William Foster was the first black director, with the short Keystone Kops-style comedy The Railroad Porter in 1912, while Luther Pollard's Ebony Film Corporation made all-black, two-reel westerns, newsreels and comedies collectively known as "race pictures." There were some all-black films in the silent era. White producers and white stars controlled Hollywood, and white actors in blackface often played grotesquely racist "colored" characters. Moviegoing was a very different experience for black and white viewers, both in segregated theaters and in the films themselves. Thirty-eight people died in Chicago and hundreds more were killed and injured across the country. Segregation was a major cause of rioting when America exploded in the Red Summer of 1919. Trampled by a horse, she died after being turned away from a whites-only hospital. Micheaux's then-estranged wife Orlean never saw him spin their marital strife into a new career. Micheaux was working outside Hollywood, but his ambition was more than a match. "Nothing would make people more anxious to see a picture," he later noted, "than a litho reading 'Shall the races intermarry?'"
He drew on his own life story to explore the African-American experience, but the shrewd showman jazzed it up with romance, murder, a happy ending and a provocative twist as the heroine turned out to be a black woman " passing" for white.
Undeterred, he wrote a novel based on the feud with his religious father-in-law, selling copies door to door. This dispute, along with drought and debt, wiped out Micheaux's business. He married a woman named Orlean McCracken but quarreled over money with her preacher father. His farm stood on the Rosebud Indian Reservation - a fitting name, as the dramatic events unfolding there shaped his entire life, just as the protagonist of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was haunted by his infamous Rosebud. After working as a railroad porter and other menial jobs, he took to farming South Dakota land the US government had appropriated from Native Americans. Micheaux was born in rural Illinois in 1884 to a family of former slaves. That legacy began more than a hundred years ago with The Homesteader, but the seeds were sown much earlier in the dramatic true events of Micheaux's real life.Ī newspaper ad for the first all-black feature film, The Homesteader, which turned 100 years old this year. Griffith, McGilligan marvels that Micheaux's first four films alone "earned his place as a stellar figure in American film." Comparing him with lauded cinematic pioneer D.W.
The audacious and outspoken Micheaux was "Muhammed Ali decades before his time," writes Patrick McGilligan in his book Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only. "Micheaux produced films challenging pre-existing views regarding race," explains film historian Charlene Regester of the Oscar Micheaux Film Society, "and demonstrated an audience existed which desired representations of black life on screen." And few did so more than Oscar Micheaux, the man who made 1919's The Homesteader, the first feature-length motion picture with an all-black cast.Ī self-taught, iconoclastic African American filmmaker and maverick businessman, Micheaux's catalog of films from The Homesteader onwards unflinchingly tackled race, segregation, censorship and other issues that still resonate a hundred years later. In the early days of cinema, black creators also took on multiple roles in order to build their own alternative to Hollywood.
OSCAR MICHEAUX FREE
You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use.But one thing hasn't changed: Ryan Coogler, Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay are among the black filmmakers keeping control of their stories by writing, directing and producing them. Oscar Micheaux portrait collection Dates / Origin Date Created: 1900 - 1920 (Approximate) Library locations Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division Shelf locator: Sc Photo Portrait Collection Shelf locator: Sc Photo Micheaux, Oscar Topics Micheaux, Oscar, 1884-1951 Motion picture producers & directors African American motion picture producers and directors Genres Portraits Photographs Type of Resource Still image Identifiers NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b16819138 NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b11487700 Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): 2b147930-c5f2-012f-1b2b-58d385a7bc34 Rights Statement The copyright and related rights status of this item has been reviewed by The New York Public Library, but we were unable to make a conclusive determination as to the copyright status of the item.
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