.

TUSLER

You mentioned before in speaking of the atmosphere in Muskogee that there were quite a few mixed families. Did you know of many mixed marriages?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, they associated freely. They wouldn't be prejudiced or they wouldn't have married. There was quite a little mixture that way.

TUSLER

Was there mixture among the whites too, as well as among the Negroes and Indians?

JOHNSON

Yes, yes, but not as much.

TUSLER

What proportion would you say. Just out of your recollection, that the Negro and Indian and white population was in Muskogee?

JOHNSON

I would say that it would be about sixty percent Negro and Indian combined. There weren't too many Indian families there, strictly Indian families. The ones there mostly had intermarried. The Osage nation was about the only nation in which Indians didn't intermarry. They were very wealthy because all their land and money went to them. I went to school with Indians who became educated and later went back to the Osage nation and put on blankets; you'd see them riding around in Cadillac cars wearing blankets. It was the only nation that preserved its original [heritage]--didn' t like to improve, although they were educated and a lot of them could speak perfect English. The other nations of the Five Civilized Tribes were Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creeks and Seminoles. The Choctaw, the Chickasaw and Seminoles didn't do much intermarriage, The Creeks did most of it. I'd say it was the most fertile. The Cherokees came from Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama. Every Indian in the Indian Territory was subsequently declared a citizen of the United States in an act approved March 3, 1901. The Five Civilized Tribes only comprised about one-third of the Indians of the United States. They had never been in the reservation stage through which the other Indians passed. For years they had been governing themselves.

TUSLER

As you recollect it, there was a larger proportion of Negro than white in Muskogee at that time.

JOHNSON

Yes, yes.

TUSLER

If you were walking down the street in Muskogee, would you see more Negro people than whites?

JOHNSON

Only in the Negro section of town. You see, the Negro section ran into the whites', close up right in town. The Negroes had department stores, big buildings with doctors and lawyers, they had theaters, and naturally they'd be more around there. Yet two blocks away, or one block away, would be all white. You'd see quite a number of Negroes in through there, but of course if you got down into your own territory you'd find that every store there was a Negro store, every one of them.

TUSLER

You've just handed me here a document--do you want to describe this on the tape recorder?

JOHNSON

This is an advertising sheet that I put out for my Johnson Investment Company. Here are some of the statistics; "4,128 Negro school children are enrolled in the schools in Muskogee County. Muskogee has twenty-six two- story residences owned by Negroes. The Negroes of Muskogee own sixteen brick buildings. Muskogee County contains 16,000 Negroes. The finest photograph gallery in the state is conducted by a Negro in Muskogee. Muskogee County has an area of 529,920 acres, ninety-five percent of which is farm area."

TUSLER

When was this published?

JOHNSON

About 1905 .

TUSLER

What did you do with this, mail it out?

JOHNSON

Yes, yes, I mailed this all over the country. I'd sell by mail a lot, and then when they'd come in there they'd look for it--it was out on the edge of town.

TUSLER

Who did you mail it to?

JOHNSON

I'd been running the Tulsa Guide and I had copies of it that I'd look through and get names of people all over the South. Then I had letters from people asking for information; I'd get ten to fifteen letters a day from people all over the country asking for information about it. That's why I published this. Instead of answering their letter, I'd just mail this.

TUSLER

They writing to you because they had your name from the Tulsa Guide ?

JOHNSON

The Tulsa Guide, they had that. I was the only person they knew to write to, to get any information. A few of them may have had some friends out there, but there was no paper that circulated nationally and there was no way for them to get information.

TUSLER

You mentioned before that you had several other enterprises there. You mentioned a commercial publishing company.

JOHNSON

A fellow and I established a commercial publishing company; my name was secretary and manager. I was also secretary of the Oklahoma Building and Loan Association.

TUSLER

What did the Oklahoma Building and Loan Association do?

JOHNSON

Selling shares of stock to get enough money to build a series of houses and lots. We tried it for about a year, but it wouldn't work.

TUSLER

Was this in Muskogee also?

JOHNSON

That was in Muskogee. Then I have an invitation printed in gold issued by the Bachelors' Club, Christmas, 1909, on which my name appears as chairman of the invitation committee. Other names mentioned include a dentist, a lawyer, a banker, doctor, teacher, the invitation is to the annual Yuletide party, Friday evening, December 19, 1909. I was in social affairs to a certain extent.

TUSLER

What did the commercial publishing company do?

JOHNSON

We published letterheads for business, just commercial printing, business, doctors' and lawyers' cards and stationery.

TUSLER

Who did you do that with?

JOHNSON

A fellow named Brown, I think.

TUSLER

I have a note here mentioning the name Joseph Atwell.

JOHNSON

That's the name, yes. Joseph Atwell. I forgot about him. I think he was a college man that I got acquainted with there. He had it going and I joined it, tried to help him out. I was more associated with the doctors and lawyers and schoolteachers. We got out business cards for them and stationery and wedding invitations— Just a little personal affair, you know, it didn't amount to much.

TUSLER

Your main enterprise there was the Johnson Investment Company.

JOHNSON

Yes, that was the biggest thing there for me at that time.

TUSLER

You didn't ever intend to start another newspaper after you got to Muskogee?

JOHNSON

They had two colored weekly papers there. A fellow named W.H. Twine, a lawyer, had the Cimeter . I don't remember the other one. His was pretty good. The best newspaper of the state was the Black Dispatch in Oklahoma City. That covered the state and was very good in telling Negro news of the world . Mr. Twine's paper, the Cimeter , was merely a local paper. The Black Dispatch is still running, I think. It was one of the largest papers, it circulated all over the United States. And then we had a little town down there called Boley, Oklahoma. It is still there, it is all Negro. They had a bank and a theater but it was never able to grow. It just existed. Of course, there's no reason there to establish an exclusive Negro town, nothing to gain by that, you see. The Negroes own enough material in Muskogee to have made a town but then you don't get the advantages of the town. You had your electric light system, you had your water works, you had your sewers, you had your fire department, you have all that in Muskogee, where in a new town you have to establish it. Unless you go in there with real money you can't do that, you see. There was a little Negro town right out of Muskogee called Taft, and the only reason that succeeded was because the government established a deaf, dumb and blind institute. Pretty near everybody in the town worked in that institution, and then they had a few stores around where the farmers came in to buy, like a country grocery store. There had been half a dozen little towns started in Oklahoma, but they never could get anywhere because they didn't get moneyed people in there and to have a tovm you've got to put in water works, you've got to put in an electric light system, you've got to put in all that. The biggest capital they were able to get to come to Oklahoma was the Doctor Brovm that built that three-story building there.

TUSLER

Was he a medical doctor?

JOHNSON

Yes. But he never lived there, he just invested; he smelled the opportunity and invested in that building.

TUSLER

But this was an exception, you say.

JOHNSON

Exception, yes. There was another man, J. McCullough, who built a three-story building there too. But we didn't get the money in there. They had a bank there, they had a building on the corner but it was only a two-story building, it wasn't a big building. We had three or four undertakers, they had buildings; and there was lots of one-story, two-story buildings around, but nothing big.

TUSLER

Would you say that the Negro people who lived there at that time were quite satisfied with the arrangement, or was there a feeling of discontent?

JOHNSON

Yes, they were, it was very very fine, it was very nice. They had a nice social affair, they had nice businesses, there were never lynchings or trouble with the police or anything. It was a fine community up until statehood. But statehood changed the thing so much. So many of these people didn't have a business education and they didn't improve their land enough. They'd have maybe 160 acres or 320--well, they'd farm forty acres of it, maybe, and they wouldn't intensify their farming. They didn't have money enough to buy good machinery. They just lived on there, grew enough vegetables to feed the family, and were just contented to live a nice normal quiet life. It aas a nice normal city, there was no trouble; they didn't have fighting and shooting and drunks. Liquor was not allowed, anyway. It was the best town in the whole state for years and years.

TUSLER

There were no serious signs of racial disturbance at that time.

JOHNSON

No, no. They got used to it, and the main, only trouble was the street cars. The white stores would sell to the women but they wouldn't let them try on the dresses. And you had enough other things that you didn't have to depend entirely upon a white store. You had nice drugstores, you had nice restaurants--of course, you couldn't eat in the white restaurants, but you could trade in all the stores; they catered to Negroes and treated them all right. And schools; the school principals, they got good money, the school teachers got good money. And the post-office boys. Of course the city employed Negro men on the streets, several Negro policemen, detectives. It was a nice normal city up until statehood, but statehood spoiled it because the people went wild, you got a different type coming in there. And as I say, a lot of those people that seemingly were flourishing, they were flourishing off of these children's money. When they had to account for it, that took the props out from under them.

TUSLER

Was this quite a disillusioning experience for the Negro population there, to have this change that you've been describing after statehood? You spoke about how happy everybody was in celebrating statehood. They must have had great expectations.

JOHNSON

I don't know why. I can't see where it was any good for them. The thing was much better before. Of course the whole state might have been better. Of course Muskogee was an exception, being the headquarters for the Civilized Tribes. That made Muskogee an outstanding place, whereas when all that went away it dropped back to just an ordinary city and reverted to what it is today. Just a little town down there. A few people are getting along all right; others don't have any ambition — they've got a piece of land and they grow enough on it, they have a few chickens and a few cows, and they live there and are quiet. They don't have any trouble, raise their children, send them off to school.

TUSLER

But the opportunities there weren't much, that's why you left.

JOHNSON

Yes, No, there was no opportunity there to make any money. You got a nice home, you could get a job around there somewhere and raise your children and send them off to school. And nobody bothers you, they don't have racial trouble dovm there. Whites and Negroes learn how to get along with one another and the Negroes don't expect any more.

TUSLER

Do you have any other documents in your collection similar to the brochure for your investment company that describe life in Muskogee at this time?

JOHNSON

No, I don't think I have, only copies of the paper, that's all, and that only described Tulsa. After statehood I left and I never subscribed to a paper after I left; I wasn't interested in Oklahoma any more.

TUSLER

You didn't save any of the newspapers from Muskogee at that time.

JOHNSON

Muskogee, no, no. Their paper was too local. I covered in the Tulsa Guide more outside stuff than I did local stuff. These [Muskogee] papers, none of them circulated nationally--they were just a little home paper telling about social events in town, a new arrival or a death, or something like that.

TUSLER

So you left Muskogee very shortly after statehood was declared.

JOHNSON

There Is something that I wanted to put in here. While in Muskogee I got a telegram from the De La Vergnes stated that my foster mother, Mrs. Turner, died in Los Angeles. It appeared that the De La Vergnes, in making one of their frequent trips to the Hawaiian Islands where they owned a sugar plantation, had brought Mrs. Turner with them to a home they owned on Orange Street in Los Angeles. When they left for the Hawaiian Islands they had her room with a Negro family from the Springs who had a home here on Bixel Street near Don Lee, later taken by the freeway. Mrs. Turner fell downstairs and died from her injuries. She is buried in Rosedale Cemetery on Pico Street where I visited her grave, often. By coincidence when I came to California in 1920, I remembered that Mr. De La Vergne at one time had an office on Hill Street. After much search I found that he was in the city in a hotel.

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: SIX, SIDE ONE (NOVEMBER 28, 1967)

TUSLER

Today I'd like you to describe your activities in your Pacific Coast News Bureau. What was this organization and how did you get involved?

JOHNSON

Well, through my connection with the Lincoln Motion Picture Company in the years 1918 to 1923, as a stockholder and as general booking manager in charge of the national distribution of Lincoln films, while at the same time working a shift at the post office, I not only did business with most of the Negro newspapers and Journals through publicity and advertising, knowing personally many of the editors and managers, but I also kept files of nearly every Journal and Negro paper. I noted that [most] of them carried news of only local importance and very little of national news. The National Negro Press Association is a big Negro organization to which they subscribed and the only organization of its kind, but some of the smaller papers can't afford the price to belong to it. So then they only publish just a little local news around town. Even while I was connected with Lincoln, I edited an amusement page in the Los Angeles Negro weekly the Western Dispatch with offices in town, under the nom de plume of George Perry, my first two names.

TUSLER

Why did you use a nom de plume?

JOHNSON

Well, I wasn't particular about letting them know who I was or my connection with Lincoln. I thought it might interfere with my work with Lincoln in some way or another, so I didn't use it all the time; I'd use it at different times. I sometimes also used it in national news dispatches for eastern and southern Negro journals. When Lincoln discontinued business in 1923, partly due to the closing of many theaters in the flu epidemic, I worked an eight-hour shift in the post office, 3:30 to midnight. I decided to try my hand in supplying news to the Negro press. I had been supplying it free with our papers and everything but not as a straight business proposition. So I bought a mimeograph machine and had printed envelopes, letterheads and statements with Pacific Coast News Bureau. I subscribed to a western clipping bureau of white journals and ordered all news of Negroes in the Western states clipped and sent to me-- everythlng about Negroes except crime. Because of the immense filing system and steel files that I had accumulated in many years with the Lincoln organization, in many cases I was able to take a small clipping and consult my files and make a much larger article out of it. All I would want from them in that clipping was a heading of something, and then I could generally look into my files and find enough material to add to that to build it into a story.

TUSLER

Your files contained information on Negro actors and actresses .

JOHNSON

More than that--I kept pretty near everything [on important] Negroes, banks, insurance companies, anything that was very important because sometimes it would come in handy later on. I would just file that, clip it and put it in the file. I got thousands of them, you see.

TUSLER

And you started doing this in connection with your Lincoln work?

JOHNSON

Yes, I had done that a long time ago, because I was getting lots of papers. I'd have to advertise in different papers in the different towns we'd go into. Always, if we didn't advertise, I'd have the agents pick up any colored papers they could and send them to me so that I would get practically all the papers in the country. And so I mailed out weekly four to six legal-sized mimeographed sheets to the Negro journals all over the nation, with exclusive news of Negroes, activities in the West and particularly in the motion picture and theater, news such as they never had before and news that they wanted. But it soon grew too large for me to handle alone and I took in one partner, a fellow named Jimmy Smith. He had an office downtown on Central Avenue where he supplied Negroes for pictures, a casting office. He knew everybody in Los Angeles and he knew where to get them. He'd get a call for two washwomen, a coachman, and a maid. Well, he'd know right away where to pick up those girls--he'd pick them up and make a note of it and send them out there, and he got a commission on everybody he sent out. Sometimes they'd want fifty Negroes for a cotton field or they'd want a preacher or they'd want a washerwoman or they'd want a juvenile. He made it a business and did good work for quite a while.

