01/19/2026
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She passed the union test. Then they sabotaged her camera. Then they blacklisted her. Then she sued every major network in America—and won.
Jessie Maple wasn't supposed to be a filmmaker.
She was supposed to be a bacteriologist. A lab technician. Safe. Invisible. Quiet.
Born February 14, 1937, in McComb, Mississippi, Maple was the second of twelve children. Her father farmed the land. Her mother taught school and worked as a dietician. When Maple was thirteen, her father died, and her mother made a decision that would change everything: she sent Jessie and many of her siblings north, to Philadelphia, where opportunities might exist that Mississippi would never offer a Black girl.
Maple graduated from the all-Black Benjamin Franklin High School in 1955. She studied medical technology. She got a job running a bacteriology and serology laboratory in Philadelphia, then New York. She was good at it—so good that she helped identify a new strain of bacteria.
But the hospital wouldn't make her permanent. She didn't have a doctorate.
On her lunch breaks, she joined other workers trying to organize. She realized something: the people with power weren't the ones following the rules. They were the ones writing them.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Maple left the lab and started writing for the New York Courier. No training. Just conviction. "I thought, well, I'm going to be a writer," she later said.
But writing wasn't enough. She wanted to tell stories with images.
In 1972, Maple enrolled in Ossie Davis's Third World Cinema Corporation—a program designed to get African Americans into behind-the-scenes film jobs so they could join the union. She was the first female trainee. She graduated in 1973.
The program was shut down after one year. As Maple noted: "It was so successful that after one year they shut it down."
She also trained at WNET's National Education Television Training School. She apprenticed as an editor on "Shaft's Big Score!" and "The Super Cops." She joined the Film Editor's Union.
But she wanted more. She wanted to be behind the camera.
There was a problem: the New York camera operators union had only three women. No Black women. Ever.
Maple studied for six months. She trained with her husband, filmmaker Leroy Patton. She rented equipment and practiced five days a week, mastering every camera she could get her hands on.
In 1973, she took the union qualification test.
She failed.
But her husband had been watching. He noticed something: someone had tampered with the test camera. Sabotage.
When he pointed it out, Maple was allowed to retake the test.
She passed.
Jessie Maple became the first African American woman admitted to the New York camera operators union.
Then the union told the studios not to hire her.
Blacklisted.
She could have given up. She could have gone back to the lab, back to safety, back to being invisible.
Instead, she did something they didn't expect: she sued them all. At once.
ABC. CBS. NBC. Every major network.
"I knew when you get ready to do something and you're going to fight for it, you have to know what you're doing," Maple said. "I knew it. I know how to do it and I knew all the cameras and so that's why I took on the union."
In 1977, she won her lawsuit against WCBS. It earned her a trial period at the station, which blossomed into a freelance career at WCBS, ABC, and NBC.
She worked her way up from being considered incompetent to becoming the number one camera operator in local news.
She wrote about the entire ordeal in her 1977 book, "How to Become a Union Camerawoman," a manual for anyone who would follow in her footsteps.
But Maple wasn't just working. She was thinking.
As a news camerawoman, she realized something powerful: she could "edit the story in the camera." She could prevent editors from taking a positive story and making it negative, especially when Black people were involved.
"I would shoot the story in a way they couldn't cut the Black person out of it," she explained. "They had to see both sides of what happened and what they had to say."
In 1974, Maple and Patton co-founded LJ Film Productions. They wanted to tell the stories that mainstream cinema ignored.
In 1981, they released "Will."
It was a gritty drama about a basketball coach in Harlem, a former All-American player struggling with he**in addiction, who takes in a twelve-year-old boy to prevent him from developing the same habit. The film starred Loretta Devine in her film debut.
"Will" was cited as the first independent feature-length film directed by an African American woman in the post-civil rights era.
But there was a problem: no one would screen it.
So in 1982, Maple and Patton opened a theater in the basement of their Harlem brownstone on 120th Street. They called it "20 West, Home of Black Cinema."
It became a long-running venue for independent Black filmmakers. A place where stories like theirs could be told without permission from gatekeepers who didn't understand them.
In 1989, Maple released "Twice as Nice," a film about twin sisters—both college basketball standouts—preparing for a professional draft. The film starred Pamela and Paula McGee, real-life twins who had won back-to-back NCAA basketball championships at USC.
The film was released nine years before the WNBA was created.
Maple kept making films. Documentaries. Features. Stories rooted in community, not just challenges, but solutions.
And she kept mentoring. Filmmaker Yvonne Welbon, who made the documentary "Sisters in Cinema," was one of many who cited Maple as an inspiration. "Her advocacy, mentorship, and care has touched generations of Black filmmakers," wrote Black Film Archive curator Maya Cade after Maple's death.
Jessie Maple died May 30, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. She was 86 years old.
In 2025, "Will" was restored in 4K by Janus Films, in collaboration with Indiana University's Black Film Center & Archive, the Smithsonian, and the Center for African American Media Arts. The restoration was endorsed by Spike Lee and Julie Dash.
The film was re-released theatrically on June 20, 2025—forty-four years after Maple made it in a Harlem brownstone with a vision no one else believed in.
Bloomington, Indiana, declared February 1 as "Mrs. Jessie Maple Patton Day."
Her papers and films are preserved at Indiana University's Black Film Center & Archive.
Jessie Maple wasn't supposed to be a filmmaker. But she became one anyway—and then she made sure others could follow.
She didn't just break barriers. She documented how she did it, sued the people who tried to stop her, won, and then built her own theater so no one would ever have to ask permission again.
That's not just breaking barriers. That's obliterating them—and leaving a manual so others can do the same.
