It’s a common and facile excuse when talking about racism in art from previous decades or centuries that it was “another time”, that people “didn’t know any better”, or worst of all it “was accepted back then”. This is almost never the case. Every art that marginalized, offended, excluded, or mocked a minority group was at the time it was made criticized by that minority group -their voice just wasn’t amplified over the din of the white male cultural elite. The Taming of the Shrew was condemned by Jewish audiences and critics for centuries, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” was criticized for its racism and imperialism (to the point Mark Twain even wrote a parody of it), and D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation was denounced and protested by African-Americans across the United States on its release in 1915. Hate has always been hate.
And it’s because of that last example that we have Within Our Gates, a rebuttal to Birth of a Nation that is also appropriately the oldest surviving film made by an African-American director. Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film about a Southern black woman going North to raise money for a school for black children at the height of the Jim Crow era is an astounding movie, bold and audacious even by modern standards. A film that vehemently and openly attacks racism and white supremacy, dismantles the lies of Griffith, and allows black voices (…black artists) to tell their own story.
Perhaps the first thing you notice about the film is the social portrayal of the black characters at its’ centre. They are intelligent, accomplished, and thoroughly modern. By the inter-titles, they speak with no accent or derogatory turns of phrase, and are never portrayed in relation to white people as anything other than on equal footing. Furthermore, Sylvia Landry the lead character, played by the African-American “First Lady of the Screen” Evelyn Preer, is extraordinarily proactive -bouncing back from domestic violence with impassioned activism and a higher standard towards male suitors. These are of course bare minimum requirements for movies about black people now, and obviously it’s not surprising given the black director, cast, and crew on the film. But it’s when you think about how ubiquitous the stereotypes that Micheaux ignores were in American cinema for more than three decades after this film -how few black characters in Hollywood pictures from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s were anything other than servants, it’s quite revealing. Not only does it show how the film was decades ahead of its time, but how there was absolutely no reason it had to be.
But of course this is only the start. The films’ frank confrontation of racial issues also stands out -not uncommon for the time, but certainly for representation on film, where racism wouldn’t be openly discussed in major Hollywood fare until about the 1950s. Micheaux seems to largely place the root of the issue on the North-South divide. The struggle to raise money for the school is keenly felt and the point is emphasized that it’s the state that refuses to afford them the education resources white schools are freely given. The schoolhouse is shabby and worn, the den of gambler Larry (Jack Chenault) ramshackle and rather small. By contrast everything in Boston is bright and rich and comparatively enlightened. When Sylvia is hit by a car in the act of saving a child, she’s treated in what appears to be a colour-blind hospital and the rich old driver Mrs. Warwick (an actress credited only as Mrs. Evelyn) not only comforts her, but is sympathetic to her cause.
Perhaps the starkest contrast Micheaux employs is in Mrs. Warwick’s subsequent conversation with a southern woman Mrs. Stratton (Bernice Ladd -looking very much like Lilian Gish) who tries to convince her not to give the school money through a lengthy racist diatribe that spills over into the risks of giving blacks the vote and all other such nonsense. In one of the films’ greatest moments, after listening to this Mrs. Warwick ups her donation to $5,000. It blatantly pits the two worlds in opposition to each other, with Mrs. Strattons’ unflinching hate and fear (she also grins at a headline that reads “Laws Proposed to Stop Negroes” so you know she’s the worst) and her calm convictions in her prejudice an avatar for southern white attitudes next to Mrs. Warwick’s perhaps unrealistic sympathy representing the north. Even Sylvia’s romance reflects this dichotomy -she rejects her southern schoolmaster Reverend Jacobs’ proposal, but at the end accepts the hand of northern Doctor Vivian (Charles D. Lucas) -symbolically choosing the north over the south. It’s noteworthy too that barring Jacobs, all her southern experiences with men were terrible: her fiance was abusive, Larry was a bastard, and her white father tried to rape her before knowing who she was.
