Did you know Oscar Micheaux was the first black filmmaker? He was born into slavery in southern Illinois, but he left home to pursue work as a Pullman Porter on railroads. This was one of the best jobs a black man could have at the time. Still, he had bigger dreams as a writer. He wrote a series of novels, including his most famous, The Homesteader an autobiography of his experiences as a Pullman Porter. Two indie filmmakers made offers to him to buy the rights for that novel but he declined and did it his damn self. He is the first African-American to produce a feature-length film in 1919. Unfortunately his films were often banned from theaters, and/or destroyed, called immoral, and was said to incite crime. His legacy was essentially lost. His movie and movies are often seen as a response to the film that is credited for birthing Hollywood, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation. A three-hour film starting with the Civil War and ending with the Ku Klux Klan riding in to save the South from black rule during the Reconstruction era. The film uses white actors in blackface to portray black men as foaming at the mouth animals. And blackness in the movie is associated with male sexual power, violence, and r*pe. The message is that emancipated slaves are unworthy of being free, they’re uncivilized, and primarily concerned with being free so they could marry white women and prey on them. It was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946. Micheaux’s films were played in the 700 theatres that were part of the “ghetto circuit.” And was categorized as race films. Woy 🤦🏾♂️. Micheaux was one of the few black independents to survive the historical scrubbing that happens with black history because of the extra miles he went to insure his survival. While on promotional tours, he used his completed films, which he often distributed by hand to waiting theatres, to secure from personal investors the financing for his next project. He passed from heart failure on March 25, 1951 at the age of 67, in Charlotte, North Carolina on a business trip.
enemies too.