He started his career as a sports writer for the Chicago Defender, a local African-American newspaper, writing under the name Juli Jones.

[6] Foster stated that the film industry "is the Negro businessman's only international chance to make money and put his race right with the world.

In the words of film critic Thomas R. Cripps, Foster was “a clever hustler from Chicago, he had been a press agent for the [Bert] Williams and [George] Walker revues and [Bob] Cole and Johnson's A Trip to Coontown [circa 1898], a sportswriter for the [Chicago] Defender, an occasional actor under the name of Juli Jones, and finally a purveyor of sheet music and Haitian coffee.

He may have made the first black movie, The Railroad Porter, an imitation of Keystone comic chases completed perhaps three years before The Birth of a Nation [February 8, 1915].

He established the Foster Photoplay Company in 1910 and its films portrayed African Americans “in slapstick humor where a character might first slip, get his head stuck in a barrel, and then be spanked by another Black person wielding a wooden plank".

[9] Slapstick comedy, in which the humor derived from characters making a complete fool of themselves, was a comedic genre typical at the time of silent films.

The short films he produced and directed showcased all-black casts, with a positive look on the black culture and the African-American community as a whole, with a view to correcting the negative images prevalent in Hollywood.

[10] In 1914, Foster went on a tour to the south to promote his three films released in 1913: The Fall Guy, The Butler, and The Grafter and the Maid.

Along with those releases, The Railroad Porter was also promoted by the leading lady, Lottie Grady, who would sing in front of the audiences while the film reels were changed between the shorts.

These films, along with those of Foster years later, showed that African Americans were starting to fight back against harmful racial stereotypes.

The NAACP began to get involved in the 1910s by criticizing films such as The Nigger (1914) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) for depicting blacks in a degrading manner.

The shows made fun of blacks and impersonated them by making them look like buffoons and imbeciles, using stereotypical characters such as the mammy figure – a dark-skinned, large female who watched over the white children – Sambo, a young male who is lazy and always lounging around; and Uncle Tom, a docile and loved family member who works on the plantation.

The Foster Photoplay Company helped to introduce the idea of race films that enabled African Americans to depict their own image in the way they wanted.

"Race films by maverick African-American directors such as Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams laid the groundwork for later black filmmaking, from the commercial successes of 1970s 'blaxploitation' films to the stylistic references and social commentary of Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Spike Lee,” said Jacqueline Stewart, Professor in English, Cinema and Media studies, and African and African-American studies.

During the 1920s, he moved to Los Angeles to produce musical shorts of black entertainers for Pathe Studios, and then tried to establish a second incarnation of his film production company.

[14] The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was known for making melodramatic films that always portrayed a black hero who prevailed and raised the image of his culture and people.

Nonetheless, a few decades after Foster's heyday, major motion picture corporations started to feature blacks on film.