While looking through a box of unidentified film reels in 2017, Dino Everett, a film archivist from the University of Southern California, did not expect to unfurl a section of film showing a Black couple dressed in costumes typical of minstrel shows locked in a romantic embrace. The short, only 20 seconds long, showed the pair kissing, swaying, kissing again and just smiling at each other. Everett had rediscovered a lost moment in film history: William N. Selig’s 1898 short film Something Good-Negro Kiss, the earliest known depiction of black…
