While there remains much progress still yet to be made, younger generations of today can often get a sense of just how much the world has changed just by looking back at movies from 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 years or more ago.

For people of all ethnicities, but especially persons of color, what they generally see — and don’t see — can be both instructive and heartbreaking. For decades in the early 20th century, minorities, if they were present at all onscreen, existed in two-dimensional and often servile form, bit background players in stories that didn’t acknowledge the harsher realities of their lived experience.

Of course, every rule or generality has its exceptions. And at a special event in Los Angeles honoring Black History Month on Wednesday, February 8, the nonprofit organization Hollywood Heritage shined a spotlight on one such atypicality.

The notable 1926 silent film The Flying Ace was screened, followed by a presentation from historian Dr. Barbara C. Wingo on Norman Studios, the leading producer during the 1920s of so-called “race” films — movies produced for African American audiences, and featuring Black casts in positive and non-stereotypical roles.

A colleague of Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering independent film producer widely regarded as one of the first major African American feature filmmakers, Richard Norman owned and operated the eponymous Norman Studios (also known as Norman Film Manufacturing Company) in Jacksonville, Florida. From 1919 to 1928, he produced eight feature films and numerous shorts. The Flying Ace is his studio’s only film to survive in its entirety.

Norman was among the first entertainment businessmen and directors to consistently produce these movies — a joint reaction and antidote to portrayals of African Americans in most films of the era, which ranged from empty and dismissive to outright racist. Norman made films that instead presented African Americans in positive ways, challenging then-current stereotypes. This fact is all the more remarkable since Norman, a white man from Florida, and his all-Black casts worked together to make these motion pictures in Jacksonville during a time in which, especially in the American South, racial mixing or integration of almost any sort was often met with virulent denunciation and outright violence.

Selected for inclusion in 2021 in the Library of Congress National Film Registry, a designation afforded cinematic works deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, The Flying Ace predates Howard Hughes’ epic Hell’s Angels by several years, but similarly reflects a public fascination and preoccupation with aviation present in the zeitgeist at the time.

As was the case with almost all of Norman’s productions, the film was made with aspirational characters. Blending adventure, mystery and romance, The Flying Ace centers around Billy Stokes, a World War I fighter pilot (Laurence Criner) given his titular nickname for shooting down seven enemy aircraft, who returns home to his job in law enforcement, and rescues a railroad station master’s daughter, Ruth (Kathryn Boyd), in commission of his duties.

The only remaining race films studio in the United States, the Norman Studios’ five-building complex, recognized as a National Historic Landmark, also represents the only remaining silent film era complex surviving from Jacksonville’s heyday as the “Winter Film Capital of the World.”

While the history of American cinema is associated overwhelmingly with Hollywood, California, from approximately 1907 through 1917, dozens of studios actually operated in Jacksonville, making over 300 motion pictures. In addition, Norman Studios is a rare example of a complete silent film complex, with the site including a production and film processing building (where the Norman family also lived upstairs), a generator shed, wardrobe cottage, prop storage garage, and larger set building.

The aforementioned Dr. Wingo, a historian and lawyer who currently serves as Vice President of the Norman Studios Board, shared photographs and other materials that illuminated the history of this unique landmark. Wingo, who also serves as Curator of the Norman Studios Silent Film Museum, additionally spoke about preserving, presenting and promoting the history of silent movies and race films in Northeast Florida more broadly, and the progress in turning the Norman Studios complex into a museum and education center.

Hollywood Heritage, meanwhile, was founded in 1980 by Frances Offenhauser, Christy Johnson McAvoy, Marian Gibbons, and Susan Peterson St. Francis — four women with a shared interest in and concern for historic preservation in a city, Los Angeles, often more in love with renewal and makeovers than properly honoring its past. More than four decades on, Hollywood Heritage continues to preserve and protect various elements of classic Hollywood, educating the public through the continued operation of its museum — in the historic Lasky DeMille Barn, located just south of the Hollywood Bowl — and by sponsoring programs on topics regarding both film history and preservation.

For more information on the organizations and their important work, visit normanstudios.org and hollywoodheritage.org, respectively.