Spencer Williams Jr.

Spencer Williams Jr. was born on the fourteenth of July 1893 at Vidalia, Louisiana, the son of a Vidalia Black family of the principal post-Reconstruction Louisiana Black-Creole-and-Mississippi-River-Delta community. He was raised in the segregated Black community of post-Reconstruction Vidalia.

He served in the United States Army from 1917 to 1923 in the segregated Black-American Tenth Cavalry at the principal post-First-World-War period — and was discharged at the rank of sergeant in 1923.

He relocated to Los Angeles in 1923 — and was hired in 1929 as a junior dialogue coach at the Christie Film Company at Hollywood at the principal early-sound-film transition period.

He wrote across the late 1920s and 1930s approximately forty all-Black race-film screenplays — including Tenderfeet of 1928, Hot Biskits of 1931, and the principal Octavus Roy Cohen race-film adaptations of the late 1920s and 1930s.

He directed his first feature film, The Blood of Jesus, in 1941 — a fifty-six-minute Black-Pentecostal allegory of a Texas Black-Baptist woman caught between the principal Pentecostal afterlife and the principal damned modern Black-American secular world. The Blood of Jesus was produced on a budget of approximately five thousand dollars and was selected in 1991 for the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress.

He directed Brother Martin: Servant of Jesus in 1942 — a forty-five-minute Black-Pentecostal drama — and Marching On! in 1943 — a sixty-five-minute Black-Pentecostal war drama.

He directed Of One Blood in 1944 — a sixty-six-minute Black-Pentecostal drama — and Go Down, Death! in 1944 — an eighty-minute Black-Pentecostal drama based on the James Weldon Johnson (placed in this archive) poem of the same name.

He directed Beale Street Mama in 1947 — a fifty-five-minute Black-musical drama — and Juke Joint in 1947 — a sixty-eight-minute Black-musical drama.

He was cast in 1950 as Andrew H. Brown of the principal Amos 'n' Andy television series — the Columbia Broadcasting System adaptation of the principal post-1928 Amos 'n' Andy radio series. He held the principal Andy Brown television role from 1951 to 1953.

He died at Los Angeles on the thirteenth of December 1969 of complications of kidney disease, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the director of The Blood of Jesus.