Rev. S.S. Jones Home Movies

Solomon Sir Jones, a Baptist minister in Oklahoma, bought a camera in the mid-1920s and filmed the world he actually lived in: Black main streets, church socials, oil-boom towns, funerals, baseball, the interiors of houses that white newsreels never entered. The Yale Collection of Western Americana holds the surviving reels. They are not a documentary in the Grierson sense. They are a man showing his congregation to itself, and to anyone who would look later. Among the most important home-movie records of African-American life before the Depression, not because Jones was a great filmmaker, but because he pointed the camera at the right street.