At the dawn of movie-making, having people kiss on camera was a risqué way to pull in audiences still getting used to this new medium. The first of these tiny love stories was Thomas Edison's 1896 short,
The Kiss, which featured two white performers. Two years later, Black vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown smilingly puckered up in short by director and studio-founder William Selig titled
Something Good-Negro Kiss. Rediscovered in 2017 by Dino Everett, a film archivist at the University of Southern California,
Something Good is thought to be the earliest kiss between Black people on film. The Kiss 1898 Credit: