Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898)
A courting couple, played by vaudeville performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, laugh, embrace, and kiss for William Selig's camera in a warm, unguarded moment shot in Chicago.
Something Good – Negro Kiss is believed to be the earliest surviving film of African Americans kissing on screen, its warmth standing in deliberate contrast to the racist caricatures common in 1890s popular entertainment. Long thought lost, it resurfaced in 2017 and again in a longer print in 2021, and was added to the National Film Registry in 2018.
Background
Something Good – Negro Kiss is a 29-second film shot in Chicago in 1898 by William Selig and distributed through Sears & Roebuck, showing vaudeville performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown laughing, embracing, and kissing for the camera. It is believed to be the earliest surviving film showing African Americans kissing on screen, made at a time when popular entertainment, including early cinema, relied heavily on racist caricature. For over a century the film was effectively lost until University of Southern California archivist Dino Everett found a nitrate print in the school’s collection in early 2017.
What to watch for
Everett’s rediscovery, followed by research from scholars at USC and the University of Chicago, prompted a broader rethinking of how African Americans were actually depicted on film at the dawn of cinema, since this footage showed ordinary affection rather than caricature. A longer print surfaced again in 2021, adding footage to the original find. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 2018, and its brief, unguarded warmth is now treated as a corrective data point in the history of Black representation on screen.
