The Flying Ace, released in 1926, imagined a version of America that did not yet exist. At a time when African Americans were barred from serving as military pilots and routinely denied full citizenship at home, the silent feature placed a Black aviator at its center and allowed him to embody patriotism, intelligence, and authority. In doing so, the film offered its audiences something both radical and restorative: a heroic image that contradicted the harsh limits imposed by Jim Crow America.
Captain Billy Stokes, the film’s protagonist, returns home from World War I as a decorated pilot, still wearing his Army Air Service uniform as he transitions into civilian life as a railroad detective. The uniform is more than a costume detail. It is a constant visual assertion of loyalty, competence, and valor at a historical moment when Black service to the nation was systematically undervalued. Through Stokes, The Flying Ace fulfilled aspirations that African Americans were encouraged to suppress in real life.
War service and broken promises
During World War I, tens of thousands of Black Americans enlisted in segregated units, believing that military service might advance the cause of racial equality. While some served in combat roles, many were relegated to labor battalions, performing physically demanding and dangerous work behind the front lines. Black leaders hoped that these sacrifices would undermine racist assumptions and force white America to recognize Black citizenship as equal and unquestionable.
That hope went largely unmet. When soldiers returned home, segregation laws remained firmly in place. Lynching and racial violence continued across the South, and economic discrimination followed Black veterans into northern cities. Writing in The Crisis, the NAACP’s influential journal, W.E.B. Du Bois articulated both the frustration and determination of the moment, calling for democracy to be defended at home with the same resolve shown overseas.
It was against this backdrop that The Flying Ace arrived, offering a vision of Black masculinity unburdened by humiliation or apology.
A cinematic world without white supremacy
Unlike filmmakers who confronted racism directly, Richard Norman chose a different strategy. His films largely avoided white characters altogether, creating self-contained worlds where Black people occupied every role of authority, romance, intelligence, and adventure. In The Flying Ace, racism does not exist because white supremacy does not appear.
This absence was deliberate. While Hollywood routinely cast white actors in blackface to portray servants, comic relief, or grotesque stereotypes, Norman’s Norman Film Manufacturing Company, based in Jacksonville, Florida, employed all-Black casts in dignified and dynamic roles. The result was not escapism in the shallow sense, but a form of narrative repair. Black audiences were invited to imagine themselves not as society’s problem, but as its protagonists.
Captain Billy Stokes exemplifies this philosophy. He is calm, capable, romantic, and heroic, a figure whose competence is never questioned within the film’s universe. At a time when such representation was almost entirely absent from mainstream cinema, that image carried extraordinary symbolic power.
Richard Norman’s unlikely path to race films
Richard Norman himself was an unlikely figure in Black film history. A white businessman from Middleburg, Florida, he began his career far from cinema, inventing and marketing soft drinks before turning his attention to movies. In the 1910s, he traveled through the Midwest producing “home talent pictures,” films that combined stock footage with scenes featuring local residents, who then paid to see themselves onscreen.
Norman’s early success came with railroad melodramas, including The Green-eyed Monster. But it was only after he remade the film in 1919 as The Love Bug with an all-Black cast that he discovered a significant and underserved audience. By 1920, Norman returned to Florida and committed himself fully to producing race movies, feature-length films made for Black audiences during segregation.
Jacksonville proved an ideal base. Known in the 1910s as the “Winter Film Capital of the World,” the city offered year-round sunlight, diverse architecture, and natural landscapes that could double for multiple locations. While many production companies relocated to California during and after World War I, Norman found Jacksonville’s resources largely available. He purchased the former Eagle Studios and, between 1920 and 1928, produced seven feature-length race films, often handling production, direction, and distribution himself.
Business opportunity and cultural mission
Norman understood that race films were not only culturally significant but also commercially viable. The Great Migration had reshaped American demographics, as millions of African Americans moved from the rural South to urban centers in the North and Midwest. These communities supported theaters, churches, and social clubs that functioned as alternative exhibition venues for Black films.
Norman estimated that millions of Black viewers regularly attended segregated screenings, while many more encountered films through community spaces. Hollywood, however, offered little that reflected their lives with dignity. Film historian Donald Bogle later categorized Hollywood’s limited Black characters into rigid stereotypes that reinforced racial hierarchy rather than challenged it.
Race films like The Flying Ace filled that void. They presented worlds where Black characters overcame obstacles, fell in love, solved crimes, and flew airplanes. Even when prejudice existed, it could be defeated. Often, as in Norman’s films, it was excluded entirely.
Competing visions within race cinema
Norman Films operated within what scholar Thomas Cripps described as a “Black underground,” a loose network of more than 100 companies producing race films outside Hollywood’s control. Some of these companies were Black-owned, others, like Norman’s, were run by white producers serving Black audiences.
Among Norman’s contemporaries were Oscar Micheaux and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, whose leaders viewed cinema as a tool for confronting racism directly. Micheaux’s films addressed lynching, sexual violence, and injustice head-on, challenging audiences to confront uncomfortable truths. Norman, by contrast, worried that overt political messaging would limit commercial success.
He favored genre storytelling, blending adventure, comedy, romance, and mystery to attract broad audiences. Posters for his films promised thrills, laughs, and spectacle. The Flying Ace was marketed as an aviation thriller, complete with illustrations of burning planes and parachuting heroes, even if the film itself relied more on narrative ingenuity than actual aerial stunts.
Making a Black aviator believable
Norman initially hoped to include real aviation feats, even reaching out to Bessie Coleman, the pioneering Black aviator, and stunt pilot Edison McEvey. Ultimately, practical constraints prevailed. The lead role went to J. Laurence Criner, a respected actor from Harlem’s Lafayette Players, one of the most prestigious Black theater companies of the era.
Criner was not a pilot, but his composed performance and stage-trained presence lent credibility to the role. The film’s visual tricks and editing compensated for the lack of real flight footage, and audiences responded enthusiastically. The Flying Ace reportedly grossed more than $20,000 on the race film circuit, a significant sum for an independently produced silent feature.
Legacy beyond the screen
The influence of The Flying Ace cannot be measured in box office numbers alone. For Black audiences in the 1920s, Captain Billy Stokes represented a future that mainstream America refused to imagine. He was a Black male hero whose intelligence and bravery were unquestioned, whose authority was natural rather than contested.
That influence extended into the Norman family itself. Richard Norman Jr., who grew up around the studio, later recalled playing in the airplane prop used in the film and dreaming of flight. Those dreams eventually became reality. He went on to become a pilot, embodying the very possibility his father’s film had imagined decades earlier.
Today, Norman Jr. serves on the board of a Jacksonville nonprofit dedicated to preserving this overlooked chapter of film history. Plans are underway to transform the original Norman Studios buildings into a museum celebrating silent film production in Northeast Florida. The proposed Norman Studios Silent Film Museum will also include educational programs designed to empower future filmmakers to tell their own stories.
Reclaiming a lost chapter of cinema
Nearly a century after its release, The Flying Ace stands as a testament to what Black cinema achieved despite systemic exclusion. It demonstrates that long before integration or civil rights legislation, Black filmmakers and audiences were already envisioning freedom, competence, and joy on their own terms.
In an industry that repeatedly denied African Americans the right to see themselves as heroes, The Flying Ace quietly insisted otherwise. Its legacy endures not only as entertainment, but as evidence that imagination itself can be an act of resistance.
