Long before Hollywood acknowledged Black filmmakers as artists, Oscar Micheaux had already written, financed, produced, directed, and distributed more feature films than nearly any of his white contemporaries. Working outside the studio system—and often in open defiance of it—Micheaux became the most prolific and influential African American filmmaker of the early twentieth century, a fierce individualist whose work laid the foundation for what would later be called independent Black cinema.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was born on January 2, 1884, near Metropolis, Illinois. He was one of thirteen children of former slaves who had moved north looking for a more stable life. Micheaux had spent his life acutely aware of race as a defining quality of American life. He had little formal education but from a young age had a ferocious appetite for self-betterment. Micheaux held down several jobs as a young man, including Pullman porter, before trying to stake out a life for himself as a homesteader in South Dakota. Micheaux's experience homesteading was punishing, and it did not last long, but it gave him firsthand experience with what would become his life's work: telling the story of black America's struggle against poverty, racism and internal strife.
Unable to sustain farming, Micheaux took up writing. His novel The Homesteader (1917) dealt with themes of interracial relationships, Black autonomy, and social tension surrounding African Americans who wanted independence in segregated communities. After white-owned film companies refused Micheaux's offer to buy the rights to make the novel into a film, he decided to do something unprecedented in film history: he would produce the film himself.
Produced and directed by Micheaux in 1919, The Homesteader is lost today but made Micheaux the first African American director of a feature-length film. The film's success on the segregated "race film" circuit demonstrated that films with Black casts and crews could find an audience. Micheaux quickly followed The Homesteader with Within Our Gates (1920), Micheaux's best-known surviving film and a reply shot for shot to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Where Griffith's film promoted white supremacy, Micheaux dared to show lynching, sexual violence, and the many hypocrisies of American racism.
Over the next thirty years Micheaux wrote, directed or produced over forty films—silent and sound—with severe financial limitations.
Micheaux often sold shares himself to Black investors and had to constantly travel town to town to personally advertise his films. Micheaux addressed controversial topics rarely dealt with in films of his time: skin tone bias within Black communities, graft among Black clergy, miscegenation laws, urban crime and decay, and moral degradation created by societal racism. Films like Body and Soul (1925), starring Paul Robeson in a double role, and God's Step Children (1938) continue to be controversial today because of their complex and honest portrayals that were not clean-cut messages.
Critics were sharply divided over Micheaux's work even during his lifetime. Micheaux was a hero to African American audiences who found proof that Blacks could produce their own art independent of white business interests. To critics, including some Black intellectuals, his films were uneven, morally abrasive, or too blunt in their portrayals of internal community conflict. Micheaux received criticisms from the NAACP, and his films were frequently cut or banned by censorship boards. Micheaux saw controversy as part of telling the truth. He felt movies should show life as it was not how we wish it to be.
The cast and crew of The Wages of Sin (1929)
His private life was tumultuous. Micheaux married several times but none of his wives stayed with him for long periods; marriages usually ended due to Micheaux's incessant travel, erratic income, and workaholic tendencies. Micheaux spent much of his life on the road hustling exhibition contracts, negotiating with theater owners, scrambling to keep up with technical advancements in sound film, and rarely putting any real distance between himself and financial ruin.
By the 1940s, Micheaux was struggling to stay healthy while filmmaking itself changed around him. His silent-era influenced style was becoming unfashionable, as Hollywood gained more control over distribution/exhibition and film production costs increased. His final film The Betrayal (1948) was the costliest and most elaborate of all of his pictures but proved to be his swan song rather than a comeback. Battled down by fatigue and nearly erased from the minds of industry professionals, Micheaux spent the twilight of his life forgotten.
On March 25, 1951, Oscar Micheaux died of heart failure in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was 67 years old. His funeral was not nationally covered, and his death was seemingly unmarked by the industry he fought against so vehemently for so long. Micheaux is buried in Great Bend, Kansas, near relatives. He rests far from Hollywood but close to the history it tried to forget.
Micheaux experienced something of a renaissance several decades after his death. Film historians, archivists and scholars rediscovered Micheaux's work, helping to establish it as uniquely American. Micheaux is now celebrated not simply as the first great Black filmmaker, but rather one of the first true independents, making movies his own way long before being indie became cool. Though his films are rough and flawed, they survive because Micheaux made them exactly as he wanted to. He believed that if you were going to be represented, you took the chances to represent yourself.
Oscar Micheaux's grave in Great Bend Cemetery, Great Bend, Kansas
Oscar Micheaux did not wait for permission. He built his own cinema, one film at a time, and in doing so, changed the possibilities of American filmmaking forever.
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