The American film industry decidedly structured itself as an anti-Black institution in several concrete and intentional ways that continue to affect the Black American cinema over a century later. In other words, I blame the popularity of Tyler Perry on The Jazz Singer (1926).

The portrayal of Black characters usually indicative of Hollywood’s nascent era as idiotic buffoons is not indelibly tied to early cinema. At its conception, the very occurrence of a film, its formal spectacle, was what attracted audiences. But even then, steps were already being taken to codify racism into the bones of an emerging industry. One of the first congressional acts of film censorship occurred as a response to the popularity of two interracial boxing films in which Jack Johnson, a Black boxer, beats his respective White opponents. The Sims Act thus limited the interstate commerce of boxing films on the grounds that moral vices were at risk of infiltrating American society. In a lot of ways, the Hayes Codes’ mother¹.

Meanwhile, the shift from cinema of attractions to narrative driven storytelling makes room for characterization and increasingly racist depictions of Black people begin to emerge. The NAACP is unsuccessful in getting D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) banned from distribution. The film is instead screened in President Woodrow Wilson’s White House.

The increasingly racist and narrow depictions of Black people, as well as White American audiences’ acceptance of them, laid the foundation for the creation of a preemptively haunted industry. But there is a historical fallacy in the idea that intellectual progress endears people to compassion. They knew better because there were always alternative images of Black life actively attempting to counter the dehumanization.

Oscar Micheaux, born in 1884 in Illinois, was a writer whose career began in the early 20th century. At the turn of the century, he was a Pullman porter and his experiences working on and subsequently losing his homestead led to the beginning of his writing career. He wrote numerous articles about his farm and his failed marriage, the earliest of which were published by The Chicago Defender. His career as a filmmaker was thereafter launched when he refused to give the movie rights for his first novel, The Conquest, to a Black American film company. He instead decided to adapt the book himself and made The Homesteader (1919), his first silent film. Over the course of his career he made over 40 films, both silent and with sound. Within Our Gates was his second feature.

Within Our Gates opened in January of 1920 to slow sales that can be attributed to both the film’s controversy and the limited number of theatres that even welcomed Black patrons to begin with. Critics at the time often characterized the film as a response to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation; the title itself comes from the epigraph to Griffith’s The Romance of Happy Valley (1919)— “Harm not the stranger within our gates, lest you yourself be hurt.” The film was initially rejected by the Board of Censors in Chicago. Both the depictions of violence against Black people in the South and the latent racism in the North were perceived as conducive to race riots, a charge never leveled against the violently racist depictions of Black people in Griffith’s film. Chicago specifically was already inundated with elevated racial tensions due to the riots in the summer of 1919. The Chicago Defender reported in January of 1920, “those who reasoned with the spectacle of last July in Chicago ever before them, declared the showing pre-eminently dangerous; while those who reasoned with the knowledge of existing conditions, the injustices of the times, the lynchings and handicaps of ignorance, determined that the time is ripe to bring the lesson to the front.”

Numerous other cities that were experiencing race riots laid similar claims and demanded that certain scenes be cut. The Defender again reported in February of 1920 that the film would be screened at the States Theater in Chicago “without the cuts which were made before its initial presentation,” implying that various versions of the film screened. The film did garner some favorable reviews from the Black American press, The Defender again proclaiming that “people interested in the welfare of the race cannot afford to miss seeing this great production, and remember, it tells it all.”

The last documented screening of the film in Chicago was February 24th 1920. Although little evidence can be found about the film’s subsequent distribution both in the US and internationally, a print of the film was found in Madrid’s Spanish Film Archive in the 70s, after decades of being considered lost. The print, titled La Negra, had Spanish intertitles and a sequence missing in the middle. The Smithsonian Institute restored the print in the 90s, translating the intertitles back to English, save for the four original intertitles that were never translated to Spanish.

This along with Micheaux’s other films, which he continued to make up until his death in 1951, disappeared because of two reasons; (1) the lack of access to resources including funding, theatres, and training for filmmakers and (2) the United States habit of framing its own myth in a way that robs oppressed people of their actual history. Micheaux, initially a novelist, combined his book and his film companies. With The Micheaux Book and Film Company, he financed the production of Within Our Gates by selling stock in the company to the same farmers who had bought his books. The Herculean feat of forming a singular aesthetic sensibility against the formation of a ubiquitous studio system of course proving never to be financially solvent.

Access affects entirely every aspect of Black American life. When nickelodeons first became prominent, in places like New York small storefronts would run up to four shows an hour for a thousand viewers, all largely unavailable to Black people. Even a film like Within Our Gates that crossed over into White audiences garnered minimal revenue. Independent Black production companies couldn’t make enough of a profit to fund their projects, tale as old as the industry of Hollywood itself. Despite their efforts over 30 years, 75% of the 150 Black production companies created in 1918 would only make one film.

The praise for Within Our Gates and Micheaux’s other films was never unanimous among Black critics, in fact for the second half of his career when he transitioned into sound film, most of the Black American press rejected him as an adequate filmmaker. A critical, engaged Black audience deprived of a dynamic film culture by lack of access to capital. Within Our Gates and The Birth of A Nation are two retellings of the same cultural phenomenon buttressed by widely different perspectives. Yet for a long time only the latter was part of the film history canon because the racism that it bolstered actively contributed to the erasure of the former. Moreover, Micheaux’s own technical shortcomings were somewhat a result of this very dynamic.

Every popular moving image of the Black American is haunted, with a visual language still congested by the plight for humanization that Micheaux’s films exhibit. There is honestly something extremely evil about that.

The Oscar Micheaux: The Complete Collection boxset on Blu-ray is available from Kino Classic. And at just $80, it’s a steal!

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1. Achille Mbembe’s argument in Critique of Black Reason that anti-Blackness is the basis of all other forms of repression remains in the wings of my every thought. ↩︎