TUSLER

All the major studios would come to him for these things?

JOHNSON

Yes, all of them knew him, and they didn't have it at that time. Now later on they established it but they didn't have it at that time. Jimmy Smith had an office from which he supplied upon request from one to 100 Negroes, men women and children, as extras for various film studios. This worked well for a while, but Mr. Smith gave up his job to become manager of James Lowe, who had just completed the part of Uncle Tom in Universal 's production of Uncle Tom's Cabin . He made a deal with Lowe and made a deal with Universal and got Uncle Tom's Cabin and took him to London, England, and played there in one of the biggest places. He put another man in his job and then he never came back to take back his job. He stayed in New York and worked around in New York. This James Lowe, while he was a big hit in Uncle Tom's Cabin, never came back--that was the last picture he ever played in. Smith stayed there and got into another little business, and another man that used to work under him took over his casting bureau. He ran it for a year or two and then he dropped dead and another man took it over. None of them was as efficient as Smith, so they discontinued it and they do the casting down in Hollywood just the same as all the other people. But at that time he rendered quite a service, because he could get the fellows quicker and knew who to get down. They don't know; they must have to send out and maybe half a dozen will appear and they won't want them, they're not typed, you see. Jim made a good business out of it.

TUSLER

What was the name of his outfit?

JOHNSON

I think it was Negro Casting Bureau of Los Angeles, Central Avenue, Negro Casting Bureau, Jimmy Smith.

TUSLER

What date was this approximately?

JOHNSON

He was in Lincoln pictures too, we used him in a couple of our pictures. It was about 1918 to '23, along in through there, 1917 up to about '23. I don't remember the exact date when Uncle Tom' s Cabin was made. And I don't know what kind of a deal he made to get them to let him take Uncle Tom' s Cabin . Universal let him take it some way or another and he took it over to England and made quite a hit.

TUSLER

So he became your partner?

JOHNSON

He was my partner for a while. He helped me — he could give me a lot of inside information on the Negroes that were in films, but he had too much work and he couldn't devote much time to my work except to give me some of the information. In fact, my work got too big for personal handling myself, being that I was a post office employee and had to work eight hours a day, sometimes ten and twelve. It got too big — I either had to quit the post office or quit it, one of the two. I couldn't afford to quit the post office; I had had eight or nine years in Omaha and I came out here on a fake sick leave, and then I stayed too long and they wrote me a letter that I would either have to resign or come back and go to work. So I had to send in my resignation. Then I thought I would be able to get reinstated here, and they told me that I had been out too long, I couldn't get reinstated. I had to take a new examination to go back in the post office here. They wanted me because I was trained. The post office is divided into two divisions, one for city and one for mailing outside. Now in all the other post offices, the mailing division is the biggest part of it. The city [of Los Angeles] is so big that the city is the big part and the mailing division is the small part. In Omaha it's just the opposite. You've got more trains than you've got people, and you've got trains in all directions and on all sides of you. A mailing man is more experienced and more valuable. He has to know all the trains and the times they go and where they go, all the stops and everything. I had to take a new examination here and I passed and got in, and they were glad to get me because I was a mailing clerk and they had very few mailing clerks. My experience here was quite an affair — it would probably require a whole chapter in itself because I was the first in a lot of things. I was the first Negro employed in the mailing division and I was the first man to work air mail; I was there when air mail started. When the military came I had charge of the military, and then when they opened a nixie department I had charge of that. The nixie department was the letters that no clerk can read, they can't make it out, they don't know what it is. We used to send them to Frisco for the railroad mailmen to work. One day I came back to work, I had been off, and there were eight big sacks of mail laying there and I said, "What's this?" They said, "They're nixies." Well, I told the superintendent about it and he said, "We're not going to work them." I said, "Well, you better go downstairs and see the railroad men. They sent them up here." So he went down there and pretty soon he came back with his head between his knees and he said, "Well, I guess we're going to have to work them. The order came from Washington that Los Angeles is too big a town to be sending their bad mail up to Frisco, you ought to work it yourself. I guess you're the guy, it takes a mailing man," So then I had charge of the nixie division. I worked all the bad mail. The funny thing was that I'd get mail in all different languages that I couldn't make out, and I had authority to go to twenty-six different guys in the post office who all could speak a different language. When I'd get a letter that I couldn't read, I'd go to some of these men and have them read it before I'd send it back. You see, nobody is allowed to send mail back if it's unreadable — it has to go to one person and he's responsible for doing something with it. He's either got to correct it or send it back. A funny part of it was that I went to two Japanese there and I asked them to read, and they claimed they couldn't speak Japanese. I knew they were wrong because they speak nothing but Japanese at home. Well, I found a colored laborer down there that was sweeping the floor, and some boys told me that he was studying the language and was carrying a Japanese- American book in his pocket all the time. So I'd go to that colored fellow to read my Japanese mail. [laughter]

TUSLER

So all these years when you were working for Lincoln and running the news bureau, you were also holding the post office job.

JOHNSON

I was at the post office all the time.

TUSLER

What were the dates of the Pacific Coast News Bureau's existence?

JOHNSON

It started right about after Lincoln went down, from '23 to 1927.

TUSLER

Four years.

JOHNSON

About four years.

TUSLER

And did you have quite a large subscription list then?

JOHNSON

I had quite a large subscription.

TUSLER

Where did they go?

JOHNSON

All over the United States. I'll give you some stuff here on it .

TUSLER

Do you have a complete file now in your possession?

JOHNSON

Yes, I have just been going over it the other day and I have about fifty of 100 or more Negro papers from all over the United States. I have saved them.

TUSLER

The newspapers themselves.

JOHNSON

The newspaper itself, yes. Then I have dispatches that I sent out, too, as far as that is concerned.

TUSLER

That is what I was wondering, if you had a complete file of the actual dispatches.

JOHNSON

I don't know as I've got them all but I have a lot of them, yes. But I kept the Negro papers and there you can see a whole lot of my articles, because they either had on them Pacific Coast News Bureau or George Perry, in all the biggest [Negro] newspapers in the United States. That's quite a valuable collection itself because those papers, half of them, are extinct and gone; they're all way back in '27. Unable to find efficient help, I could not afford to jeopardize my government position with a wife and a child to support and was compelled to discontinue the publication. I have many letters from subscribers, the Chicago Defender , New York News , Pittsburgh Courier , Philadelphia Tribune , Washington Bee , Topeka Plain Dealer , Omaha Monitor , St. Louis Argus and so forth. My files contain many personal letters of commendation and so forth from Robert Vann, editor and owner of the Pittsburgh Courier and Competitor magazine of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Tony Langston, Chicago Defender , Chicago; Romeo Dougherty of the New York News ; Booker T. Washington, Emmett J. Scott, Tuskegee ; Robert R. Church, the richest Negro in the country; and so forth. I had in my files copies of fifty or more Negro Journals published in the 1920' s and '30's.

TUSLER

Was your service unique in the area then?

JOHNSON

Yes, there was only one other in the United States. There's a Negro press association in New York or Chicago that supplied news, but they were too expensive and the smaller papers couldn't afford to have it. The big papers had it, and they only had big news, they didn't take in the smaller things. It was done by very efficient men and it is still running, this Negro news press. These smaller papers couldn't afford to buy it and so that's where I got in because they would take mine and be glad to get it, and give me in exchange space in the papers or anything. And I'd trade the space for advertising for the motion picture company.

TUSLER

Oh, I thought you didn't start this until after Lincoln closed.

JOHNSON

I was running it for a while there but after that quit, and then I went into it in a big way. First I was only doing it in a small way.

TUSLER

I see, while the Lincoln Company was going.

JOHNSON

Yes, while Lincoln was going.

TUSLER

But after the Lincoln Company closed, you charged them for the service.

JOHNSON

Yes. I charged them.

TUSLER

What did you charge?

JOHNSON

I don't remember prices; sometimes it would be space. I'd sell the space to other firms that wanted to advertise. Sometimes I'd do it for so much space, six inches of space, and then I'd take the space and sell it to other firms. First I was using it for the Lincoln Company and then later on I would sell the space to advertisers.

TUSLER

Was it a financial success to you?

JOHNSON

If I had been able to quit the post office I would have been able to make a success of it. But I couldn't. I had schemes to study in the post office, too, and after working eight hours and sometimes ten or twelve hours a day I didn't have much time to do much studying anywhere else.

TUSLER

And nobody was helping you with it.

JOHNSON

No, I couldn't find anybody that had the ability to do it. They could do typing but you've got to have a knack to be able to read through a whole lot of material and then compile it and condense it down to a smaller article. Sometimes you read a couple of pages and you get it down into a six-inch column, you see. Then you have to have general knowledge from a lot of other things to be able to add to it. You get a line that gives you a lead and then you've got to build on that, and you have to have the material to do it with. I had the little clippings that I had been filing and all kinds of information that I had on hand.

TUSLER

Did the clipping service send material to you from newspapers from all over the United States?

JOHNSON

From all over the United States, everywhere there was a Negro paper.

TUSLER

So your news bureau was not just concerned with Pacific Coast news.

JOHNSON

No, that was just the name I had. No, I got papers from Florida, Georgia, Tuskegee, Alabama, New York, Chicago, Washington, all over the whole country.

TUSLER

Do you have a copy here of some of your releases? [tape recorder turned off]

JOHNSON

[Referring to newspaper] One article went, "Negro Bank Shows Progress of the Race," and it tells about various Negro banks. "There are about twelve million Negroes in the United States that it is estimated have $22,000,000 deposited in Negro banks. They have three times that sum in other banks. Colored insurance companies have resources of about $500,000,000. Property holdings of colored people are worth more than three billion , and the church property $100,000,000. The average deposit in Negro banks is around $69, a comparatively low figure, but large enough to show that the colored citizen is progressing.... The fact that there are in the United States a total of eighty Negro banks, banded into a national association, is sufficient proof that the colored people are rising. These eighty banks, wholly owned and operated by Negroes, have approximately $22,000,000 on deposit, representing 320,000 depositers " [* *This and the following quotations in this section have not been checked against the originals. Punctuation supplied by the editor] Now of course, that's back In '27.

TUSLER

You wrote that particular release?

JOHNSON

Yes. One big article that went all over the United States was, "Real Estate Boards to Aid Racial Survey of Land Valuation." Then another one, "Theater Fracus Results in Fatal Shooting of Colored Youth," Oh, that isn't worth reading. Another, "Negro Preacher Starts a Race Journal to Aid Whites in California Segregation Battle. Quotes Bible in Advocacy of Peaceful Separation." One here is, "Black Republics To Get an Airport Line. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. "

TUSLER

So they really covered every imaginable kind of subject.

JOHNSON

Yes, this isn't just motion pictures, this part. Here is general news. Now here's one on the front page of the Dallas Express , Dallas, Texas. February 25, 1927. "New Commercial Steamship Line Is Outcome of Legal Battle Between Rival Factions."

TUSLER

These were releases of the Pacific Coast News Bureau.

JOHNSON

Pacific Coast News Bureau.

TUSLER

Are they so indicated on the paper?

JOHNSON

Yes, exclusive. "Los Angeles, California, February 26, Pacific Coast News Bureau." Here's one in the People 's Eye Opener , San Antonio, Texas, "Negro Attorney Addresses Legislature on Insidious Self-Governing Bar Bill. President of Negro Association Appears Before California Legislature. Pacific Coast News Bureau, George Perry, Sacramento."

TUSLER

Practically the whole front page in that case is made up by the Pacific Coast News Bureau.

JOHNSON

Yes, about fifty percent of it.

TUSLER

What's the date on that one?

JOHNSON

That's March 19, '27. Most of these I've got around here now are in '27. Here is a very big article--it went all over the country and it is exclusive, "$100,000 Race Beach Resort Faces Foreclosure. The only colored beach on the Pacific Coast must raise $25,000 or lose title." That was quite an article on a big resort.

TUSLER

Did you ever search for news yourself? Did you act as a reporter yourself or did you rely on the clipping service?

JOHNSON

Oh, no, I got this from all parts. I get it out of the newspapers; sometimes you only get a few lines. Then I go into my files and write a big article on it. All you want is a lead on something. That's why you keep your stuff filed, so that you can go back and refer to different things. All you'll want is a lead--say a certain girl has got a job in a certain film; well, I go back and build a big article on that. I'll tell something about the girl's life and I'll tell something more about the picture and who's in it. With keeping your files and keeping your records it allows you to build on; all you need is a line or two to get you started.

TUSLER

Did you ever do any interviewing, or go and talk to people about any of the items?

JOHNSON

Oh, not many, because they don't know as much as the newspaper reporter that wrote it. They can't tell you much. Of course I know a lot of the boys personally. I know things they've been in. But I have better records of a whole lot of these colored movie actors than they have themselves. A lot of them never kept material. Like Sidney [P.] Dones. Now Sidney Dones [Democracy Film Corp.] made several Negro pictures and he died here. I know his brother well, and the family hasn't a thing about him. I've got more material about him than their own family has. They never saved anything. And that's the way you do so much-- there's only a few that have saved and know what they have been in. Rex Ingram has been in lots and lots of pictures. Now he's an old man; he's still playing in pictures but he's grey haired. He's probably got a pretty good record of what he's been in; but then I've talked to twenty-five or more of them and they don't know, they never kept records, a lot of them don't even have pictures of themselves. But I have it there--I go through them, and it will tell you every picture they were in, better than they could tell you themselves. They can't give you any information about the picture, either. He said, "Well, I was in Noah's Ark ." But he doesn't know any details of Noah's Ark like I can tell you — who made it, when it was made, all the cast, who is the director, and who all the whites were and all the colored. I've got those records. I can file that on cards so that I don't have to keep going back to the book all the time, I have all those records filed on cards of what pretty near every Negro did. I got to know more about what they did than nine-tenths of them know themselves.

