The Flaming Crisis is a short Western film about a news reporter who is wrongly imprisoned for murder. After several years in jail, he escapes to an unnamed city in the West and falls in love with a local cowgirl. In order to help his new community, he agrees to hunt down a gang of outlaws that is terrorizing the town (and chasing his girl); however, after this heroic act, he feels compelled to turn himself in to the police. In the end, the real murderer confesses and the reporter is free to marry the cowgirl. While during the subsequent decades more films were produced with wrongful convictions as key plot points within broader Black narratives, early race films did not present crime or criminality as uniquely Black experiences. Instead, they showed Black characters from all economic backgrounds, centering an equitable Black society as the norm. Here, the ghost visiting the protagonist in prison appears as a well-dressed aristocrat, implying that Black people in America could be of high social status.