Micheaux, Oscar

January 2, 1884
March 25, 1951

The novelist and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Illinois, one of thirteen children of former slaves Swan and Bell Micheaux. The early events of his life are not clear and must be gleaned from several fictionalized versions he published. He evidently worked as a Pullman porter, acquiring enough capital to buy two 160-acre tracts of land in South Dakota, where he homesteaded. Micheaux's homesteading experiences were the basis of his first novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913). In order to publicize the book, Micheaux established the Western Book Supply Company and toured the Midwest. He sold most of the books, and stock in his first company, to white farmers, although his later ventures were financed by African-American entrepreneurs. From his bookselling experiences, he wrote a second novel, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (1915). Micheaux's third novel, The Homesteader (1917), attracted the attention of George P. Johnson, who, with his Hollywood actor brother Noble, owned the Lincoln Film Company, with offices in Los Angeles and Omaha. The Johnson brothers were part of the first wave of African-American independent filmmakers to take up the challenge to D. W. Griffith's white supremacist version of American History, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and produce their own stories of African-American life. Fascinated by the new medium, Micheaux offered to sell the Johnson Brothers film rights to his novel, on the condition that he direct the motion picture version. When they refused, Micheaux decided to produce and direct the film himself, financing it through what became the Micheaux Book and Film Company, with offices located in New York, Chicago, and Sioux City, Iowa.

The film version of Micheaux's third novel, The Homesteader (released in 1918), was the first of about fifty films he directed. He distributed the films himself, carrying the prints from town to town, often for one-night stands. His films played mostly in white-owned (but often black-managed) black theaters both in the North and the South. He even had some luck convincing southern white cinema owners to let him show his films at all-black matinees and interracial midnight shows in white theaters. While the black press at the time sometimes criticized Micheaux for projecting a rich black fantasy world and ignoring ghetto problems, he dealt frankly with such social themes as interracial relationships, "passing," intraracial as well as interracial prejudice, and the intimidation of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan.

Micheaux's second film, Within Our Gates (1919), contains a disturbing sequence representing a white lynch mob hanging an innocent black man and his wife. When Micheaux tried to exhibit the film in Chicago, less than a year after a major race riot in that city, both black and white groups urged city authorities to ban the film. Micheaux's response to such censorship was to cut and reedit his films as he traveled from town to town. Showman and entrepreneur that he was, he would promote a film that had been banned in one town by indicating in the next town that it contained "censored" footage. Produced on a shoestring, his films earned him just enough money to continue his filmmaking.

Some twelve of Micheaux's films are extant, and they give an idea, though incomplete, of his style. His interior scenes are often dimly lit, but his location scenes of urban streets are usually crisp and clear, providing a documentary-like glimpse of the period. He seldom had money for more than one take, with the result that the actors' mistakes sometimes became part of the final film. However, Micheaux had a genius for negotiating around tight budgets, improvising with limited resources, and synchronizing production with distribution. In the early 1920s, in order to purchase the rights to African-American author Charles Waddell Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), he offered the author shares in his film company.

To create appeal for his films, Micheaux features some of the most talented African-American actors of his time, including Andrew Bishop, Lawrence-Chenault, A. B. Comithiere, Lawrence Criner, Shingzie Howard, and Evelyn Preer, many of whom were associated with the Lafayette Players stock company. The actor and singer Paul Robeson (1898–1976) made his first motion picture appearance in Micheaux's Body and Soul (1924), in a dual role as both a venal preacher and his virtuous brother. Micheaux returned often to the theme of the hypocritical preacher, a portrait inspired by the betrayal of his father-in-law, a Chicago minister. Of the actors whom Micheaux made celebrities in the black community, the most notable was Lorenzo Tucker, a handsome, light-skinned actor dubbed "the colored Valentino." Micheaux's films also featured cabaret scenes, chorus line dancers, and, after the coming of sound, jazz musicians and comedians.

Although his company went bankrupt in 1928, Micheaux managed to survive the early years of the Depression, continuing to produce silent films. Although Daughter of the Congo (1930) featured some songs and a musical score, The Exile (1931) was thought to be the first African-American-produced all-talking picture. Micheaux went on to make a number of sound films, but many moments in these films were technically compromised because his technicians could not surmount the challenges produced by the new sound-recording technology. In the late 1930s, after the brief notoriety of God's Stepchildren (1937), Micheaux's film activities began to wind down and he returned to writing novels. He published The Wind from Nowhere (1941), a reworking of The Homesteader, and three other novels during the next five years. In 1948 he produced a large-budget version of The Wind from Nowhere, titled The Betrayal and billed as the first African-American motion picture to play in major white theaters. However, the film received unfavorable reviews in the press, including the New York Times. At a time of his decline in popularity as both novelist and filmmaker, Micheaux died during a promotional tour in 1951 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Micheaux's work was first rediscovered by film scholars in the early 1970s. However, these critics still disdained the wooden acting and unmatched shots in his films, and they decried what they thought to be the escapist nature of his stories. More recent critics, however, have hailed Micheaux as a maverick stylist who understood, but was not bound by, classical Hollywood cutting style; who used precious footage economically; who was adept in his use of the flashback device; and whose "rough draft" films were vaguely avant-garde. However, Micheaux is not recognized for his "protest" films and his use of social types to oppose caricature rather than to reinforce stereotype.

Thus, though largely ignored during his lifetime, Micheaux began to receive recognition in the later twentieth century. The Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame inaugurated an annual Oscar Micheaux Award in 1974. In 1985, the Directors' Guild posthumously presented Micheaux with a special Golden Jubilee Award, and in 1987 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The recent discovery of prints of two silent Micheaux films, Within Our Gates (1919) and Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), in archives in Spain and Belgium, respectively, has increased the interest in his work.

See also Chesnutt, Charles W.; Film; Robeson, Paul

Bibliography

Bowser, Pearl, Jane Gaines, Charles Musser, eds. Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Gaines, Jane M. "Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama, and Oscar Micheaux." In Black American Cinema: History, Theory, Criticism, edited by Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Green, Ron. "Oscar Micheaux's Production Values." In Black American Cinema: History, Theory, Criticism, edited by Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. "A Filmography of Oscar Micheaux: America's Legendary Black Filmmaker." In Celluloid Power, edited by David Platt. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992.

Regester, Charlene. "Lynched, Assaulted, and Intimidated: Oscar Micheaux's Most Controversial Films." Popular Culture Review 5, no. 1 (February 1994): 47–55.

jane gaines (1996)

charlene regester (1996)
Updated bibliography