The Trooper of Troop K
1917 film directed by Harry A. Gant

The Trooper of Troop K is a Lincoln Motion Picture Company film produced in 1917, directed by Harry A. Gant and starring Noble Johnson. It was the production company's second film.
Set at the Battle of Carrizal, the film contains a battle scene with hundreds of extras, depicting African American U.S. soldiers fighting Mexican soldiers.
The film originally consisted of 3 reels of 35 mm movie film. Most of this is now lost film. The small portion that survives is earliest extant fragment of Black-produced cinema.
Synopsis
Joe (Noble Johnson) is fond of Clara (Beulah Hall) but his inept romantic gestures do not impress her. Jimmy (Jimmie Smith) reacts with disgust to Joe's antics, and competes with Joe to win the affections of Clara. Joe joins the army because Clara suggests this will help Joe clean up his act.
The army captain is delighted by Joe's kind-hearted nature and his skill with horses.
“The Trooper of Troop K” enters the record as 1917 film directed by Harry A. Gant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Trooper, Troop and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Trooper of Troop K” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Trooper, Troop and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q107283542. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Trooper of Troop K” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.