TUSLER

So you relied on that kind of material primarily and didn't do personal interviewing.

JOHNSON

No, no, I get can better information from books than I can from them. They were in a picture but they have forgotten the date of it; they were in it but they don't know if it was maybe a Universal picture; they can probably tell me who is the star but they can't tell me anybody else that is in it. They were in hundreds of pictures and they don't have the slightest idea. [tape recorder turned off]

TUSLER

We have just had the tape recorder off while Mr. Johnson was showing me some of his motion picture files which we are going to discuss next week [See Tape VII] . I think you also have some letters there that show some of the contacts you had in the Pacific News Bureau with some of the people who wrote to you in connection with sending you stories.

JOHNSON

This is one: "October 31, 1927, from Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, Culver City. Mr. Johnson, Pacific Coast News Bureau. My dear Mr. Johnson: I am sending you an exclusive story to be released to your service on the Negro players who have lately taken part in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ' s pictures. The story mailed to you last week was also sent to Negro papers generally. This was done by mistake and it was intended to be released to your service. I would appreciate it if you will be kind enough to send me clippings so that we may check on the approximate use of this material. Very truly yours, Jos. Polonsky, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. ""Paramount-Famous -Lasky Corporation. August 7, 1928. From the office of Arch Reeve, Pacific Coast News Bureau. Dear Sirs: To assist you in receiving motion picture news within the shortest possible time after it is written, it is necessary that our newsletter list contain your correct address. The address we have now is 1131 East 41st Street. If there has been any change in the above we should appreciate a note informing us of the correction. This will enable you to save at least one or possibly two days in receiving the news, Sincerely yours. Arch Reeve."Now from some of the colored papers. The Chicago Bee, Chicago, one of the largest Negro papers in the United States, "Pacific Coast News Bureau. Gentlemen: I am very much pleased with the service you have developed there. It is the best written and best prepared which any of the colored bureaus have put out. I am sorry that geographical conditions prevent you from being able to cover a larger field. Sincerely yours. Chandler Owen, General Manager.""The New York Amsterdam News, 2293 Seventh Avenue, New York City. July 13, 1926. Pacific Coast News Bureau. At last I am resting easy--news from your bureau has been coming to me, and I have been at the stage referred to in ring parlance as 'hanging on the ropes' because I wanted to know just who was getting out that splendid dope from the Coast. Hoping then that I will in the future be hearing from you by special delivery. I am sincerely yours, Romeo Dougherty. "The above are just a few of the letters received showing how the Pacific Coast News Bureau dispatches are being received by the same national Negro press who also subscribe to the National Negro Press Association. The following is a sample of the type of news that the Pacific Coast News Bureau sent to the national press. "The Pittsburgh Courier , Saturday, February 27. [Two-column, eight-inch map] Study in Black and White. Spread of the Negro Race Shown by Dark Sports and Area. Proper Restrictions the Only Safeguard." [Map of Los Angeles with the Negro district in black] . "Propaganda Which Helped to Arouse Colored Californians. Tampa, Florida. December 18, 1926. 9,000 Pupils Without a Single Black American. Glendale, near suburb, 19,500, is advertising the fact that it has an entire school system of 8,995 children between the ages of three and eighteen years old and there is not a single black American child registered. Ten miles from Los Angeles.""The Commonwealth, Gary, Indiana, March 18, 1927. Big Interest Involved in Restriction Litigation, $7,000,000 Negro Syndicate Deal Opposed by 500,000 White Financial Combine. By George Perry.""The Dallas Express, Dallas, Texas. February 26, 1927, Efforts of Police Department and Probe of Grand Jury Prove Futile in Bombing Case of Last Friday.""The Western American , Oakland. February 25, 1927. Race Stars Appear in Old Ironsides. Chicago Quartet in the Greatest Picture Ever in Hollywood.""The Colorado Statesman , Denver, Colorado. January 8, 1927. Migration of Negro a Relief to the Race Problem. Shifting of 2,000,000 Negroes in Last Decade Beneficial to an Entire Nation."Those were some articles that were [printed],

TUSLER

That gives a good overview of the places where your releases went and what kinds of stories they dealt with. Did your brother, Noble Johnson, ever assist you in any of this?

JOHNSON

No, no, he doesn't know anything about it, he had nothing to do with it. He has never been here in town. He hasn't lived here a long time. He has always been somewhere else. While he was in Hollywood, he was very busy, and then for quite a while he ran dog kennels out in Hollywood.

TUSLER

I wondered if his connections had helped you in obtaining any news releases.

JOHNSON

No, I didn't take advantage of my relationship, I very seldom ever mentioned it at all because I didn't want to. He has lived in the San Fernando Valley. He had two or three dog kennels there and then he owned property in North Hollywood, he owned property up on the Ridge Route up there; he had a house burn down up there. He has traveled quite a bit; he and his wife (she is a horsewoman) would travel. That's what he has done most of the time since he has retired. I get a letter from him in Canada, Montana and Wyoming, all around different places. He really likes to travel, they both like it, and they are both horsemen. She is much younger and I guess she is doing most of the driving now. He is about eighty-five years old and not too active now.

TUSLER

He never did help you in any of this work or in any of your collecting activities either.

JOHNSON

No; in fact there are years when I don't even see him. He's been in pictures out there and I never go out there to bother him. He had a home in Laurel Canyon and he had another one further out--I would come in there sometimes, he would take me out there. As a rule he never came around me much or I never bothered him any, and he has lived alone. He always has been tied up in pictures.

TUSLER

Where did you do your news bureau work?

JOHNSON

At home. The only time I had an office is when I got with that fellow, Jimmy Smith, who had an office booking pictures. I moved up there but it wasn't satisfactory so I moved back home. I used the garage and had my mimeograph machine out there. I used to run them myself.

TUSLER

Where was your home then?

JOHNSON

I guess it was on 35th Place. When I came here there were no Negroes going south beyond 12th Street. Then they moved , kept going out. The Oddfellows built a hall there and then they went out further. They built a theater out there and they moved out further. Just before the Depression at one time I lived over in Westlake Park, half a block from Westlake Park. I had been renting and I told my wife, in the Depression, "I've got some money in the bank and I'd better take it out." So I went down and paid it on a home down there. It was a white neighborhood and they were just moving out; a nice five-room cottage. I left five dollars in [the bank], and in less than six months the Depression came. I got interest on that five dollars for about three or four years! [laughter] The bank went down but they paid off. I'd get a check for about 60 cents every now and then, paying off that $5.00. Well, we were in a very [good neighborhood] --all the doctors and lawyers and big shots all lived around me; we had the prettiest block over there on 35th Street.

TUSLER

Was this largely a Negro neighborhood?

JOHNSON

Yes. Just moved into it; it was a new Negro neighborhood, all nice little cottages, and all the Negro businessmen lived around in my block. I had three or four doctors and lawyers [near me]. I lived there about ten years or more, and then property commenced to open up over here in back of the Golden State [Insurance Building], up on Washington, in there. Those people commenced to going out over there and all those big shots moved over there. That left me pretty near alone over there. New people were coming in and they were a different type entirely. So I told them, "We've got to get out of here." The Jews used to live over with the colored people back in the '20' s; well, they decided to get away from them and they came out here, built this whole tract, put in their kosher shops.

TUSLER

You mean this neighborhood right here?

JOHNSON

Yes, up to La Brea, all around up through here.

TUSLER

What area do you call this?

JOHNSON

Well; it's halfway called the Crenshaw area. Between La Brea and Crenshaw, and between (the freeway wasn't there then) the St . Monica Freeway and Exposition. All in here and all up and down Adams they had kosher shops and synagogues, and there's no colored people this side of Western. Well, they got along here all right for about ten years. One day one colored fellow got in somewhere up here. The next day they put up signs all around here, selling. I can talk to five people in my back yard (just thirty-five feet off of three lots--my lot is one of the few that are long along the side streets, most of them are short), I used to talk over the fence to the Jews and I asked them, "How long before you are going to leave?" "Oh, I'm not going to leave, I used to live in Chicago, I'm used to colored people." I said, "Oh, I give you about two weeks." [laughter] In about two weeks he was gone. I bought it from a Jew, and he thought he could go out and buy with the money I paid him. He couldn't and he came back and wanted to rent it. I rented it two months and he still wanted to rent it. I said, "No, I want my place, I want to get in." So he came in and he wanted to take out his things. I said, "What do you want for the rug," and he had a looking glass up there. He asked me a big price, about $100 for the glass. I said, "You're foolish. You can't find any place where this rug will fit, you have to cut it all up. I'm giving you a good price." He wouldn't take it, he got sore. So he went out and he couldn't find a place to live; he had to rent for a long time. Most of the Jews went over here, Westchester, where the Olympic Village used to be, and they ran them out of there and now they went up on Fairfax. And they ran them out of there. Now they're all the way along Pico, all the way out on Pico; that's where the Jews are now. Then the colored commenced to coming in there like hotcakes. They bought everything. Here there's only a half a dozen whites left now.

TUSLER

When was all this happening?

JOHNSON

I have been here about fifteen or sixteen years.

TUSLER

I want to ask you about the work that you did on the Negro weekly here in Los Angeles called the Western Dispatch; you said that you wrote the amusement page while you were also employed with the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. What did that work consist of?

JOHNSON

Oh, I just...

TUSLER

We've just had the recorder off while Mr. Johnson brought a copy of the Western Dispatch. What is the date of this one?

JOHNSON

December 1, 1921.

TUSLER

Here you have the amusement page which says "Edited by George Perry." Does that mean that you wrote all the articles that appear there?

JOHNSON

Yes, I wrote all these. I'll read some of the headlines. One headline, "Jack Johnson's Burlesque Contract Cancelled." Another one, "New Film Company in Houston, Texas." "Noted Writer Tells of the Amazing Growth of Movie Industry. Pittsburgh Contributor to the Competitor Magazine Lauds Photoplays Produced in the West." This is by Rose Atwood in the Pittsburgh Courier Negro newspaper, and it tells of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and the Mlcheaux Film Company. Another heading, "Noted Artists To Appear in Recital." Another one, "Negro Musical Inspiration for Jazz Opera."

TUSLER

And this came out once a week?

JOHNSON

Yes.

TUSLER

Is it still in existence now?

JOHNSON

No. No, it went out.

TUSLER

Who published it?

JOHNSON

Published by Dr. J. A. Somerville, a prominent doctor; Willis O. Tyler, a prominent lawyer; J.C. Banks, a real estate man; and Louis S. Tenette, a Negro printer; published at 312 I.I. Phillips Building--that used to be the Germain Buildlng--at 224 South Spring Street, published every Thursday.

TUSLER

And the name of the president there?

JOHNSON

W.M. Austin, president; I don't remember who he was, though. I was thinking of the others that I knew. In the amusement page I had a Negro film producers directory, telling of twenty-five producers of Negro pictures and the pictures they produced, all across the United States. There is an advertisement of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, established 1916, capitalized $75,000, oldest film corporation in the world producing Negro photoplays, now releasing A Man' s Duty and By Right of Birth, and preparing to produce Black Americans, 1121 Central Avenue, Los Angeles. Black Americans was never produced.

TUSLER

Did this newspaper have quite a following in the Los Angeles area?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, it had quite a following, and was very popular. We were all prominent men, but it was just a sideline with them. The trouble is, they didn't keep it up and they didn't make it a permanent business. I don't know why it discontinued. Here is one whole half-page ad of the Los Angeles branch of the National Association of Colored People. They had news in here from Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Louisiana, Maryland, Delaware. It is a seven- column paper.

TUSLER

And appeared once a week.

JOHNSON

Once a week, yes. Front page picture of Frederick [Madison] Roberts, a Negro assemblyman in the state.

TUSLER

Do you have very many copies in your possession of these newspapers?

JOHNSON

No. Some of them I may have two or three; some I only have one.

TUSLER

Where would copies of this newspaper be? Do you know if there are copies of them?

JOHNSON

I don't think any of them, no. They're all gone, you see; this is in '22. I don't think you can find them-- I don't believe they are in the library even.

TUSLER

I wondered if you knew whether anyone had kept a collection of them or not.

JOHNSON

I'm quite sure that nobody kept a collection of all of them. That's the only reason I'm keeping them, because I think they are valuable. I think everybody has lost them, and a lot of people that wrote these things are dead. That's forty years ago. They haven't saved them and the library didn't care nothing about them, and I don't think you can find [them anywhere] .

TUSLER

How did you begin to do this work for them? Did they ask you to take that over?

JOHNSON

Oh, no, no. That is just the habit I have; I have always been a collector of somethings. I had two vaults with pennies and stamps downtown. I have been a collector all my life, just a natural collector, saving things. I got into this a long time ago and it proved profitable in some ways, and then I realized that the longer I kept it the more valuable it would get because people have destroyed [things]. I have gone back trying to get copies of papers and they're all gone. You see, none of these are permanent, very few of these papers have lasted. Some of my Chicago papers are still going. The Chicago Bee and Pittsburgh Courier and some of those papers are still running. But all of these papers, everything here is destroyed a long time ago.

TUSLER

How did you get the job of heading up the amusement page for them?

JOHNSON

Oh, I don't know, I knew Tyler, a lawyer, very well. I used to go down to his office quite a bit.

TUSLER

He was connected with the Lincoln Company, wasn't he?

JOHNSON

Well, yes, he did a little legal work but wasn't a member of it. He was a very prominent lawyer here in town. I consulted him once about trying to help me get back in the post office. He had an office downtown on Spring Street and I used to go down there and hobnob around with him quite a bit. Then he died and he left nothing; he left a home, but I don't know who his relatives are. He had a nice home near Western Avenue way out in the white district there.

TUSLER

It was through him that you were asked to edit the amusement page?

JOHNSON

Well, he probably did. I don't know why I did it then because I didn't get any money for it. There was a period of adjustment when I got out of pictures and I wrote back to get in the post office, and they told me I had been out too long. There was a period then of idleness, waiting until a new examination came up, and I associated with him quite a bit in his law office. I think that's how I got into it. He was a criminal lawyer, quite a prominent lawyer. I got pretty well acquainted with him. I was just trying to find something to do temporarily. I think I got into it that way, because there was nothing in it for me and it didn't last.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: SIX, SIDE TWO (DECEMBER 12, 1967)

TUSLER

Today you are going to tell about your brother, Virgel Johnson, who did a rather remarkable thing with his life. So would you like to start from the beginning?

JOHNSON

Virgel was born March 6, 1879, near Marshall, Missouri, the son of Perry and Georgia Johnson. Following the birth of another son, Noble, in 1881 the family moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Colorado Springs at that time was a beautiful little city nestling in the picturesque location at the foot of the famous Pikes Peak with its famous cog railroad and near the scenic localities of the Garden of the Gods, Cheyenne Canyon, Helen Hunt Jackson's grave, the Broadmoor Hotel, and about thirty miles away by stagecoach, the gold mining localities of Cripple Creek and Victor, Colorado. In the valley between the city and Cheyenne Canyon and the Broadmoor Hotel was a little suburb called Ivywild, at which there were tracks and homes of the wealthy. Quite a number owned blooded horses. Learning of Perry Johnson's reputation as a horseman, he was engaged by the horse-owning millionaires to take charge of their horses, train them, and enter and drive them in various races in the state and on the eastern tracks. They provided him with a brick house for his family, stables and outhouses for the horses, and a half-mile training race track upon which to train them. Two years later in 1883 a daughter was born, and two years later in '85 another son was born on October 29, George Perry, resulting in the death of the mother. The father was now with four children, three boys and one girl, all two years apart and motherless. Across the fields a mile or so was the three-story home of a white family, a man and wife and two grown sons. They owned a furniture store uptown in the Springs and inherited plantations in the Hawaiian Islands. In Ivywild, their property, aside from the three-story frame house, included barns, cows, pigs chickens, peacocks, a covered springhouse with running springs emptying into small ponds and then running through a meadow and emptying into a large pond a half a mile away. Their name was De La Vergne . They came from Missouri and brought with them a widowed colored servant. She was treated like one of the family, her duties confined to cooking, washing and ironing. While there were four in the family beside me, the two boys later went to school in Europe. My father was now with three children — Virgel, called Virge; Noble, called Nobe; and sister Iris--all children two years older than each other. Virgel had very little schooling. He would ride a horse to a colored grade school in Colorado Springs, in which he was the only colored in his class. At a very young age, when my father left with a bunch of horses for the eastern races, he would leave Virge in charge of the house and anywhere from one to three white hired hands. Now and then when entering the horses in the Colorado State Fairs in Denver, Rocky Ford and Grand Junction, both Virge and my father would often be in the same race. There were only a few colored people in Colorado Springs, and none in our locality. All Virge 's playmates were white, including the famous Lon Chaney, whose parents were deaf mutes and lived nearby. Later Noble and Lon Chaney met again the the studios in Hollywood. As Virge grew older I only know of him taking one job on a salary basis. He became a coachman for a millionaire in the Springs, I remember because when he wanted to clip the bobtail coach horses he would take his bicycle, tie it up in the air, attach a chain to the pair of clippers and have me climb up on the bicycle and ride it while he clipped these horses. Virge was always serious, no time for play or women. He never had a girl in his young, schoolday period. Finally he decided to leave Colorado and go after bigger things. He was never around Negroes very much, not particularly because he shunned them or tried to avoid them. In the Springs he was known as "Perry Johnson's boy." The only girls he was ever around were those in his school classes and they were always white, as we did not live in a Negro section.

TUSLER

Was he known to be Negro then?

JOHNSON

Yes. As Virge grew up he tried his hand at mining for gold in Victor and Cripple Creek, and also at fanning, as my father homesteaded 160 acres thirty miles east of Colorado Springs. Noble and Virge would take the team of horses and wagon and in an all-day trip go to the farm and plant corn in rows as far as your eye could see. Then they would go back to town and wait for the rain. If it came they would return and cultivate the corn. If it didn't rain they never went back. Years later as I went through that same district, it was all green with sugar beets. They later learned that in planting sugar beets, the beets would send a taproot three and four feet and reach water. The three feet on top formed a mulch that protected the water below. Then Virge tried his hand at mining for gold in Victor and Cripple Creek. Father, Nobe, and Virge would stake claims, build a frame house with a canvas top, find a claim, and start digging, taking turns--one would dig, the other be on top with the windlass, rope and bucket hauling up the ore. They'd put the sacks on a donkey's back and go from one to five miles to a reduction plant to have it assayed. If it showed gold, they went back and kept digging. If it did not show enough gold to pay for the trouble, they closed up and started in another place. Later, Virge worked on salary for others. He went up in the Dakotas and in Minnesota. I don't know much about his life there, only that in some way he became acquainted with a very pretty colored girl about his own color, named Mabel, and married her.

TUSLER

What do you mean, "about his own color?"

JOHNSON

Light enough to pass for white. Real light. I got tired of the South and moved to Omaha, Nebraska. I sent for my girl, the one I was going with in Muskogee, Oklahoma, married her, and a year later had a daughter, a seven months' child who died. Exactly one year later, I had another daughter, my present daughter. About 1910, Virgel and Mabel moved to Little Rock, Arkansas and entered the construction business. Because of his experience in the early days of mining in Colorado, he soon came to be well-known in road building, quarry mining, and rough-and-tumble construction. I have a letter from Virgel 's wife Mabel dated May 1, 1913, from Forrest City, Arkansas, showing that Virge and she had located there. She writes that Virgel had a big contract building the levees at Cotton Plant, Arkansas, and at that time she and Virge were living at 614 North Capital Avenue, Little Rock, Arkansas. In another letter dated Little Rock, November l4, 1914, he states that he and Mabel had been married thirteen years. I think our father was living in Indianapolis and she writes he had just married a Texas widow with a little money and he had a few good horses, has settled down and is doing good. In a letter dated December 25, 1913, Virgel was operating the Johnson Team and Dray Company, Little Rock. In 1912 he opened the first rock quarry in Little Rock, which is now the present site of Cemmack Village and Rivercliff Apartments, due west of Little Rock Country Club and Little Rock College. Virgel removed the rock upon which the project was built in 1916 and '17, shipping same to Galveston, Texas. In 1917-18, during the World War I period, he was very active in United States Army work building levees and in the construction of Camp Pike, Arkansas. He was the general contractor for the first highway between Little Rock and Memphis. He constructed the streets of Stuttgart [Arkansas] and years later was the general contractor for the Riverside addition to Little Rock. Among some of the letterheads on his stationery was: Craft Transfer and Coal Company, vice- president; Reeves Transfer Company, Little Rock; Little Rock Stone Products Company; Johnson Construction Company, grading, paving, sewers, heavy concrete construction, 208 West Second Street, Little Rock ; V.C. Johnson, contractor, excavating, grading and wrecking. He owned and lived at one time in a big white colonial mansion. Virgel made several trips to Los Angeles, sometimes alone, other time with his wife, Mabel and their pet dog, Buddy. When alone, he would stay at his brother's, George; when with Mabel, at the hotel. His other brother, Noble, he would visit at his various homes in and around Hollywood, and at other times stop at Noble's ranch at Sierra City, California. His father, Perry Johnson, was living in Indianapolis with his daughter Iris, but he died in June, 1929. Some years later his daughter passed away and is buried beside her father, also in Indianapolis. Virgel's grandmother lived to be over 100 years old when she passed away in Colorado Springs, the same cemetery as our mother. In the letter dated April 30, 1934, I received the sad news that Mabel, aged fifty-five, then living at 1024 Prospect Avenue, had passed away on a Sunday morning in the Little Rock hospital. A newspaper clipping of the death stated that Mabel was a native of Yankton, South Dakota. She is survived by her husband, V.C. Johnson, and one sister, Miss Cora Fox of Sioux City, lowa . In Virgel's letter he stated that her sister and son were there. They had come down for a visit two weeks previous, not knowing that Mabel was sick. Mabel had lots of friends, a large funeral and was buried in the Mount Holly mausoleum. In a letter dated August 3, 1942, he writes, "Have been getting along very well with our building proposition. Now working on a project number three apartment building. The project consists of five units of projects as we call them. Original setup was for seven million dollars. Have completed 117 houses at $8,750 and $9,750, each. Eighty- seven low priced houses at $4,150. These are all sold and rented and overflowing with kids. These are two- and three- bedroom houses. Now rushing four six-story apartments with three-and four-bedroom units to each building. The same are being built on my old rock quarry site. I removed the rock in 1916, '17, shipping same to Galveston for Gulf Coast work. We are also starting on a shopping center, some fair-sized job. Apartments, estimated cost $1,200,000, shopping center $1,500,000. It's hard work, worry and it's all damn foolishness that I mess with it, and I often wonder why. But I am lost when I am not in hot water. This $2,700,000 work is just that many headaches. Am expecting to have all work completed by Christmas or January 1. However, our time limit is July 31, 1948. If no material or unforseen conditions arise, will be done on December 31" [*Quotations in this section not checked against originals. Punctuation supplied by the editor.] He sent me a twenty-two page booklet and newspaper clippings. The project is named Cammack Village, a planned community of Little Rock that started March 25, 1942. It is located due west of the Little Rock Country Club and the Little Rock College and it adjoins the present city limits. The elevation is comparable with the highest in Little Rock and the entire site is covered with a forest of pine trees. The proposition is owned by the Arkansas Housing Corporation. Johnson is only one of the firms supplying material, which he did from his rock quarries, crushing plant and sand plant, pumping station and barge. His offices, warehouse, storage yards covered six and one- half acres and his quarry and crushing plants, forty-three acres. Other buildings, rubble, granite storage quarries, 160 acres. In a letter dated 9/10/1950 he stated that he was so upset by the death of his private secretary April 10th, who had been on his payroll for thirty-five years and eight months without a miss and who had taken care of everything for him, that he was selling out most of his holdings and would marry a woman who had been a good friend to Mabel and had been living with them evern since her husband died, in 1932. Her name was Blanche and she had relatives all over Texas. After marriage he thought they might locate in the lower Rio Grande Valley where he and Mabel had often spent the cold winters. But in 1951 they moved to Searcy, Arkansas, and purchased a large area of land adjacent to the city on the southeast. In 1954 he v/rites, March 1st, "l shut down and closed up our business. Had a nice and good comfortable operation but just paid my crew and notified the public that nothing more doing, and sold a large part of my equipment and leased our plant site for a five-year term. Now have two plants operating a redi-mix concrete. I bought a twenty-two acre farm adjoining our property here, fifty-eight acres of which is within city limits, a few miles from the city, for industrial sites and half farmland good for residential sites." In 1956 he writes that he had sold off thirty-two acres at $1,000 to $3,000 per acre at his home in Searcy. He had thirty-four acres left and one-third of the ninety- four acres adjoining his property. He weighs 118 pounds and has given up smoking. In 1957 he writes he had retired and was working harder than ever; he had sold all the property he had left that he had developed, bought 100 head of cows and calves to fatten for sale in the fall. Plans to winter on the Mexican border towns. In 1959 Virgel wrote that he was well and getting along fine, stopped traveling and rambling so much, keeps busy improving his property, buying and selling. He keeps on hand twenty-five to eighty head of cows and calves, buys and sells every week at the stock sales auction. In 1964, he writes that he and his wife both visit doctors once a month. "They look us over and send us away with a big bunch of high-priced pills." He says he has stopped driving so much and they spend their winters in the Gulf States from Fort Myers to Del Rio, Texas. As to Virgel 's condition my first knowledge came when his attorney sent me a letter dated February 7, 1967 stating that Virgel was ill and in the Rogers Hospital, and had before he went to the hospital ordered them not to notify me as I would only be upset. But his wife thought that I ought to know and had the attorneys write me telling me of his condition, that he had been in the hospital two weeks and that in the last two days had grown worse. In answer to a telegram to his wife, she replied that as far as we know nothing can be done, we have nurses around the clock; some days he is better, some he is not. The next telegram was that he had passed away and funeral services would be held at 2 p.m., Saturday, March 11 at the First Methodist Church in Searcy. I immediately wired condolences to his wife. Later I received a press clipping of the funeral services and the names of the pallbearers, among whom was a senator, another prominent businessman and friends. That is the history of his life.

TUSLER

From what you've read there, I'm not sure at what point your brother made the decision to start passing for white.

JOHNSON

He made that decision when he was sixteen years old, right when he left Colorado Springs after he tried the mining business in Cripple Creek. That's when he decided to leave Colorado. He had stopped working for my father and gone out for himself mining in Cripple Creek. Then that didn't pay out and there wasn't anything for him in Colorado. He wasn't a college man, he wasn't educated. He got tired of horses, he had been trained with horses ever since five years old up until he was probably twenty-one, helping my father--he'd be a kid fifteen years old managing the whole thing. He had a business head on him-- never played much, he was always serious. Then they tried this mining, and that's when he decided [to pass]. You see, he never associated with colored people-- there was a few colored people who lived uptown in another section but we spent all of our life down in this little Ivywild, this little white millionaire section about like Beverly Hills, only it wasn't that big. We went to school there, played there, ate there and lived there, and that's all we knew. There were a few colored people uptown, a few churches and things, but we never associated with them. The only colored kid he might have met would be in public school, and he didn't go to high school--he didn't even finish seventh grade.

