Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates
Today we are thrilled to feature a guest-post by film critic/cultural historian Sheila O’Malley (BIO BELOW)
One hundred years ago today … pioneering African-American director Oscar Micheaux's film Within Our Gates, featuring an African-American cast, screened in Harlem at the Lincoln Theater, the start of a five-day run. The film was promoted by the African-American weekly The New York Age as: "The Greatest Race Drama Ever Shown Featuring Miss Evelyn Preer and All Star Colored Cast." Within Our Gates would screen a couple months later in Brooklyn at the Putnam.
The New York Age. 6 May, 1920, p. 6. Newspapers.com.
The film had a rocky road to being screened at all. It's been said that Within Our Gates, written, directed, and produced by Micheaux, was a direct response to D.W. Griffith's racist spectacle Birth of a Nation (1915), but the reality was a bit more complex. Micheaux consciously echoes Birth of a Nation stylistically and structurally; (the film moves from South to North and back, the flashbacks are woven into the story in ways still fresh and startling in 1920). Allyson Nadia Field observes at Criterion, "Using Griffith’s own language to disprove his racist assertions, Micheaux’s portrayal of a white lynch mob belies Griffith’s depiction of a gallant Klan." The film takes on poverty as well as the lack of education and opportunity, particularly for those living in the Southern states, and it shows the issues arising with post-WWI African-American life, as well as the Great Migration.
Report of the film’s screening in St.. Petersburg, Florida. The New York Age. 6 May, 1920, p. 5. Newspapers.com.
Evelyn Preer, a well-known actress of stage and screen as well as a popular jazz and blues singer, plays Sylvia, a teacher at an impoverished school in the South, who heads North to ask for donations to keep the school afloat. Her journey takes place within the context of Jim Crow laws, the rise of the KKK, and the threat of lynch mobs.
Charles D Lucas and Evelyn Preer in Within Our Gates (1920). YouTube.com.
With a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, Within Our Gates references the contributions African-Americans have made in American wars, especially in the one that just ended, as well as the death of Theodore Roosevelt in 1919. At one point, an activist doctor lists the many contributions African-Americans have made to America, urging Sylvia, "We were never immigrants. Be proud of your country, always!"
Descended from former slaves, Micheaux worked at a shoeshine stand in Chicago, before moving on to work as a Pullman porter, a very prestigious job (which would come in handy later when he needed to hit up rich people for loans to get his films made). The defining moment for Micheaux appears to be when he bought land in South Dakota to work as a homesteader. He wrote a novel based on his experiences (The Homesteader), and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company wanted to turn it into a film. The negotiations broke down, but it gave Micheaux his idea and inspiration. Why not make the film himself? And so he did. He set up the Micheaux Film & Book Company out of Sioux City and began to make his own films. He eventually produced over 40 films.
Within Our Gates was Micheaux's second film. For years it was considered a lost film, until a print was discovered in the 1970s. It was made during a very jittery year. The end of the war was followed by a worldwide pandemic which raged from 1918 into the summer of 1919, killing untold millions. The summer of 1919 was punctuated by violent "race riots" in many American cities, but mostly Chicago. Because of this, censor boards were afraid of Within Our Gates. The Chicago Board of Censors took one look at the film and rejected it. They feared it would stir up violence in "urban" audiences.
Micheaux. Courtesy Kino Lorber.
Let us take a moment to recall David Denby's now infamous review of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing back in 1989, where he worried, "... if Spike Lee is a commercial opportunist, he’s also playing with dynamite in an urban playground. The response to the movie could get away from him." There were other white critics who worried along similar lines. Here's Joe Klein at New York Magazine: "If Lee does hook large black audiences, there’s a good chance the message they take from the film will increase racial tensions in the city." The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Chicago Censors reviewed Within Our Gates for two months, before finally allowing it to be screened. Many cities were scared off, and refused to screen the film at all.
But New York audiences had a chance to see Within Our Gates during its limited run from May 20-24 at Harlem's Lincoln Theatre.
Micheaux's gravestone reads, truthfully: "A man ahead of his time."
Sources:
Higgins, Bill. “Hollywood Flashback: Oscar Micheaux's Pioneering Black Film Studio Was Founded 100 Years Ago.” The Hollywood Reporter, 2 May 2019, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/oscar-micheauxs-pioneering-black-film-studio-was-founded-100-years-1205015.
“The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, a First for Black Cinema.” The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, a First for Black Cinema | African American Registry, web.archive.org/web/20160519202751/www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/lincoln-motion-picture-company-first-black-cinema.