A Micheaux film would pack all-Black movie houses, with Micheaux himself often approaching theater owners directly to book his movies. Theaters were usually segregated, with Black audience members relegated to the balcony. Most of Micheaux's films were out of the norm for Hollywood at the time, which largely ignored Black audiences.
The attorney who helps clear the man’s name got through law school by selling books door-to-door, a nod to Micheaux's own past. In 1935’s Murder in Harlem, Micheaux himself appears as a detective involved in a murder that prejudiced white police have blamed on a Black man. They declared the movie “sacrilegious, immoral, and would tend to incite violence.” Micheaux was forced to edit it. In 1925’s Body and Soul, a priest (played by Paul Robeson, who would star in many of Micheaux's films) struggles with his corrupted faith, which put censors on edge. Micheaux ignored them, and audiences lined up. Following the Chicago race riot of 1919, local ministers believed the anti-lynching sentiment would stir up further aggression and asked him not to show it. The film’s frank depiction of racism, including a lynching, was meant as a counterbalance to the sanitized version seen in director D.W. In 1920’s Within Our Gates, a racist man is about to commit sexual assault when he realizes his victim is his own daughter. With the success of The Homesteader, Micheaux was able to pursue his film career in earnest and tackle increasingly controversial subject matter. The 100-year-old film hasn’t survived-a recurring problem in a time when film preservation wasn't on anyone's mind. Reviews were positive, but it’s hard to know exactly how close Micheaux hewed to his own source material. The silent film version of The Homesteader was released in 1919 in Chicago, with Micheaux producing and directing. And just like that, Micheaux was in the movie business. Rather than relinquish control, Micheaux instead formed his own production company, Micheaux Film and Book Co., on the premise that he had taught himself to farm and could therefore teach himself to make films. When producers at the Lincoln Motion Picture Company attempted to purchase the rights to make The Homesteader, Micheaux grew frustrated at the protracted negotiations as well as the limited role he would have in how the movie was produced. The same barriers Micheaux found in publishing were also present in the nascent film industry. “But, if you write that way, the white book publishers won't publish your scripts, so I formed my own book publishing firm and write my own books, and Negroes like them, too, because three of them are bestsellers.” “I want to see the Negro pictured in books just like he lives,” Micheaux once said. It was the solution to prejudicial publishing attitudes of the era, which had little interest in authentic accounts of the Black experience. Micheaux sold his books door-to-door, garnering enough success to form his own publishing company, Western Book Supply. This concession likely saved Micheaux from any serious condemnation by critics while still allowing him to explore a taboo topic. Micheaux flirts with this controversy in the text before having the hero discover he was wrong about her race-Agnes is biracial. In it, his protagonist, Jean Baptiste, causes a stir in the world of white settlers in South Dakota by falling for a white woman named Agnes Stewart. The Homesteader was Micheaux’s standout work of the era. With his marriage on thin ice and his farming facing a drought, Micheaux moved to Sioux City in 1913 and transformed himself into a novelist, penning the semi-autobiographical The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer in 1913, The Forged Note in 1915, and the fictionalized memoir The Homesteader in 1917, among others. He also got married to Orlean McCracken in 1910, but the relationship was fraught. Soon, Micheaux expanded his land holdings from 160 acres to well over 1000 acres. After working for a few years as a train porter, he moved to South Dakota and began a career as a homesteader, farming on land granted by the government for a small filing fee to encourage Western expansion. Born in Metropolis, Illinois, in 1884, Micheaux’s parents, Calvin and Bell, had both been born enslaved-so the freedom Oscar later had to travel and explore the world was not something he took lightly.
Micheaux had a deep understanding of the racial divide that blanketed the 19th century. Micheaux Book & Film Company, Library of Congress, Public Domain // Wikimedia Commons
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