TUSLER

Do you think that the white community was more comfortable to him?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, to all of us. I lived with whites for twelve years--I didn't know anything about colored people. All my playmates were white. I was in the same position he was. The only thing was, they took me and shipped me off to school, and that was a mistake because they sent me to a Negro school and a school that wasn't for higher education. Those schools are like Tuskegee — all they want to do is train a Negro to come in, learn to read and write, and then go back south and teach other Negroes. Now the schools for Negroes like Howard University and the school at Wilberforce, Ohio, those are modern colleges, and there's where the Negro that wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or an educated man, if he didn't want to go to a white school, would go. But Tuskegee and Hampton, those were schools for Negroes of the South to come and learn to read and write and do a little bit of stuff, and then go back south and be teachers. If you want a higher education they will tell you not to come there. I should have never been sent there.

TUSLER

The time your brother was in Little Rock he was passing as white, then?

JOHNSON

Yes. Yes.

TUSLER

In fact, even before that.

JOHNSON

As soon as he left Colorado.

TUSLER

And all the rest of his life he lived that way?

JOHNSON

All the rest of his life; he cut loose entirely. The only connection he had was with his own relatives, and they kept that secret. He was very careful about that because his life was at stake, if some of those bankers or others that met him and hobnobbed around with [had known] . You see, my daughter is not light enough to pass for white, and her husband is darker; and so he could have been in trouble here if some of his close friends in Arkansas happened to see him [here]. He took that chance; of course he didn't do it but two or three times in his whole life. He saw there was nothing for him as a colored man, and being able to do that, [he did]. He wasn't raised with colored; we didn't know much about them, we didn't know their habits-- our habits were always white. I've been accused lots of times of trying to pass, but I never did. I was the only one. My other brother [Noble] hasn't done it but he has kept away from colored a good deal because he was involved in films all the time. They knew he was colored down there--it isn't that they don't know; he's colored, and they might like you all right but they aren't particular about some of your friends. You have to keep kind of to yourself when you're playing in that kind of a business even though you're known to be colored. You could be colored and have some real dark friends, and somebody that you wanted to associate with--whlle they might want you all right--might not particularly care about your friends, you see. So my brother kept away from the mass of Negroes. He knew Negroes because he worked with a lot of them down there on the sets, they all knew him, of course.

TUSLER

Did your brother Virgel ever have any regrets or any bad feelings about this, that you know of?

JOHNSON

Oh, no, the only regrets or feelings that he might have had is that it split up the family, that's all. He would come here and stay here in my house and go away. That could be the only regret, because he has been a success all his life. In Colorado we had more white friends than we did colored, and so when he got out there was no reason why he should call himself a colored man and try to go around and be with the colored when there was no opportunity for it and they couldn't help him any. He was just being natural; he wasn't considering himself as particularly passing, or anything. He just did what he wanted to do. But he knew when he got in the South that it would be dangerous. Around here or any place else it wouldn't have made any difference to him, but he knew that when he got down in the South he couldn't do that, even though he wanted to.

TUSLER

I wonder why he chose to go to Little Rock, which is a segregated area.

JOHNSON

Well, as I said, I didn't know much about him when he got to the Dakotas. He had been through the Dakotas, racing in Sioux City. I don't know why, he never explained why. But the next time I heard from him, he was in Little Rock. That was during the war proposition and I think he had the mind of construction, because he got down there and he was hired by the government, had big connections with the goverranent, and built Camp Pike, Arkansas, the big government camp for the Army. You see, he got in with the United States Army and the government in Washington and got permits to do all that. He built the whole thing. Then at that time the Arkansas River was overflowing quite a bit so he got in the job of building rock levees. One of the first things he did down there, he bought some rock quarries. He found out that that was a pretty good deal. Then he'd go and make his contracts to not only do the work but supply the rock, too.

TUSLER

Do you think the North would have been a safer place for him to be?

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, the North is the place, he never did explain why he went down there. There may have been some other reason--he might have got acquainted with some of the officials that had something to do with getting him in down there. He traveled around quite a bit and met a lot of people. Somebody might have told him that if he'd come down there he'd get him in. There was some white official that I never did know--he may have been an Army man--somebody that Virge went hunting with in the Rockies. I think he got pretty well acquainted with some influential white man that put him in touch with the government; I faintly remember a deputy of some kind, they went hunting together, and I kind of think he might have put him in touch with government officials because during the war he had a big contact with Washington and in the government. So he evidently got acquainted in some way and had some pull to get in there, because he just couldn't walk right out and get a job without any previous experience. He had never built anything big and for him to go get a contract to build Camp Pike, Arkansas as an unknown man isn't quite according to Hoyle. [laughter]

TUSLER

Did he ever express any feeling to you about the fact that he was playing a rather dangerous role in doing this?

JOHNSON

Yes.

TUSLER

He talked to you about this.

JOHNSON

Yes, he warned us; he warned us several times. He said, "Be careful. Never give." You see, I never put my address on my letters at all. [He] warned me they might suspect him, they may try to lay a trap for him, you know. There is always somebody that is trying to do something or is trying to get it. He told me that one time he had a big crew of men working, digging, and there were some colored fellows there, I think some colored fellow suspected it and made some kind of remark, and he hauled off and knocked him down and fired him. I think this guy kind of had a suspicion that he was a colored fellow but he made the bad crack of saying something about it. Virge says he knocked him flat and kicked him off the place. But he couldn't have hurt him, anyway, because he was too strong there. If that had happened at the start that might have caused him a lot of trouble, but he had been too identified--he had big dray teams, lots of horses and lots of Caterpillars, and things to do great big work, you know.

TUSLER

What do you think would have happened to him had it become known that he was passing for white in that area?

JOHNSON

It would have closed him out of business and they might have killed him, I don't know. He was pretty close to them--he was probably in some of the lodges, probably in the Elks and some of those private lodges, and he knew the bankers and had borrowed money. It's very dangerous. They might have killed him; he surmised they might because he wouldn't take any chances that way.

TUSLER

But by this time, of course, he had become identified not only to other people but to himself as a white person.

JOHNSON

Oh, yes; in fifteen or twenty years he probably could have outlived it. He wasn't a social man but being married, they had a certain amount of social goings on, you know, probably with the wives and men like bankers and lawyers, big men. The Negro isn't very safe in a deal like that.

TUSLER

Did he associate with any Negro people to your knowledge?

JOHNSON

No.

TUSLER

Other than in a work relationship?

JOHNSON

No. Nobody knew it, nobody in the world knew.

TUSLER

I wondered if he had Negroes for personal friends as well as whites.

JOHNSON

Oh, I don't think so--he might have. No, he wouldn't dare do that. He might have known fellows to say hello to them, how are you, or something like that. He worked a lot of colored guys, and he might know them and be jolly with them as long as they didn't get into the race question or something. You see, most of those laborers are Negroes in that part of the country; he was probably working ten, fifteen or 100 Negroes at times, you know. As long as they kept their mouths shut--even if they thought it, they'd have to keep their mouths shut. That's the only instance I know of that he mentioned, that he had [the] slightest type of trouble. And he didn't have any trouble with that guy because he knocked him flat and told him he could handle him, and then he kept his mouth shut. Well, he didn't prove nothing, he just had his suspicion, you know.

TUSLER

In other words, he had to adopt the attitude that other white men in that area had toward the Negro in order to survive.

JOHNSON

Well, he didn't have to be abusive to them, you know; all he had to do was work a man. You see, he was very stern, he bossed white men. Our father had white help--our hired help on the horses mostly'- v/ere white because we couldn't get colored fellows, they didn't know anything about horses. Virge would boss all them as a kid. Seventeen and eighteen years old, he was bossing five and six and seven white hired hands there. He never grew up with the Negro atmosphere. He never had it; he acted like a white man and he talked like a white man and he never had the attitude at all. And he didn't have the fear. Now, the colored who has been a colored man and is trying to pass for white has a certain amount of timidness. He isn't ever sure of himself. Virge hadn't been a Negro at all in his whole life; he never grew up as a Negro.

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: SEVEN, SIDE ONE (FEBRUARY 28, 1968)

TUSLER

Today you're going to describe for us the contents of your large collection on the Negro in the film industry, which is housed here in your private residence at 4320 West 30th Street, Los Angeles.[*The George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection is now in the UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections.] First of all I would like to ask you, how long ago did you start this collection?

JOHNSON

Well, about 1912 [when I was] in Omaha, Nebraska, my brother had started the colored film company out here. After playing on Central Avenue at ten cents a head, they wrote to me and wanted to know if I could get it shown in the East. I was working in the post office eight hours a day. The first thing I did after they sent me copies of the colored pictures they had made, I played them in the colored theaters in Omaha and they liked it. I knew of a man named Tony Langston who was dramatic editor of the largest Negro paper in the United States, the Defender in Chicago. I wrote to him about it. He said, "Well, you send me a copy of your film. There's a white firm that owns about four Negro theaters on State Street, and I will screen it to that man after the show. If he likes it we'll book it here." I gave him a contract to do that, sent him a picture, he booked it, and they went wild about it. I think it played a week or more in two or three theaters. Then Mr. Langston wrote back and said, "The picture was wonderful, the people are crazy about it, and I'm crazy about it. I'll be your manager for Chicago, for Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, if you wish. I'll book the pictures at all the Negro theaters in those districts as your manager." I said all right, and I made him manager. He said, "Now, you write to New York to Romeo Dougherty, holding the same position on the New York News , Negro weekly in New York." I did that, sent him a film, and they were crazy about it. He said, "I'll be your representative." So we made him a representative. I wrote to Washington, to Atlanta, to St. Louis, and in a month I had five branch offices. That meant that each one of those offices had to have a copy of the film. So that [meant we had to] make a bunch of films. Then you have to have a central office. Los Angeles was too far away. So I opened an office as general booking manager and all those men had to report to me daily by wire, where they were booking the film. I had to order the film by wire. Sometimes if a film was booked for a little house and another fellow got an order to book it for a week in Washington, I'd have to wire the other house to cancel the film and ship the film to cover the big house. It meant that I was having to manage three film productions, and that meant about three to four to five prints of each production. They were all playing and traveling at the same time and I had to manage all of that, know where the film was going, and had to protect them. We had a fire in one place and I had to cancel the film in another place and order that man to ship the film to another place. I had to keep them full of advertising matter, big billboards, photographs, big outdoor lithograph posters, and that meant that I was getting probably fifteen letters and ten telegrams a day. And working eight hours in the post office.

TUSLER

Was this the beginning of your collection?

JOHNSON

That's the beginning of my collection, yes.

TUSLER

You saved all of the telegrams and the correspondence.

JOHNSON

I have all that correspondence, telegrams, advertisements from newspapers. Two of them were representatives on a newspaper so they gave us a very good rate and put a lot of advertising in the paper; then when the picture was shown they wrote a very good article. I kept all those, filed all those, and I have been filing ever since--the reviews, anything about them, anything that was said.

TUSLER

All of these records that had to do with your work for Lincoln are part of your collection now.

JOHNSON

Yes.

TUSLER

And that was what started the collection. Now, when Lincoln closed its doors and there no longer was a Lincoln Motion Picture Company, you went right ahead with your collection.

JOHNSON

Oh, yes, yes; no, I didn't stop that. I've got copies here of all the Negro newspapers in the United States, pretty near, in the '20' s, papers that nobody else has, copies of Negro newspapers published all over the United States between the '20's and the '30's.

TUSLER

Did you clip the newspapers?

JOHNSON

No, I've got the whole paper.

TUSLER

What else did you start to save at that time, after you were through with Lincoln?

JOHNSON

Well, then of course I saved... now, getting, newspapers, we exchanged papers with other papers. I'd get copies of newspapers from all over the United States, colored papers. I'd clip out and file everything I could find in there about pictures. And then I read all the magazines, all the big trade magazines, white papers; and any picture in which a Negro appeared in any shape or form, I'd put it down. I'd buy every magazine I could find and every book I could find. I talked to a lot of the boys; I knew a lot of the extra actors around that worked out there. So I just kept that collection going all the time I was in the post office and even after I quit, up till today. I still do it.

TUSLER

You still collect all these. You subscribe to roughly how many magazines?

JOHNSON

I subscribe to the three big Negro magazines. Jet , Ebony and Sepia. Jet and Ebony are from Chicago and Sepia is Houston, Texas. I subscribe to ten national magazines and I clip and file from them every day.

TUSLER

And this all goes into your clipping collection.

JOHNSON

I go to second-hand stores and buy old magazines. I have them here so that if something was in a certain magazine, I go look it up.

TUSLER

Primarily everything that you've clipped relates to Negro film actors or Negro production companies.

JOHNSON

Something to do with the Negro, yes, something to do with the Negroes. I have the names of most all of the Negro actors and I have most all of their records. I go back through old books and things and compile their records I have more information on a majority of these Negro actors than they have on themselves. I not only get it that way-- I go the files of the Film Daily and clip it out there. In a lot of pictures the Negro plays in, he doesn't get any credit at all. Lots of times there will be fifteen Negroes in a picture and maybe only one will be named on the screen. But in talking and knowing so many, I get information of the other Negroes that are in the same picture that didn't get the screen credit, for instance. A lot have played in hundreds of pictures but they have had very little screen credit. But I've talked to a lot of these fellows and they don't have their own records themselves.

TUSLER

Do you have a book collection of standard source books on films here?

JOHNSON

Yes, I have a big collection. I have one of the best collections in the country of press sheets (that have no relation to Negroes), press sheets put out by films in the '20's. I have thirty or forty copies of the Film Daily, one as late as 1918. I take Films in Review magazine and clip out everything in there that tells about old pictures and who was in them--but they don't say if they are Negroes. I have a book here that I bought that tells about Birth of a Nation. There has been a big argument [about it]--there were three or four white men in it that played Negroes, but there was only one Negro in the cast, and a lot of people have said that even she didn't play in it. I have the proof in the magazine written by [Seymour] Stern, and it has the name in the cast.[*Stern, Seymour. The Birth of a Nation. Special issue of Film Culture, No. 30, 1965.] In that same book there is a little article that says that this man asked Griffith himself if there was any Negro in Intolerance, and he said he got no favorable answer from Griffith. But he says that Madame Sul Te Wan was in Intolerance also, and I know my brother Noble Johnson was in Intolerance . That is in no book; you can't find that in any book. I have the whole history of that Birth of a Nation.

TUSLER

That's the type of information that shows up in your clipping information.

JOHNSON

Yes, yes.

TUSLER

Do you know of any other collection similar to yours anywhere?

JOHNSON

No, I don't think there's one in the United States. In the later years, Ebony magazine probably has (I think they started in the late '30' s). Naturally they have published a lot of material about the Negroes and they have kept that with a lot of pictures and things they put in there. I clip everything out of Ebony that Ebony puts in there; but I have lots and lots more material that Ebony has in it, and Ebony I think has more material than anybody [else] since the time they've been in [publication]. But even then I don't think they have as complete [a file] as I have. I know nobody in the country has my brother's record, and I'm quite sure that I have information on hundreds of others that you can't find in any book in the library.

TUSLER

What about the Academy?

JOHNSON

They have very little. I have been in to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, searching through there. Several years ago I carried my list of things to the lady there (I don't know whether it's the same one now or not). She looked at it and said, "Well, you've got a lot of stuff we like but we just don't have the money." And that's been ten years ago. But I have been back there in the last year; I took my daughter up there one day and we looked through there and copied some stuff. We had a hard time finding anything about Negroes, and then it isn't cataloged in the proper shape to find it easily. I don't think there is any place in the United States that you can find this material easily. You might find it by looking through book after book, but then you wouldn't know because in so many cases like my brother's case, they don't say he ' s a Negro, though his name is in the cast.

TUSLER

So to the best of your knowledge what you've done is really a unique thing.

JOHNSON

Unique. I don't think there's any place in the United States that's got it. They want [the information] now; they've just now commenced to go after it, but they have neglected to get it all that time, and all these magazines and papers are lost, they are gone. Nine-tenths of these newspapers that I have copies of have been out of existence for years. The nearest book they have is the Negro in Films written by an Englishman [Peter Noble] who never came over here and got all his information by writing the studios. He's got the best book published, but it's far from correct and it doesn't cover everything. Yet it is a very good book. He has a lot of pictures in there; he spent a lot of money on it and he ' s a very good writer and well known in England. But I just know how incorrect he is by reading the material he wrote about my brother, which is very, very, very poor and incorrect.

TUSLER

Full of factual error?

JOHNSON

Yes. But lack of competition makes it the best book published. That's the idea.

TUSLER

What in your opinion is the most valuable aspect of your collection?

JOHNSON

My most valuable would be that I have a very big collection of press sheets, which I don't think you can find anywhere--I doubt if the studios themselves have them. I have probably 100 or more press sheets of the big actors and certain films they were in, all those old-time actors, silent picture actors. Then I have a very highly prized collection of [Jeannette] MacDonald and Nelson Eddy; it's in big demand. I have whole page illustrations of pretty near every picture they were in; pictures of her as a baby and all the way up; and I have a personal letter from her, not to me, but to somebody else, on her own stationery with her signature.

TUSLER

Why her and Nelson Eddy particularly?

JOHNSON

I happened to read someplace that information on her was lacking, so I commenced to get every bit I possibly could. And I've got a collection that very few have. It has nothing to do with the Negro.

TUSLER

In a general way, would you say that the clipping part of your collection was the most valuable part for research?

JOHNSON

Yes, yes, because I have it filed on cards where it's easily accessible. Information is no good if you can't get it the way you want it.

TUSLER

We have just had the tape recorder off while Mr. Johnson has been laying out some materials here. I wonder if you could describe them briefly. Photographs or stills from early Negro motion pictures? This pile over here is from the Micheaux Company, isn't it?

JOHNSON

Yes. I have folders with photographs of pictures of the Micheaux Film Company, the Negro film company in Chicago which made about thirty or forty pictures; he wrote about ten or fifteen books, very good. Other firms back in the '20 's that were making Negro pictures were the Reol Film Corporation, the Monumental Film Corporation, Micheaux [Book and] Film Corporation, Royal Garden Film Corporation, George Randol Film Corporation, Juliet Educational Film Corporation, Ebony Film Corporation, Eagle Films, Democracy Film Corporation, Birth of a Race [Photoplay] Corporation, Lincoln Motion Picture Company.

TUSLER

Do you have stills from a good many of their productions?

JOHNSON

Not too many, not too many stills. No, they are pretty hard to get.A partial list of the white and Negro corporations organized to produce Negro films:The Will Foster Motion Picture Company, Chicago, Illinois in 1910, the Foster Photoplay Company, Chicago, 1917. The Peter P. Jones Film Company, Chicago. The Colored and Indian Film Company in New York. In 1917, the Ker-mar Producing Company in Baltimore. 1917, the Birth of a Race Corporation, incorporated for $1,000,000. White owned and a national sensation; produced and started, not finished; involved prominent white and colored men of note. 1918, Juliet Film Company, New York, capitalization $20,000. Ebony Film Corporation, white, Chicago, capital increase from $500,000 to $2,500,000, produced sixteen Negro comedies released through General Film. 1918, McAfee Film Company in Louisville, Negro, produced one film. In 1918, United Film Company, white, produced Uncle Tom' s Cabin in five reels. 1918, colored American war film, one reel, released by C.L. Chester Company on public information for release through Mutual Film Company. 1918, Colored and Indian Film Company, produced and released 1,000 feet, one-reel Negro comedy. 1918, Unique Film Company, Chicago, produced and released a three-reel Negro film. 1919, Democracy Film Company, Los Angeles, capital stock $50,000, produced several Negro films. 1919, Frederick Douglass Film Company, Jersey City, New York, produced and released a five-reel Negro film. 1918, Charles H. Turpin, Negro owner of a Negro theater, St. Louis, produced one film. 1919, M. Devinfast White established a studio in Jacksonville, Florida; produced several two-reel comedies. 1919, several American Negroes in France made a film of Negro troops in France and distributed it in the United States. Douglas Amusement Company, Philadelphia, capitalized in 1919, $100,000, backed by prominent Negro bankers, sold stock and built one of the finest Negro theaters in the country in Philadelphia. The Delsarte Film Company of New York, capital $100,000, a stock-selling proposition, white-owned with Clarence E. Muse, Negro, as director general. Pyramid Pictures, 1920, Chicago, Negro, made and released two newsreels. One Day in the Magic City of Birmingham, and the other, People of Atlanta . 1920, the Trinity Film Corporation, Pittsburgh, capitalization $1,000,000, white, a stock-selling scheme, proposed production of The Daughter of Pharoah , never made. Bookertee Film Company, Los Angeles, Negro. Negro real estate dealer Sidney P. Dones produced and distributed a two-reel Western for $10,000. The Micheaux Film Company in 1920, Chicago, one of the best Negro-owned film companies. His first film was from a book he wrote, The Homesteader. George P. Johnson knew him personally, entertained him in his home, and was instrumental in interesting him in films. When Johnson first met him, Micheaux was walking through Iowa and South Dakota selling his book The Homesteader to white farmers. He no doubt produced more all Negro films than any other individual- over thirty. In 1920, the next most prominent producer of Negro films was a white theater man in New York, Robert Levy. In 1928 he, in association with E.C. Brown, a Negro banker of Philadelphia, established the Quality Amusement Company of Philadelphia. Levy at once came to Chicago to meet George Johnson who came from Omaha, Nebraska for a conference, A few years later, at the request of Emmett Scott, Assistant Secretary of War, Johnson went personally to New York and brought Mr. Levy back for a conference with Scott. Mr. Levy had previously formed the Reol Film Company of New York using his highly trained Negro theatrical actors, and produced a number of the best Negro films ever made. One of Levy's first Negro films was Eyes of Youth in 1920, starring the famous stage actress Abbie Mitchell. In 1921, one of the biggest white organizations organized in that area--merely a stock-selling proposition which Constellation Film Corporation of New York City capitalized as a Delaware corporation offering for sale $200,000 Class A stock. Headed by whites using prominent Negroes as officers for bait. The vice-president was Charles W. Anderson, former Collector of Internal Revenue, New York City. Stock at $10 per share, having issued an elaborate four page prospectus and a page ad in the leading Negro magazine The Crisis. No films ever made. 1921, the Harris Dickson Film Corporation of New York produced several two-reel Negro comedy films of the Dickson Saturday Evening Post stories and released them through Pathe. In 1921 a white firm, North State Film Company of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, produced and released some very good films with an all-Negro cast, A Giant of His Race in seven reels and The Green-Eyed Monster in eight reels. In 1921, another southern firm, the Norman Film Company of Jacksonville, Florida, went on location at the Negro town of Boley, Oklahoma and produced a five-reel, all-Negro Western thriller using several of the experienced and highly trained actors from the Lafayette Stock Company, Anita Bush and Lawrence Chinault, in addition to the world-famous Negro cowboy Bill Pickett and world champion Wild West member of the Texas 101 Ranch. 1921, another white-owned organization, the Andlauer Productions of Kansas City, Missouri, produced an all-Negro film in seven reels. As the World Rolls On , in which they paid Jack [John Arthur] Johnson $7,500 for eighteen and a half hours' work. The film also included scenes of the great Negro ball player Rube Foster in the Chicago American Giants. 1926, the firm of colored American film players [Colored Players Film Corporation] in Philadelphia, capitalized at $250,000, composed of white and Negro men of note, produced several very fine films with a Negro cast, one of which was Ten Nights in a Barroom . The great Charles Gilpin appeared. In 1928, the Dunbar Film Corporation in New York, an interracial corporation, produced a seven-reel film, The Midnight Ace , produced at the Warner Brothers Studios in Brooklyn, New York, at a cost of $18,000, $10,000 of which was put in by white capital of the fifteen people in the cast, five of whom were white.The above record of what is in my files is a sample of many pieces, deleted just to give you an idea of vihat I have that cannot be found anywhere in any history. The Negro's activity in films would be worthless without it.

TUSLER

This is a list that you put together yourself on the basis of what's in your files, and it refers back to these card files where further information can be found about these companies in the form of clippings.

JOHNSON

Yes.

TUSLER

These files, which we're sitting in front of now-- I wonder if you'd take them drawer by drawer and explain what they are.

JOHNSON

In my collection of over fifty years I have [collected these] steel files--this one here of Negro movie actors has about five or six hundred cards in three files. They contain envelopes of movie actors, and clippings and information on their records. Another bunch of files has film productions, the names of Negro film productions or white productions which used Negro actors. I have three of those files; the first one has 568 names in it. The envelopes are full of clippings, photographs, and information about them.

TUSLER

This is filed by the name of the production.

JOHNSON

Yes, these are filed by the name of the film production--each one has the name of the production, the year, the date, who made it and all the information necessary. Another file (these are all in four-by-six envelopes) contains nothing but names, dates and information on Negro films made from 1910 to 1950.

TUSLER

They are filed by the name of the production.

JOHNSON

They are filed by the name of each production. These are not all Negro productions--they are productions made by Negro and white people, but they are not always owned by Negroes. For example, we have Children of Fate , eight reels, Negro production, made in 1928. And we have The Call of His People , a Reol production, New York City, in 1921, six reels. Our Colored Soldier Boys in Action Over There , made during the war.

TUSLER

Some of these I see are cards on which you have typed information about the production.

JOHNSON

A few of them have cards but I didn't have complete information on them. Some of the others have clippings from newspapers and things containing them.

TUSLER

Are those clippings reviews of the productions?

JOHNSON

Reviews, and any information about them. It varies, different things. Another [file] is for film corporations. 1916 to 1940. Like the Birth of a Race Corporation in 1917, capitalized at $1,000,000. The Democracy Photoplay Corporation in 1919 in Chicago, capitalized at $1,000,000, white owned, with Negro films. The De Light Film Company, 1919, Chicago, Illinois; they made several films.

TUSLER

And these are filed alphabetically by the name of the corporation.

JOHNSON

By the name of the corporation, the year, the date of the capitalization, officers, information about them that can't be found anywhere else.

TUSLER

Could I interrupt just a minute, Mr. Johnson--we ' re going to have to turn the tape over and continue it from there.

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: SEVEN, SIDE TWO (FEBRUARY 28, 1968)

TUSLER

Are the clippings in the collection labeled sometimes so that it can be determined where they came from?

JOHNSON

Yes, they are all pretty well labeled. I also have big steel files that hold big manila envelopes that have typewritten information in them. Like this (I have one here), "Black and white firms organized to produce Negro films, 1910 to 1940." Here is a list of Negro weekly newspapers, 1910 to date, which I have copies of. A partial list of ninety or more Negro or white films, some only stock-selling ventures, some produced pictures. I have in some cases personal letters and copies of their advertisements. I have a typewritten copy, several sheets of material that I have there, on press sheets way back. For example, The Blue Book of the Screen , 1923. These are books. Camera Secrets of Hollywood, 1931. Mary Pickford, The Demi-Widow;, 1935. Douglas Fairbanks, The Four Musketeers, first edition. Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, a biography of Fox, 1933. W.C. Fields, His Follies and Fortunes, 1949. Good Night Sweet Prince, John Barrymore. The Gay Illiterate, by Louella Parsons. Hollywood Without Makeup, by Pete Martin. The Hays Office, by Raymond Motley. How To Appreciate Motion Pictures , by Edgar Dale. The Great Goldwyn by Alva Johnson. Frances Marion, How To Write and Sell Film Stories. Hollywood Looks at Its Audience by Leo C. Handel.

TUSLER

A good many of these books are now out of print?

JOHNSON

Yes, quite a number of them are out of print.

TUSLER

Do you have a complete list there of all the press sheets that you own?

JOHNSON

Yes, here they are. For example, The Lure of the Circus , Universal, Eddie Polo.

TUSLER

And how have you preserved these press sheets?

JOHNSON

They are all in good condition. They are in manila envelopes in steel files.

TUSLER

And filed alphabetically by the name of the picture?

