Oscar Micheaux: Pioneer of Independent Black Cinema

By Karen Burroughs Hannsberry

Oscar Micheaux’s life was sprinkled with contradictions and shrouded in mystery – from where he grew up, to how he died, and numerous details in between. There’s even disagreement on the correct pronunciation of his name. But there are some particulars that are indisputable. Hailed as a “true pioneer” and “the ultimate independent filmmaker,” Micheaux was a novelist, screenwriter, director, and producer who founded his own studio, became the first African-American to helm a feature-length film, and produced more than 40 films with predominantly Black casts. 

Facts.

Micheaux was born to former slaves Calvin and Belle Michaux (the director added the “e” later on) on January 2, 1884, in Metropolis, Illinois; some sources say he was the fifth of 11 children, while others say 13. When he was 17, he moved to Chicago, where he worked at several different jobs before landing a post as a Pullman porter. Micheaux’s nationwide travels on the railroad exposed him to available land in the West, and after three years as a porter, he’d saved enough money to purchase a homestead in South Dakota. He would wind up spending the next six years on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in Gregory County; he was ultimately forced to sell his land after his crops were destroyed by drought, but he did more in South Dakota than till the soil and harvest corn and oats.

It was during his years in South Dakota that Micheaux started writing, beginning with articles he sent to Black-owned newspapers about homesteading opportunities, and in 1913 he wrote his first novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. The novel was based on Micheaux’s own life, including his time spent as a Pullman porter and a homesteader, his love for the daughter of a Scottish neighbor, and his marriage to a Chicago schoolteacher with an overbearing preacher father. He sold the book by mail order and by going door-to-door, and secured reviews by making contacts with newspapers in nearby cities like Des Moines, Omaha, and Sioux City (where he lived for a time, beginning in 1916). He would go on to write six more novels, but it was his third, The Homesteader (1917), that led his pioneering spirit into an entirely new direction.

A retooling of the story from The Conquest, The Homesteader caught the attention of brothers George and Noble Johnson, founders of The Lincoln Motion Picture Company – the first Black-owned film production company – who wanted to purchase the film rights to Micheaux’s book. According to some sources, Micheaux insisted on directing and envisioned a full-length feature, as opposed to the short film the brothers had in mind. Others state that Micheaux demanded more money than the brothers were prepared to provide. And a third theory suggests that Micheaux wanted to base the production closer to the Midwest as opposed to the Johnsons’ Los Angeles headquarters. The specific circumstances notwithstanding, the deal between Micheaux and the Johnson brothers fell through and Micheaux decided to adapt the novel on his own – taking on the writing, directing, producing, and distribution. 

In 1918, he founded his own production company, The Micheaux Film and Book Company of Sioux City, raising money by selling stock to private investors, including many of his Sioux City neighbors and contacts he’d made during his days as a Pullman porter. The following year, The Homesteader was released, and was both a commercial and a critical success – the critic for the Chicago Defender labeled it “a creditable and dignified” achievement – and Micheaux traveled from city to city to personally promote and distribute the film. It’s said, in fact, that the copies were played so frequently that they were eventually worn out, a factor contributing to The Homesteader being a lost film today. 

From 1919 to 1948, Micheaux produced more than 40 features, known as “race” films – he adapted several more of his books as well as two novels by Charles Chesnutt, frequently remade his own pictures, and in two cases, based his screenplays on real-life events. Micheaux hired a wide variety of performers; his first picture starred Evelyn Preer, who would go on to earn acclaim on Broadway as well as in feature films, and became known in the Black community as “The First Lady of the Screen.” Over the years, Micheaux would label several of his recurring players with monikers inspired by popular white actors and actresses of the day – the Black Valentino (Lorenzo Tucker), Sepia Mae West (Bee Freeman), Colored Cagney (Slick Chester), and Negro Harlow (Ethel Moses). And a number of Micheaux’s discoveries went on to mainstream success, including Paul Robeson, Juano Hernandez, Oscar Polk, Amanda Randolph, and Frances E. Williams.

Common to most of Micheaux’s films were issues that focused on racial uplift and economic self-sufficiency, class and color divisions, and the criminal element in the black community, represented by small-time crooks and corrupt clergymen. “My results . . . might have been narrow at times, due perhaps to certain limited situations, which I endeavored to portray, but in those limited situations, the truth was the predominant characteristic,” Micheaux once said. “It is only by presenting those portions of the race portrayed in my pictures, in the light and background of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights.”

Among Micheaux’s best-known features are Within Our Gates (1920) and God’s Stepchildren (1938), both available on the Film Masters TV YouTube Channel. Within Our Gates, his second and earliest surviving film, emphasizes the need for education in the Jim Crow South while addressing such dark themes as racism, lynching, and rape. Many view the film as Micheaux’s answer to D.W. Griffth’s Birth of a Nation, which depicted negative stereotypes of Black Americans and extolled the exploits of the Ku Klux Klan – Micheaux’s advertisements for Within Our Gates declared that the film had “more thrills and gripping, holding moments than was ever seen in any individual production.”

In God’s Stepchildren, Micheaux was clearly inspired by two mainstream Hollywood productions – like These Three (1937), the plot features a child who spreads a malicious rumor about the teacher who punished her bad behavior. And the Micheaux film echoes Imitation of Life (1934) when that same child – who is of mixed race – later abandons her family in order to “pass” as a white woman. The film was based on an unpublished short story by Micheaux’s second wife, Alice B. Russell, who also starred in the film and appeared in many other Micheaux productions.

These two features, like most of Micheaux’s work, faced obstacles from censorship boards; Micheaux’s first film was even briefly banned in Chicago, and he regularly faced censors throughout the country who would require cuts to his films before they would show them – if they showed them at all. He was especially stymied by the state boards in the South, which routinely objected to his representation of racial violence, injustice, and miscegenation. 

Because his films were made on shoestring budgets (he went bankrupt at least once during his career), Micheaux was not above cutting corners; he often hired amateur actors or even friends, family members, or the children of his investors. He also frowned on rehearsals and reshoots, so line flubs by performers often remained in the final print, and many scenes were characterized by poor lighting or sound. However, the films also featured innovative film techniques including flashbacks; fantasy sequences; iris shots, where a scene starts or ends with a shrinking or expanding circle; and parallel editing, where the film alternates between two or more scenes happening simultaneously in different locations. “Micheaux was not the best of craftsmen when it came to either directing or writing lines,” film archivist and author Pearl Bowser stated in a 1994 documentary on race movies. “But what was important about Micheaux’s work was he was a man who was driven with an ideal – something that he had a passion to say. And he used film to do that.”

Unlike other black-owned production companies, Micheaux was able to continue producing films in the 1930s after the talkies were introduced, but he only made two films in the 1940s: The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940), a boxing picture, and The Betrayal (1948), adapted from his 1941 novel, The Wind from Nowhere. The latter picture – which was a whopping three and a half hours long – was Micheaux’s first film to open on Broadway, but it was a return to the storyline that he’d used for numerous pictures: a former Pullman porter who moves west to be a rancher and is loved by two women, one who is Black and the other who appears to be White. The film was trashed by critics; in a typical review, the critic for the New York Herald Tribune’s dismissed it as “a preposterous, tasteless bore.” Ever the never-say-die entrepreneur, Micheaux continued to promote the picture, touting it as the “Greatest Picture of Its Kind,” but it would be his last film.

By this time, Micheaux was facing a myriad of health challenges, and in 1951, just a few years after the release of The Betrayal, he died in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the age of 67. Like so much of his life, the exact circumstances were murky; some sources attribute his death to heart disease, while others speculate he may have been involved in a car accident, and it’s not known for certain why he was in North Carolina at all. After his death, which received little fanfare, Micheaux quickly faded from the public consciousness, but the late 1960s saw a resurgence in awareness about his life and career, beginning when a group of historians in South Dakota began to write about Micheaux’s experiences while he was a resident there. 

Over the next few decades, many Micheaux films – previously considered lost – were discovered; a copy of Within Our Gates was found in Spain in 1979; Murder in Harlem (1935), a remake of a lost Micheaux silent film, was unearthed in 1983 in a warehouse in Tyler, Texas; and in the late 1990s, his fourth silent film, The Symbol of the Unconquered, turned up in Brussels. In the years since, numerous honors have been posthumously awarded to the writer-director-producer, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Golden Jubilee Special Award from the Directors Guild of America, and a special commemorative stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service. And in 2019, his 1925 film Body and Soul was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. 

Among many other accolades, Micheaux was also the recipient of a star on the Walk of Fame at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he filmed Within Our Gates. According to the director of the center, Nelson Page, Micheaux was a true pioneer in the film industry, “not only because he made race pictures, but because he knew what his audiences needed to see [and] wanted to see.” 

“I think his legacy is that he was the first, and for a good half century, the best,” Page said in a 2024 interview with CBS News in New York. “And I think he carved out a pathway for others to follow.”