African-Americans were not allowed to serve as pilots in the United States Armed Forces until 1940, but that didn’t stop Richard Norman from making a black fighter pilot the hero of THE FLYING ACE. In this 1926 film, Captain Billy Stokes returns home victorious after World War I to resume his civilian career as a railroad detective - without removing his Army Air Service uniform, a constant reminder of his patriotism and valor.
[...]
Captain Billy Stokes is a model for the ideals of racial uplift, fulfilling aspirations that black Americans were not yet allowed to achieve. At a time when Hollywood employed white actors in blackface to play shuffling servants and mammies, the Norman Film Manufacturing Company, based in Jacksonville, Florida, hired all-black casts to play dignified roles. Instead of tackling discrimination head-on in his films, Norman created a kind of segregated dream world where whites - and consequently, racism - didn’t even exist.
Richard Norman, a white man who grew up in Middleburg, Florida, began his business career as an inventor of soft drinks but, after a couple years, abandoned tonics for the movies. By the mid-’teens, Norman was traversing the Midwest making “Home Talent Pictures,” which combined stock footage with scenes of locals who later turned out and paid to see themselves on screen. [...] In 1920, he returned home to Florida and devoted himself to making what were known as “race movies,” all-black films geared toward black audiences.
[...] During the Great Migration in the early20th century, thousands of black Americans had moved from the South to theNorth and from country to the city, where they constituted a significant block of new consumers. Norman estimated that urban movie theaters reached a black audience of three million, while ten million more saw movies in segregated theaters, vaudeville, or at churches and schools. When these audiences looked to Hollywood to see themselves, they were disappointed. [...] Race movies like Norman’s offered something new: a world where blacks overcome prejudice or, infilms like THE FLYING ACE, never even encounter it.
[...] When Norman finally made THE FLYING ACE, he cast J. Laurence Criner, a veteran of the Lafayette Players, Harlem’s prestigious all-black theater troupe, as the lead. Criner didn’t know how to pilot a plane, which probably ended up saving Norman money and does not seem to have interfered with the film’s success. THE FLYING ACE grossed more than $20,000 on the race film circuit.
While it’s impossible to measure the influence THE FLYING ACE had on its viewers, it is reasonable to assume that audiences found its lead character inspirational. Billy Stokes was a black male hero who would have never made it on screen in a Hollywood movie of the time. Stokes sparked the imagination of at least one boy: Richard Norman Jr., who has fondmemories of playing in the plane from THE FLYING ACE when he was young. “I used to dream about it,” he said, “and my dreams came true.” The younger Norman eventually became a pilot. [...]
Megan Pugh, San Francisco Silent Film Festivalprogram book, 2010, pp. 22–24