JOHNSON

No, they are by numbers. No. 374 is The False Faces, Henry Walthall. No. 375, The Man Who Turned White , H.B. Warner. A Crooked Romance, Gladys Hulette. Mrs . Slacker , Creighton Hale. The Exquisite Thief , Priscilla Dean, Universal. Burnt Wings, Frank Mayo, Universal. Lasca , Frank Mayo and Edith Roberts, Universal.

TUSLER

Did these have to do with Negro films?

JOHNSON

No, these had nothing to do with Negro films. The Little Diplomat, Baby Marie Osborne. These were old-time actors, a long time ago. Dolly's Vacation, Baby Marie Osborne. Please Get Married , Viola Dana. The Willow Tree , Viola Dana, Metro. The Lamb and the Lion , Billie Rhodes. These are old silent pictures.

TUSLER

How did you get them?

JOHNSON

Oh, I don't know how I did get them. I suppose I bought some of them --I don't know, they didn't all come to us, but they take in the old-time [films. No. 452,] Fighting for Love , Ruth Stonehouse and Jack Mulhall. Marked Men, Harry Carey, Universal. Folder, 4 x 18 in color, photos of Hedda Nova, star of The Woman in the Web, by Vitagraph, an episode serial. William Duncan, star of The Fighting Trail , and Vengeance and a Woman . Photos of Corinne Griffith, Alice Joyce, Earle Williams, Grace Darmand, Gladys Leslie, Webster Campbell, Harry Morey, Florence Deshon, Nell Shipman. A program of a special benefit performance in aid of the Mayor of Westminster' s Food Relief Fund in the London Pavillion, Picadilly Circus, London, Sunday, January 29, 1927. Directors of the European Motion Picture Company and Uncle Tom's Cabin , devoted the entire proceeds of this performance without deduction to the Mayor of Westminster Food Relief. Noble Sissle, Florence Mills. Memorial appeal by James Lowe, the Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom' s Cabin . Twenty-one numbers on program including those by Josephine Baker, Noble Sissle, Four Harmony Kings and George Garner.

TUSLER

This is a complete listing of all the press sheets in your possession.

JOHNSON

Yes, this is the complete list but I haven't read it all.

TUSLER

What are some of the other materials that you have in your collection that these other folders are keys to?

JOHNSON

I have ten first edition and limited editions of film books. Douglas Fairbanks: Hollywood , The Movie Colony; Movie Lot to Beachhead ; The Plcturegoers Who' s Who ; Sound Pictures , Tallulah Bankhead ; Pauline Frederick ; Hollywood Without Makeup ; Vagabond Dreams Come True, copy number 26 of a limited edition of 299 signed copies with Rudy Vallee's signature, "To the greatest leader of them all, Paul Whiteman, " signed "in admiration, Rudy Vallee." Here are names of Negro films produced by and before 1930, a list of about sixty-one film productions that have detailed mention elsewhere. Additional information on these are in my steel files in the envelopes. Here's a typewritten list of white and Negro firms organized from 1910 to 1949 to produce and distribute Negro films, some only stock. This is in my steel files.

TUSLER

So these lists are really keys to what are in the files.

JOHNSON

A list of Negro prizefighters who appear in prizefight films. Date on Negro film actors. That list runs into several thousand. I have a very rare booklet of limited copies entitled 1866 to 1921, History of the Tenth Cavalry , compiled and edited by Major E.L.N. Glass, Tenth Cavalry, copyrighted 1922. It was given to me personally in October, 1929, when I spent two days at Fort Huachuca, Arizona with Harry Gant, white cameraman of the Universal Film Company and also cameraman for the Lincoln Company. We produced a one-reel film of the cavalry, the fort, soldiers and officers, and exhibited it all over the United States. I also have other articles on the Tenth Cavalry. An article regarding the use of Negro troops of the famous Tenth Cavalry in the Spanish-American War drama, The Rough Riders . Because of the protest of the Western Protective Association, an organization formed hy 150 motion picture actors and actresses, the War Department issued an order barring the use of government troops for motion picture companies where the use of such men kept civilians from employment. Another newspaper article by Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times book editor, a review of the book, The Buffalo Soldiers by W. [William H. ] Leckie, illustrated, the University of Oklahoma. A four-page illustrated article on the group of Negroes who have been training in this locality for a number of years with the intention of entering the Rose Parade, also probably to get into pictures. An article by Robert G. McDaniel about Fort Huachuca, about 100 years of the post, from being a frontier cavalry post whose troopers fought the Apaches, to being headquarters of the Amiy Strategic Command as it is now. It tells about World War I, when General John "Blackjack" Pershing and men from Fort Huachuca went with him in this unnecessary chase of the Mexican bandit-revolutionary Francisco Pancho Villa in 1916. Original letters from newspapers--letters from the Chicago Bee , Gary Indiana; New York and different places; Negro papers and their letterheads. Here's a list of theaters, 1919 and 1921, a complete list of Negro theaters that are operating in the United States in those years.

TUSLER

Did you put that list together?

JOHNSON

Yes, I compiled it because I had to write to all of them. Here are some theater programs. The Majestic Theater, Los Angeles, quite a ways back. Here's a Lincoln Theater program, a Negro theater on Central Avenue. The program of the Douglass Theater in New York City, a Negro theater. Here ' s a program of the showing of Uncle Tom ' s Cabin, Pantages Theater, a special program put out at that time by Universal. A page ad of a Negro film by the Democracy Film Company; they showed it to Ray's Garden Theater on Main Street between Eighth and Ninth (it must have been back in the '20' s; I have never heard of that theater). Lithograph posters and stills.

TUSLER

Is this a complete listing of your stills?

JOHNSON

No, this is quite a number of them.

TUSLER

You have quite a few stills from the Lincoln Motion Picture, don't you?

JOHNSON

Yes, I have a complete set that we put out.

TUSLER

And then you have a box there that has negatives.

JOHNSON

That's the negatives of the stills for By Right of Birth, the last picture.

TUSLER

Those are the only negatives that you possess.

JOHNSON

Yes. A list of Negro writers of musical scores in film productions.

TUSLER

Does this list refer back to more clippings?

JOHNSON

No, this is just information that they wrote some of this--colored writers that scored musical scores in film productions. It isn't an extremely long list. Here is a page from Billboard , a big theatrical paper, August 6, 1921, which gives a complete list of all the Negro theaters in the United States with their managers, addresses, city and state, the population and the name of the theater.

TUSLER

Did you use this list in your work?

JOHNSON

Yes, yes. I have all of Life magazines in World War II. And a great list of three daily newspapers in World War II. Here are rotogravure sections of the Los Angeles Times from July '22 up to '45 — about twenty of them.

TUSLER

Not for every week.

JOHNSON

No, just certain dates. They put out a rotogravure section, and I just happened to save [these issues]. I have copies of telegrams sent to me by different people back in those days.

TUSLER

When you were booking your films?

JOHNSON

Yes, back in the '20' s. Like I told you I had a booking office in Omaha that I was running. Here is a telegram from my representative in New Orleans and in Georgia, D.I. Thomas, from Atlanta on March 15, '37. "Rush by special parcel post ten ones and ten threes to me in care of Champion Theater, Birmingham " That means one sheets. "Ten three sheets"--that ' s the three sheet there, that big advertisement.

TUSLER

The very large sized advertisement.

JOHNSON

The large sized three sheets. And there's a one sheet, that's just a third of that. That's the window card, that one there. [Mr. Johnson is pointing to these materials] Imagine me working in the post office, and getting these [telegrams] from six or seven branch offices, information every day that had to be shipped out to them to get there in time for the picture. Here's one from Brooks, a traveling man. "My print ruined. . .using Thomas' print. Absolutely must have another one immediately if possible...." Then I'd have to get on the telegraph and cancel the little house and send it to the big house to protect him. That's what I was getting every day.

TUSLER

Who printed your posters?

JOHNSON

Otis Lithograph Company in Cleveland, Ohio.

TUSLER

Who was in charge of the design work for it? Did they do all that?

JOHNSON

No, they don't do any of that; you have to send them a photograph or an idea of what you want put on there. Now, that's a scene from one of the pictures--they'd send just an ordinary photograph and they made that up there. Otis [did] most of the work in the country in those days. I don't know whether they are operating now.

TUSLER

Did you have to handle that?

JOHNSON

I did it all by myself. I went over there. Of course later you can get copies, but the first time we put an order in, we put an order in for probably (they come in two or three sizes) a thousand, I was going east anyway, and I stopped there, gave them the check for it, and they showed me all through the plant. They shipped them where we asked them to be shipped. A lot of them might have been shipped out here [Los Angeles] and the rest of them were shipped to Omaha where I was then. Here's a list of newspapers. Here is the Tuskegee Messenger , April 9, 1927. I have copies from papers here from all over the country, '21, '25, '27--the New York News, Amsterdam News , Philadelphia Tribune , Pittsburgh Courier- -those are all big Negro newspapers that we advertised in and had to keep track of. I have copies of these. Negro books and Negro magazines.

TUSLER

So that completes the file that you have there.

JOHNSON

Yes, as much as [possible]--it' s pretty hard to tell everything you have got.

TUSLER

I think you have done a good job of giving an idea of what's there. Have you ever used the collection to do any writing?

JOHNSON

No, I haven't done anything with it except for when I was running the news bureau. I found that these newspapers generally printed everything I gave them about in the films. So when I got out of the [Lincoln Company] and I still worked at the post office and I wanted something to do, I started a news bureau. I put out three or four legal-sized sheets of news and sent them to these different colored newspapers all over the country. For a while I had to send them without getting any pay, just to show them how good it was; well, they all got to liking it and they published it, front page stuff, and then I commenced charging for it. I worked it up so big that I couldn't handle it-- I couldn't find any efficient help and I was working at the post office too, so I had to give it up. But that's where I accumulated all these papers. They all sent me copies of papers from all over the United States.

TUSLER

That added to your collection.

JOHNSON

And they were publishing my stuff. They gave me great credit for what they called "manufacturing" news. I had one editor. Nick Charles from the Plain Dealer , Topeka, Kansas, come here and walk in the office and say, "I came all the way here to see who is putting out all this news, and I find you here with no organization. How in the world can you do it? Where do you get it from?" Well, the trouble with a lot of people is that they don't know news when they see it. I would read (I take a lot of magazines and a lot of papers) and then I had quite a collection, and I'd get a lead on something, go to my collection and build up on it, and write a big story.

TUSLER

That was the Pacific Coast News Bureau.

JOHNSON

Yes. Well, that's the way that went--I started it as a kind of a hobby but they took everything I wrote and headlined it clear across the top of their papers and kept wanting more. Well, I couldn't find efficient help with the ability — the ability is to know what news is.

TUSLER

I certainly want to thank you for taking your valuable time to put all this together to describe for us.

JOHNSON

Oh, it isn't much out of the way.

TUSLER

We appreciate it very much.

JOHNSON

You see, a few years ago this wouldn't be worth ten cents. But the nation's awakened to the fact that the Negro is going to have to play an important part in the nation, and now they've commenced to pay more attention, put out more money for more education and more schools and more everything. And they find that they have neglected to accumulate anything like this in the last twenty-five or thirty years. They haven't got it. Nobody's got it. They never paid attention to it. I've talked to some of the [Negro actors] around here. They have no record of what they were in, they don't know any more about it than the man in the moon. And to me that is history. That's going to be quite valuable because people want to know; they can go to the library and get these books and find out, but then they have to do an immense amount of searching to find it.

TUSLER

You have provided some shortcuts.

JOHNSON

Yes; I've found that I don't have them all, but then I have a whole lot of them.

TUSLER

Has anybody ever used your collection?

JOHNSON

No, I have never told about it, nobody knows about it.

TUSLER

Nobody has any knowledge of its existence.

JOHNSON

No. You could go to the [actors themselves] --they don't know. As the kids grow up and they commence to get in school, they all want to know that stuff. And they keep hunting but they can't find it, nobody's got it.

TUSLER

So that's what motivated you to go on saving it.

JOHNSON

Yes. I would go to look up something and I couldn't find out anything about it. These books, these libraries don't tell you anything. The biggest amount of material here is being held for that big library near the Bowl--they condemned a piece of property there.

TUSLER

For the Hollywood Museum?

JOHNSON

Yes, and then they did nothing about it. Mary Pickford and a lot of these big guys leave their whole movie collections to these museums. I think they have in their files probably more stuff than anybody. But the Academy of Arts and Sciences has got very little.

TUSLER

I certainly thank you again for taking the time to do all this. We appreciate very much having your comments on the collection.

