MICHEAUX, OSCAR

In a career that began in l9l9, Oscar Micheaux (January 2, l884–March 26, 1951) produced more than forty "race movies"—motion pictures made for African-American audiences—a record unmatched in American cinema history. What little is known of his early life is derived from scattered sources such as family lore, a few elusive public records, and autobiographical themes and sequences in several of his movies, and from seven self-published, often thinly veiled, autobiographical novels. An adherent of Booker T. Washington's ideology of black entrepreneurship and "self-help," Micheaux spent much of his youth homesteading on the Rosebud Indian reservation in South Dakota, doing a stint as a railroad porter on Pullman sleeping cars, and as the author and publisher of his novels. Beginning with his first movie, The Homesteader (l9l9), he took up themes that Hollywood filmmakers ignored: social dramas rooted in racial issues, tales of black striving and achievement, and plots that sometimes turned on false or mistaken racial identities.

At first the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression stifled Micheaux and other makers of race movies. In addition to audiences shrunken by their economic plight and a paucity of sources of capital, the new medium of "talkies" also proved a daunting obstacle, at least until the Harlem theater owner Frank Schiffman backed Micheaux's reentry into production. The Great Depression thereafter reenergized Micheaux's work and sharpened its focus on his familiar themes of black ambition woven into episodes of his own life story. The Exile (1931) was typical of his work during this period in that its sources were Micheaux's own autobiographical novel The Conquest (l913) and a reworking of his silent film The Homesteader. In another instance of his using the Depression as an inspiration for a remake, Micheaux reworked Birthright (1924, l938), a "story of the Negro in the South," that he derived from a novel by the white Pulitzer Prize-winning populist writer T. S. Stribling. As adapted by Micheaux, its story centered on a black Harvard graduate who struggles against Southern racial morés in an attempt to found a school for African-American children.

The Depression touched Micheaux in yet another way. He began to relocate his settings in northern cities, where he created a tension between black plight at the hands of the white South as against the new perils of life in the North, where poverty was accompanied by black crime, violence, and the breakup of the family under the stress of urban life. His heroes were often achievers and gogetters, while the heavies were criminals who preyed upon African Americans, as in The Girl from Chicago (l932). Or, as in Underworld (l937), the movies were cautionary tales warning of a too hasty rejection of the sturdy values of "the Southland" in favor of the hollow glamour of the urban underworld. Sometimes, a familiar genre such as a backstage romance in which the hero strives to crash Broadway—as in his Swing (l938)—also included a subplot that took up some social issue such as, in this instance, the abuse of women by black men idled by slumping urban economies even as their women became breadwinners as domestic servants.

With the onset of World War II and a consequent liberalizing of racial depictions in Hollywood movies, race moviemakers suffered. Micheaux offered his services to the government's propaganda arm, the Office of War Information, pointing out that "we are never shown on the screen in . . . the war effort," but with no recorded response from Washington. Thus Micheaux's work during the Great Depression constituted both a high moment in the history of the race movie as well as its swan song.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

Bowser, Pearl, and Louise Spence. Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences. 2001.

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, l900–l942. l977.

Gaines, Jane M. Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era. 2001.

Green, J. Ronald. Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux. 2000.

VanEpps-Taylor, Betti Carol. Oscar Micheaux: Dakota Homesteader, Author, Pioneer Film Maker, A Biography. l999.