Spencer Williams Jr.

Spencer Williams was born on the fourteenth of July 1893 at Vidalia, Louisiana. A teenager in New York, he found work as a call boy for the impresario Oscar Hammerstein and was mentored, he recalled, by the great Bert Williams — no relation. He served in the Army through the World War I years, reportedly rising to sergeant major, and reached Hollywood in 1923; by 1929 he was a sound technician at the Christie Film Company, soon writing the dialogue for its all-Black-cast talkies.

His screenplay for Son of Ingagi (1940) — the first all-Black-cast horror picture — won him a director's chair from Dallas's Sack Amusement Enterprises, and through the 1940s he made some ten features in Texas. First and greatest: The Blood of Jesus (1941), a Baptist allegory of temptation and mercy, shot for about five thousand dollars with his own company and unprofessional players — the first race film admitted to the National Film Registry, in 1991. Behind it came Marching On!, Go Down, Death! from James Weldon Johnson's poem, Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A., Juke Joint.

At the decade's end a national talent search found him in Tulsa, running a vocational school for veterans, and made him Andy Brown of CBS's Amos 'n' Andy — the first American television series with an all-Black cast, and among the most contested: the NAACP condemned it from its 1951 premiere as a libel on the race, and it was gone in two seasons, its reruns withdrawn in 1966. He gave the role a craftsman's skill; the argument around the vehicle belongs to the record, and the record keeps it.

He died in Los Angeles on the thirteenth of December 1969, at seventy-six, of a kidney ailment, his obituaries silent about his directing. In 1983 a warehouse in Tyler, Texas, gave his lost films back to the world. Honored be Spencer Williams, who made the pictures Hollywood would not, and was found again.