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: THREE, SIDE TWO (SEPTEMBER 15, 1967) Appendix

JOHNSON

Paul Robeson.[*The following section on Paul Robeson was written by Mr. Johnson from material in his collection and read onto the tape recorder.] Paul Robeson, Negro athlete, singer and actor was born April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of Reverend William [Drew] D. Robeson. His mother died when Paul was six years old. His father was born in 1945 and died in 1918. He had been a slave and, when freedom came, became a preacher. Paul learned the spirituals at his father's services.In 1915 he entered Rutgers University on a scholarship; he was a member of the football team and the third Negro to have attended Rutgers. At Rutgers he won Phi Beta Kappa honors, was a four-letter man athlete, and was named to the 1918 All-American football team by Walter Camp. In 1919 he graduated from Rutgers, moved to Harlem to live and entered Columbia Law School. In 1925 he obtained a degree in law, took a position with a law firm, and then turned to the stage.In 1924, Robeson joined the Provincetown Players, a theatrical group to which Eugene O'Neill, the noted playwright, belonged. As a Provincetown member, Robeson was invited to play the leading role in O'Neill's All God ' s Chillun and in Emperor Jones. Thereby at the age of twenty-six Robeson began his remarkable career as an actor, a decision that brought him everlasting fame. His interpretation of Emperor Jones created him nothing short of a hero and moved the critical Alexander Woolcott to write, "Robeson adds to his extraordinary physique a sure rich understanding and a voice that is unmatched in the American theater. This dusky giant unleashed provides the kind of an evening you remember all your life."In 1925, on April 18, Robeson gave his first concert as a singer, and in the same year went to Europe where he won immediate fame in the duplication of his New York stage success, Emperor Jones . Next Robeson appeared in The Hairy Ape and in the fall, Black Boy , a New York production sponsored by Horace Liveright, the American publisher, in which he played the part of a prizefighter. Black Boyforced on Robeson's mind new ideas of the difficulties of the colored problem. It is the story of a Negro who, beaten by white people in white civilization all his life, becomes champion of the world. His physique fitted Robeson admirably for the pugilistic part. He was the only colored player on the All-American football team for two successful years. In 1926 a young Italian artist, Antonio Salemme, working in his studio at Number 46 Washington Square South, top floor, New York City, had Robeson pose for him for four months while he carved a plastic marble statue of Robeson which when cast in bronze was valued at $20,000. It was made to Robeson's exact size, six feet, two inches.In 1921, Paul married Miss Eslanda Cardoza Goode, an author and anthropologist. She was continuously at his side during the early years as wife, confidant and companion, and later as manager and press representative. She was a correspondent attached to the United Nations. As a writer, her Paul Robeson , Negro , was published in 1930; fifteen years later her second book African Journey was published. They had one son, Paul Robeson, Junior, born in Brooklyn in 1927.In 1949 Paul, Junior married Marilyn Paula Greenberg, white, and they have two children, Susan, fourteen, and David, twenty-one. [That is in 1967.] The Robeson's interracial marriage raised quite a storm of controversy. In 1927 Elizabeth S. Sergeant wrote a life sketch of Paul Robeson in her book Fire Under the Andes portraits of eminent Americans, including Amy Lowell, Eugene O'Neill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H.L. Mencken, William Allen White, and Willa Cather. In 1925, on April 18, he gave his first concert as a singer and in the same year the Robesons went to Europe where Paul won immediate fame in the duplication of his New York success Emperor Jones . In 1926 the Robesons covered America in concert tours. In 1934 Robeson made his first trip to Russia as an artist. In 1937 Robeson took his son to Russia to study. While Robeson won international fame as a singer, music critics in Europe as well as in New York, Chicago and Boston have all hailed him as the perfect exponent of the spiritual. Strange as it may seem, Paul Robeson is more famed for his interpretations of the Negro spirituals than anyone, yet Roland Hayes, technically speaking, was a more finished artist.Back in 1928 and 1929 Robeson had quite a bit of trouble with Actors Equity Association and the Chorus Equity Association over a contract Paul had signed with a Miss Carolyn Dudley Regan to appear in the colored review that she was promoting and opening up in London in the production of Showboat . Robeson was the first senior Negro member of Equity; Charles Gilpin was the first colored junior member. The London courts upheld Robeson's contract to continue his role in the Drury Lane production of Showboat.In 1948, Walter White, secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a published article "The Strange Case of Paul Robeson" writes, "Why did Paul Robeson voluntarily give up an annual income estimated to average $200,000 from concerts, records and other sources to obey Russia's every command as faithfully as William Z. Foster?" In an endeavor to answer this question Dr. White writes, "As one who has known Robeson for nearly thirty years I feel the explanation for the role of a would-be political careerist is not simple but yet easy to see in the personality of the man. Basic to an understanding of Robeson's reasons for his leftist turn is a deep resentment he has always felt against slights and deprivations because of color and his attempted escape into a dream world which he imagined existed in Russia. Together with his ideological rejection of an economic and political system which does little to eradicate mistreatment of minorities, Robeson was a victim of an evangelic acceptance of a new system of society. Embittered by the contradictions of American democracy, he looked hungrily for an escape from the practices which angered him and accepted the Soviet way uncritically because his fervor forbade him from seeing its contradictions. The sum total today seems to be a bewildered man who is more to be pitied than damned."In 1949 he spoke in Moscow at the anniversary of poet Alexander Pushkin's birth and declared, "I am here again in this country I love more than any other." In 1951 Robeson was denied the right to travel abroad by the United States State Department, allegedly for having told a European audience that the American Negro would not fight Russia. Later the State Department said Robeson refused to give satisfactory answers to the question of membership in the Communist Party. The ban was lifted in June 16, 1958 when the Supreme Court ruled that passports could not be withheld because of a citizen's belief or associations.1959 was Robeson's first visit to England in nine years. He was met at the London airport by a large crowd. Robeson stated that he would remain in England until October and then tour Europe, including East Germany and the Soviet Union, in a series of stage, television and radio engagements. During his absence he said that he and his wife Eslanda would keep their brownstone home in the Washington Heights district of New York City with all their books and furnishings, knowing that they would return. In his first public appearance since coming to England he led the audience of 8,000 in singing "John Brown's Body" at the opening of the music festival in Wales. He accepted an invitation to appear in the production of William Shakespeare's Pericles at the Stratford-on-Avon in England. He also disclosed that his book Here I Stand would soon be published in England with an American edition to follow later.January 31, 1959, both Paul and his wife, having cancelled a trip to India, were confined in the Kremlin Hospital, Moscow, Robeson suffering from bronchitis and a generally rundown condition. Robeson's condition prevented him from returning to the States for the funeral services of his brother, the Reverend Benjamin C. Robeson, seventy, pastor of the Mother Africa Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Harlem, New York.In August 1963, having been in a London nursing home which specializes in nervous disorders for over a year, Paul Robeson, his wife Eslanda and an American woman friend flew to East Berlin "by Polish airliner and left the airport in a Russian-made automobile for an unknown destination.In December 1963, controversial singer Paul Robeson ended his self-imposed five-year exile and left Berlin by air for the United States. The sixty-five -year- old Robeson and his wife Eslanda were met at the airport by their son Paul, Junior, his wife and their two children. The six-foot- three former All-American football player who received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952 appeared in good spirits and seemed delighted to see his son and other members of the family. Robeson's only statement came in response to a query as to whether he intended to join the civil rights movement in this country. "Yes," he said, "I have been a member of it all my life." Robeson stated that his government forced exile and that caused his income to dwindle from $104,000 in 1947 to $2,000 a year since 1950, but for the $30,000 he received for the 1949 concert tour in England.In 1965 Robeson is sixty-six years old. Appearing hearty and vigorous he was a guest of honor at a meeting and a program sponsored by the quarterly magazine Freedomways at the Hotel Americana in New York City, at which he received tribute and felicitations from artists, writers and entertainers at A Salute to Paul Robeson meeting, m.c.'d by actor Ossie Davis and his actress-wife Ruby Dee, and participated in by authors James Baldwin, John O. Killens and others. Nearly 2,000 persons crowded in one of the of the hotel's largest ballrooms to honor a man who to most of them is an idol.In May, 1965, Robeson paid Los Angeles a visit, his first here since returning to the United States from a five- year sojourn in England. Also in 1965 Robeson, sixty-seven, had been found in a semi-conscious condition in a clump of weeds in Highbridge Park near his home in New York City, Washington Heights section. Robeson was found to have facial lacerations and injuries to his left ankle and right hip. There was no evidence of foul play and his wallet containing $15 was found in his pocket; his injuries did not indicate wounds of violence. His wife stated that Robeson had been ill and he suffered from loss of balance and dizzy spells.Robeson's author-anthropologist wife of forty-four years, Eslanda Cardoza Goode, died at the age of sixty-eight of cancer at Beth Israel Hospital, New York in 1965. She was a celebrity in her own right, while they lived in Europe from the late 1920's to 1939 and later in the 1950's on her native soil as a correspondent attached to the United Nations. While her husband toured and made concert appearances in England and elsewhere on the continent, she wrote, publishing her first book Paul Robeson , Negro , in 1930. Fifteen years later after advanced study at London University, the London School of Economics and America's Hartford Seminary Foundation she completed her second book, African Journey , in which she predicted Africans would win their freedom. In 1963, Eslanda Robeson was decorated with an East German medal, the Clara Zetkin Medal awarded for her struggle for peace, according to the East Germany News Agency. She had one son Paul, Junior, born in Brooklyn in 1927, and two grandchildren, David and Susan.In 1941 when Robeson's annual income was $104,000 they lived in the twelve-room mansion, The Beeches, in Enfield, Connecticut, but later when government-enforced exile cut his earning power to as low as $2,000 or so a year, it was sold in 1953 for $33,000 and the Robesons moved into a four-story flat in New York City.Mrs. Robeson did not seek recognition as an actress. She did appear in three of Robeson's films, in 1930 the silent film Borderland , in 1936 in Big Fella , and in 1938 in Jericho , produced in African and named Dark Sands when shown in America. One day in Emperor Jones when he was supposed to whistle with fright, he started to sing instead just a few bars of melody. "Why don't you sing something?" said a friend. "l can't sing," replied Robeson. "Sing something," the company pressed. "Much to my surprise they all started crying when I sang. They all seemed to think I had a voice. That's how it started. I took my voice on tour. Two years later I took a few lessons in technique to learn how to save my voice. "Also in 1928 some differences had arisen between Paul and Actors Equity Association. It seems that in January when his wlfe was very ill and his child was in the hospital, he signed a contract with Miss Carolyn Dudley Regan of New York, white woman, who had taken the first colored review to Paris with Josephine Baker to appear in the colored review. He was to get $500 per week plus 5 percent of the gross from $10,000 to $20,000, and ten percent thereafter. Miss Regan bound the agreement by paying Robeson $500. Mrs. Robeson came over to London in an effort to straighten out the contract or buy it. She stated that Robeson had signed to appear in a dramatic, a blues, and a spiritual sketch but that in March, Robeson, then in Porgy , had to withdraw because his voice was not equal to the strain. Later, when considering his contract, he figured that the singing of the blues would affect his voice and for that reason he asked to be released. In 1928 Robeson, the first Negro singer to be a member of Actors Equity Association of New York, was temporarily suspended while in London playing in Showboat , over the contract. Robeson was at that time in England, and out of the jurisdiction of Equity. The matter was settled satisfactorily at a later date.In 1929 Paul's name appeared in press dispatches in the Negro press as one of the officers of the new Negro film corporation being formed as follows: "Tono-Film Corporation Formed By Race Man. New York, February 21, 1929. The Tono- Film Corporation, whose officers and department heads are to be all colored, is being formed in this city and has the backing of one of the largest film corporations in the country. Included in the list of officers and directors will be found Paul Robeson, Noble Sissle, Maceo Pinkard, Earl Dancer, J.C. Johnson, Flourney Miller and Will Vodery. Maurice Dancer of Dancers News Bureau, 1587 Broadway, will be in charge of publicity.In 1933 the United Artists Film Corporation produced Emperor Jones , produced by Dudley Murphy, starring Paul Robeson in his first talking film, with a mixed cast. In 1935, returning to Europe, Robeson starred in the British film of Edgar Wallace's Sanders of the River , made by Zoltan Korda. Nina Mae McKinney, who was brought from Hollywood to play the leading role in King Vidor's Hallelujah , came to England to play opposite Paul in Sanders of the River . In 1936 The Song of Freedom was made in England directed by J. Elder Wills, with Robeson in the role of the king of an African tribe. In 1936 Paul returned to America to play the role of Jim in the film version of Edna Ferber's Showboat , produced by Universal Film Company, in which he thrilled the audience with the singing of the immortal "Old Man River." In 1937 Robeson returned to Europe and North Africa, and in England he appeared in King Solomon's Mines directed by Robert Stevenson with a large cast including Cedric Hardwicke. In 1937, in the Hammer-British Lion production at the Beaconsfield studios in London, Robeson appeared with his wife in Big Fella under the direction of J. Elder Wills. In 1938 Robeson costarred with Henry Wilcoxo, Wallace Ford, and an African girl, Princess Kouka, in Jericho , directed by Thornton Freeland and filmed in North Africa. His wife Eslanda also was in the film, which was shown in America under the name of Dark Sands . In 1947, World Pictures, Limited of Toronto and Brandon Films, Incorporated, New York, made a distribution deal of Native Land featuring Paul Robeson to roadshow in key cities prior to general distribution. The Micheaux Film Corporation, an all-Negro film production company, featured Paul Robeson in the film Body and Soul , with Mercedes Gilbert in the female lead. In 1940 Proud Valley was made in England and directed by Pen Tennyson, and considered one of the finest British films made. It was one that Robeson liked the best and the last Robeson film made in England . In 1942, Tales of Manhattan , produced by Fox, directed by Julien Duvivier, headed by Paul Robeson, with Ethel Waters as his wife. George Reed, Eddie Anderson and others appeared in stereotype darkie release. It was the last film Robeson appeared in and a great letdown from his recent stage appearance in Othello . That's his great play. Although Paul Robeson is known the world over for his remarkable performance in Othello , few know that two other Negro actors have played the Othello role. Ira Aldridge was the first. Born in New York in 1805, he played the Othello role in London and on the continent for many years. He died in 1867. Years later William Marshall, a native of Gary, Indiana, who first won fame in Green Pastures, played Othello in Dublin, Ireland. Robeson, an internationally famous bass baritone as well as actor, had previously played the Moor role of Othello in London, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Princeton in summer theatrical productions in 1942. Robeson's greatest performance on the stage was in 1943 in the Theater Guild production in New York of Othello , the Moor of Venice, in which Robeson received one of the most prolonged and wildest ovations in the history of the New York theater. Since 1604 when Othello had its premiere, the role of the Moor has been played by some of the world's most accomplished actors. But despite Shakespeare's intention that the part be played by a Negro, it remained for the present production to satisfy that condition on Broadway by casting Paul Robeson as the Moor. Directed by Margaret Webster, dean of Shakespearean directors, Robeson, able supported by Uta Hagen as his white wife Desdemona, and Jose Ferrer, gives a remarkable performance as he strangles his wife whom he loved not wisely but too well and then stabs himself mortally.Twenty-nine years later, at the age of sixty-one, Paul Robeson made theatrical history in William Shakespeare's hometown, Stratford-on-Avon in England, when he became the first Negro, playing the part of Othello the Moor, to perform in the celebrated theater. After his amazing performance in which he kissed blonde Mary Ure six times, Robeson answered fifteen curtain calls and was applauded and then cheered. His role marked the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theater's 100th season.