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Filmmaker Micheaux countered stereotypes of black America
Wednesday, February 02, 2000 By Ervin Dyer, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
For black people in the early 1900s, a trip to the movies could be more insulting than pleasurable.
What the black audience got - and the few black actors who made it onscreen - was a motion picture canvas that routinely painted them as buffoons.
In stepped Oscar Micheaux, a South Dakota homesteader, novelist and seat-of-the-pants entrepreneur whose goal in life - and on film - was to show "there is no barrier to success which diligence and perseverance cannot hurdle."
Micheaux became celebrated for his "race films," or movies that starred all-black American casts and were often written, produced and directed by black filmmakers.
Some directly addressed racial issues that Hollywood ignored. Others, a world of mysteries, musicals and Westerns, simply became objects of pride and a way to connect the black community.
Many were made in the North and shown in the South, where patrons who couldn't afford to see live entertainment could use their spare change to see black performers on the big screen.
According to Pearl Bowser, a Brooklyn filmmaker, lecturer and consultant, one of the first known "race films" was a 1909 documentary commissioned by Booker T. Washington.
The educator-activist used the film to raise money for his Tuskegee Institute, and it was hugely successful at displaying Washington's mission to educate black youth.
More than 500 race films were made between 1910 and 1950, and Micheaux's work was prolific. He produced or directed 40 films before he died in 1951.
With Micheaux's success, other black production companies quickly popped up.
They become so popular that moviegoers in large cities such as Chicago would flock to the "midnight rambles." The name, borrowed from vaudeville, became a way to describe the segregated showings in the American South where blacks were allowed to attend movies only at midnight.
A resurgence in black filmmaking has sparked renewed interest in the subject. Beginning Friday, and running through Feb. 25, Kuumba Trust and Community Media are sponsoring an Oscar Micheaux Film Festival. It kicks off with a lecture by filmmaker Bowser and screens her one-hour documentary "Midnight Ramble" at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
The work puts race films in a perspective of the times, showing what they represented to their audience. They meant a lot, said Bowser, because they attempted to counter the bitter legacy of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," an epic paean to the Ku Klux Klan that portrayed blacks as violent, sex-crazed savages. When it was released in 1915, "Birth" stirred black boycotts and even race riots.
Micheaux's films dealt with racism and tackled issues such as class consciousness and lynchings. Some of his plots dealt with drug and alcohol addiction and often included lowlife characters. Micheaux was a gutsy businessman who wanted to make money, but he also saw his job as something of a mission.
His answer to the notorious rape scene in "Birth of a Nation" was to film a similar one in "Within Our Gates," but this time the victim was black and the rapist white.
For Bowser, it is important to finally recognize the significance of race movies and the influence of Micheaux.
"It's the missing chapter from American film history," Bowser said. "When you talk about the development of movies in this country, when you talk about independent film making, you have to include these race movies. You have to include Oscar Micheaux."
What a fascinating figure he was.
Micheaux, born in Illinois in 1884, was the child of former slaves. As a young man, he decided the best place for an African-American to do well was in the West, so he became a farmer and rancher in South Dakota.
There he began writing novels, which he sold himself, quite successfully, even though they had racial themes. When an early black film company wanted to adapt his work for a film, he insisted on directing it, though he knew nothing of filmmaking. The company said no, so Micheaux went into the movie business and made it himself.
Extremely enterprising, Micheaux made the films and distributed them himself. A self-promoter, he set up tours with black actors and actresses, often taking grand Southern tours where he would visit up to 10 different cities.
At each stop, he found the black middle-class neighborhoods, stopped in black churches and had the pastor announce his films from the pulpit. He would call on black businesses and go door-to-door - er, backdoor-to-backdoor - in upscale white neighborhoods informing the maids and domestics that his films were showing.
According to Bowser, a film archivist who became interested in the genre while programming a series of race films in New York in 1971, Micheaux had fallen in love with a white woman early in life. Out of loyalty to the black race, he never married her, fearing it would divide him from the black community.
His union to an African-American Chicago schoolteacher remained childless and ended in divorce after his wife never became accustomed to the cultural vacuum of the South Dakota prairie.
As a result, many of Micheaux's films, though they presented blacks as middle class and respectable, frequently dealt with themes of interracial love, which in the end was made acceptable because the white partner turned out to have some black blood.
Today, most of these movies are lost and almost forgotten. Like the majority of all low-budget, independent films of that time, there were few prints and no organized preservation systems. After being shown for a while, prints often disintegrated or were destroyed.
This festival, said Bowser, can show people that before Hollywood, before blaxploitation and before Spike Lee, there were black films.
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