The Brothers Johnson : the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, black business, and the Negro image during the Progressive Era
| dc.contributor.advisor | Walker, Juliet E. K., 1940- | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Falola, Toyin | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Moore, Leonard | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Miller, Karl H | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Butler, Johnny S. | |
| dc.creator | Campbell, Yuri Andrew | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-06-18T19:11:59Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2021-06-18T19:11:59Z | |
| dc.date.created | 2014-05 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2014-05-02 | |
| dc.date.submitted | May 2014 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2021-06-18T19:12:00Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation looks at the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, the first filmmaking concern owned and operated by African Americans with the intention of producing dramas depicting the race in a positive fashion. By undertaking a micro-level inquiry of the LMPC the study provides an unusually detailed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a Progressive-Era black entrepreneurial endeavor whose national reach had macro-level economic and cultural effect within the African-American commercial realm. On the micro-level, the dissertation adheres to the Cole model of entrepreneurial history by addressing the family, social, and employment backgrounds of the two brothers who owned and operated the film venture, Noble and George Johnson. The dissertation therefore includes notable attentions paid to the business experiences of a third brother, Virgel, and their father, Perry. The family’s deeply rooted ethos of self-reliance through business intertwines with their search for spaces affording the opportunity to deal with wealthy whites and vibrant black communities. The importance of black geographic and economic mobility during for burgeoning establishment of a sense and practice of a black economic and cultural nation is thereby highlighted. The business history inquiry into the organizational and operational specifics of the LMPC provides an informative bedding for the second prong of the study’s thrust, explicating the ways that the businesses of Noble and George Johnson can be seen as modes of a nationally-projected production of the social and cultural knowledge of race. That line of questioning is enhanced by the family’s history with racial ambiguity and the search for access to white wherewithal. On this front those businesses are vetted as chapters in the African-American tradition of modern public storytelling aimed at forwarding the advancement of the race’s bids for full citizenship and material well being by strategically demanding the recognition of black humanity. Theses storytelling businesses were important links in a tradition which had profound effects on African-American life and constituted discursive practices which help us to see the multi-faceted, even contradictory, pull within the experience of blackness in America, a basis of identity seeking likeness and difference, domains of blackness and the freedom to move beyond black | |
| dc.description.department | History | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/2152/86521 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/13472 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | African-American history | |
| dc.subject | African American business history | |
| dc.subject | African American film studies | |
| dc.subject | Brothers Johnson | |
| dc.subject | Lincoln Motion Picture Company | |
| dc.subject | Progressive Era | |
| dc.subject | Black business | |
| dc.subject | Negro image | |
| dc.title | The Brothers Johnson : the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, black business, and the Negro image during the Progressive Era | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | text | |
| thesis.degree.department | History | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | History | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | The University of Texas at Austin | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy |