"Within Our Gates" is the earliest surviving feature film by an African American director. It was Oscar Micheaux’s second film, made as an angry retort to the overt racism in D.W. Griffith’s “Birth Οf Α Nation”. It involves an idealistic young woman who attempts to raise money for an elementary school to serve the black community. In the course of navigating the racial politics of both the black and white communities, her past is revealed in a series of flashbacks that contain the film’s most notorious sequence: the lynching of her parents by a white mob. Micheaux’s staging of the scene is startling in its bluntness and speaks volumes about the director’s fearlessness and willingness to address the racial taboos of the time. The movie was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1992. Presented with recorded musical accompaniment composed and performed by DJ Spooky.
Oscar Micheaux
Oscar Micheaux (1884 – 1951) was a pioneering African American author and filmmaker, and without a doubt the most famous producer of race films. He was born near Metropolis, Illinois and grew up in Great Bend, Kansas, one of eleven children of former slaves. The advent of the motion picture industry intrigued him as a vehicle to tell his stories. He formed his own movie production company and in 1919 became the first African American to make a film. He wrote, directed and produced the silent motion picture “The Homesteader”, starring the pioneering African American actress Evelyn Preer.