Sylvia’s mixed-race heritage is another really bold choice, especially in the context of miscegenation still being illegal in many parts of the United States when this was made. Of course it’s presented in the context of a secret history that her biological father attempts to sweep under the rug by paying for her education. Vivian doesn’t ostracize her for it though. The lead-up to this big reveal and the explanation for what happened to Sylvia’s adopted family is a long flashback serving as the movies’ third act, where some of its most serious subject matter comes from. Here is where it most explicitly stands up to Griffith, as we see the death of a white landlord by a disgruntled local whom he had cheated. A black servant Efrem (E.G. Tatum) scapegoats Sylvia’s adopted father (William Starks), a witness to the death. We then see a white mob, framed evilly without the heroism Griffith had imbued on his Klansmen, hunting down and lynching Sylvia’s family, with her being the one to escape in part due to her father being the murdered mans’ brother. In all this the inter-titles emphasize the unfairness and innocence of the Landrys against the cruelty of these white men, who even lynch Efrem in spite of him being a “friend to the whites”. The violence of these scenes is uncomfortable, driving home Micheaux’s condemnation of the barbaric discriminative violence carried out by white thugs against the black community, and how this reality is ignored. There’s even an interesting scene of how the death is later recounted, portraying the elder Landry as a vicious killer, that might be directly taken from Birth of a Nation if the black character wasn’t portrayed by an actual black man. This and the inversion of the predatory sexual politics of Griffith in the attempted rape scene are clear challenges to the lies spread by such white supremacist texts. And looking at these scenes in this moment in time particularly, the white mob enacting their vigilante justice with guns and clubs, crowding their victims and even strangling one at one point, it’s clear as day seeing their descendants in the American police.
One other character worth discussing who’s not connected to anything save for more critique of a specific kind, is Old Ned. He appears in an interlude during the ladies’ conversation, upheld by Mrs. Stratton in great esteem. He’s a black Reverend and a complete Uncle Tom, characterized by unflattering make-up and a goatee, preaching white supremacy and black humility. He teaches his black congregates that being subservient, uneducated, and poor will get them into heaven and that on earth their duty is to the white man. It’s utterly horrible, but Micheaux seems to have a small morsel of sympathy for such charlatans (either that or he just wants to get through to them), evidenced in a fourth wall break after Ned is mocked by a group of white men where he expresses heavy disgust with himself to the audience, admitting it’s only an act but that he is going to hell for it. “I’ve sold my birthright,” he says. “Negroes and whites -all are equal.”
That really is what it all comes down to, the core theme that Micheaux needs to convey. A plea for the barest minimum of equality. And as much as he may emphatically condemn the south, he’s not ignorant to the racism of the north -Sylvia is robbed while in Boston after all. And all over the place there are signs of the systems of oppression that govern the whole nation. His ultimate message is spelled out in his final scene, which doesn’t seem to connect wholly to the narrative of the film, where Vivian tells Sylvia to be proud of the contributions African-Americans have made for their country and to celebrate the ideals of that country as well. Micheaux is asking that of his black audience, and more importantly of the whites.
Few would take it to heart. Micheaux had a difficult time releasing Within Our Gates. Fears abounded that it would spark race riots (much as what was said of Do the Right Thing sixty-nine years later -like with Do the Right Thing, it didn’t), some cities refused to show it at all. In Chicago, the site of the 1919 riot, it was heavily re-edited and censored. After it was believed to be lost for decades, a near fully intact copy surfaced in Spain, and it was subsequently restored and reverse-translated by the Library of Congress. You can watch it right here: https://www.loc.gov/item/mbrs00046435/ (though you’d be missing DJ Spooky’s wonderful score).
Oscar Micheaux is not as widely known as he deserves to be. Far from being one of the earliest black filmmakers, he was a revolutionary. The themes of his films were decades ahead of their time, resonant and applicable now one hundred years later. He worked on a budget, his films could look cheap, leading some to criticize a lack of aesthetic or technical prowess in his work. But he was just as innovative as any filmmaker working during that era -more so than many. Three years before Eisenstein began experimenting with cinema and perfecting his Methods of Montage, here Micheaux employed sharp editing and cinematography to convey a key idea -when he intercut the lynching of the Landrys’ with the assault of Sylvia as a way of connecting racism with sexual violence. And as for inventing new cinematic techniques, he’s responsible for no less than Birth of a Nation (itself not actually responsible for most of the breakthroughs since accredited to it). Within Our Gates is a film much more deserving to be counted among the great achievements of early cinema. And in a better world, it would have the lasting impact that ode to white supremacy has instead enjoyed.
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