Badass Black Women History Month:
Celebrating 28 Black Women Who Said,
“Fuck it, I’ll Do It!”
Day 14: Maria P. Williams and Tressie Souders
The first black female filmmakers
It’s Valentine’s Day, so I’m going to do something special and honor two women. Partially, because their work speaks to each other, but also because very little is known about either one of them.
Maria P. Williams (pictured) and Tressie Souders are widely believed to be the first black female original filmmakers in America. While black women like Zora Neale Hurston and Drusilla Dunjee Houston made documentary projects, Souders and Williams were the first to make original films.
Souders came first. She was born in Kansas in 1897. At the time, Kansas had a bustling black community that supported black artists. It’s unclear what inspired Souders to get into film, but she released her first movie, “A Woman’s Error” in 1922. Souders produced, directed and wrote the film. It was distributed by the Afro-American Film Exhibitors Company. No copies of the film exist today, but Billboard Magazine said in January of 1922 that, “'A Woman’s Error’ was the first of its kind to be produced by a young woman of our race, and has been passed on by the critics as a picture true to Negro life.”
Souders would later move to L.A. and work as a domestic worker. The Tressie Souders Film Society was created in her honor. Little else is known about her life or work and no photographs of her currently exist.
Now, just a year later in 1923, another black woman from Kansas––Maria P. Williams would produce, write and star in her own silent film, “The Flames of Wrath.” Previously, Williams worked closely with her husband and they created their own production company, the Western Film Producing Company and Booking Exchange, but “The Flames of Wrath” was Williams’ first solo production after their divorce. Only one still from Williams’ film exists today and it’s housed at the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection in California. Nothing else is known about her life after the film.
The Norfolk Journal and Guide said of Williams, “Kansas City is claiming the honor of having the first colored woman film producer in the United States…,” yet they also made the same proclamation for Souders a year earlier. This has led to conflict over which woman truly is “the first,” but I don’t think it matters.
Souders and Williams were both driven, independent women who made films set in the cities they loved. They both used local actors and local production teams and they did it all as black women.
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