oscar micheaux and his circle (excerpt)

CONTENTS

The Touring Package: Programs and Credits ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Oscar Micheaux and Race Movies of the Silent Period xviipearl bowser, jane gaines, and charles musser

I . OVERVIEWS

1. Black Silence and the Politics of Representation clyde r. taylor 32. The Notion of Treatment: Black Aesthetics and Film,

based on an interview with Peter Hessli and additionaldiscussions with Pearl Bowser arthur jafa 11

3. From Shadows ’n Shu›in’ to Spotlights and Cinema:The Lafayette Players, 1915–1932 sister francesca thompson 19

4. The African-American Press and Race Movies, 1909–1929charlene regester 34

I I . OSCAR MICHEAUX

5. Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates:The Possibilities for Alternative Visions michele wallace 53

6. Within Our Gates: From Race Melodrama to Opportunity Narrativejane gaines 67

7. Oscar Micheaux’s The Symbol of the Unconquered: Text and Contextpearl bowser and louise spence 81

8. To Redream the Dreams of White Playwrights: Reappropriationand Resistance in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul charles musser 97

9. Black Patriarch on the Prairie: National Identity and BlackManhood in the Early Novels of Oscar Micheaux jayna brown 132

10. Telling White Lies: Oscar Micheaux and Charles W. Chesnuttcorey k. creekmur 147

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Copyrighted material - Indiana University Press

I I I . MICHEAUX’S CONTEMPORARIES

11. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: The Flying Ace, the Norman Company, and the Micheaux Connection phyllis r. klotman 161

12. Colored Players Film CorporationAn Alternative to Micheaux charles musser 178Lost, Then Found: The Wedding Scene

from The Scar of Shame (1929) Pearl Bowser 18813. Richard D. Maurice and the Maurice Film Company

pearl bowser and Charles Musser 19014. Cinematic Foremothers:

Zora Neale Hurston and Eloyce King Patrick Gist gloria j. gibson 195

appendix a The Reemergence of Oscar Micheaux: A Timeline and Bibliographic Essay j. ronald green 211

appendix b An Oscar Micheaux Filmography: From the Silents through His Transition to Sound, 1919–1931 compiled by charles musser, corey k.creekmur, pearl bowser, j. ronald green, charlene regester, and louise spence 228

appendix c A Colored Players Film Corporation Filmographycompiled by charles musser 278

appendix d Norman Film Manufacturing Company: Production and Theatrical Release Dates for All-Black-Cast Films compiled by phyllis r. klotman 286

Notes 289

Bibliography compiled by kristen barnes, jane gaines, fred neumann, and hank okazaki 329

About the Contributors 341

Credits 345

Index 347

viii | contents

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1. Black Silence and the

Politics of Representation

clyde r. taylor

With conferences such as Oscar Micheaux and His Circle at Yale University and the cele-

bration of 100 Years of Black Cinema at the National Museum of American History, Smith-

sonian Institution, we approach a new stage in the understanding of American cinema and

its relation to Black Americans. We have come to the end of the beginning. Even in contem-

plating the amazing history of Black-oriented “race movies,” we ought to be beyond the a-

ha! stage, and should have gotten past the “gee whiz” experience.

So positioned, the agenda now should be to provoke cinema studies toward a serious ex-

amination of racism as a slice of the apple-pie history of U.S. cinema. Too often, presenta-

tions on American cinema smoothly sidestepped the issue in favor of anecdotal nostalgia. This

examination demands an integration of “race movies” into the whole history of Black people

in cinema. Such an agenda would also o¤er valuable lessons that illuminate other cultural

histories.

There are many interpretive tools for this task, but few serve better than the concept of

unequal development. This is one of the points where the politics of representation can use

some input from political science. To make my sources plain, I am influenced here by two

books, Samir Amin’s Unequal Development and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdevel-

oped Africa. Rodney’s title contains an important warning. We cannot tolerate the trap of think-

ing that the sub-development of some societies is all their fault. Rodney wants us to treat

underdevelopment as a verb. In African society, as elsewhere, somebody underdeveloped

somebody else. As William Blake said, “Pity would be no more, if we did not make some-

body poor” [my italics].

Unequal development takes place wherever there is an exploitative/dependent relation-

ship. Unequal development means that less powerful societies must join the competition for

survival and prosperity at a pace set for the convenience of more aggressive societies. Unequal

development means that a more powerful society draws from the less powerful selected goods

and resources without regard for what the loss of those resources will mean to the exploited.

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The experiences of women vis-à-vis men in almost every social arena serve as a continuing

example of unequal development.

Unequal development is a major factor in the construction and development of Black

cinema. Just as Karl Marx noted that it is alienation that hires a coach and goes to the opera,

unequal development, which we might call “Undie” here, for its resemblance to those gar-

ments that are seldom seen but considered fundamental to anyone’s public equipment, is a

constant almost-embodied companion in the filmmaking process. Undie’s role is crucial in

the development or mal-development of the screen, though rarely given top billing or even

a credit. Undie is an executive producer, along with the executive producer; Undie directs be-

side the director, helps pick the cast, fires some of the crew, determines the narrative line—

in fact, its fingers work to shape the whole film. Unequal development is as much an invisi-

ble hand in the making of the movie as any force of capitalism functioning silently in the

marketplace. So even though Undie is less glamorous than some of the players we’d rather

talk about—the stars, the aesthetic thrills, the sexy gossip abut personalities, the dial-a-dream

stories—we’ve got to account for him (him advisedly) or else be chumped o¤ as dilettantes

in the wind.

Samir Amin talks about the distortion of some societies and their economic life under

unequal development. Perhaps the most significant damage is to a society’s history, which is

sharply interrupted and rechanneled by outside pressures above and beyond the external pres-

sures that impinge on any society at all times. You can know what I mean by thinking of a

moment in a people’s collective memory after which everything changed radically because

they came: their boat sailed into the harbor, and a peaceful group of folks suddenly became

“natives.” Alongside this trauma stands the amputation of the society’s decision-making

process. Also implanted in this moment is the awesome wound to the group personality: if

“we” are no longer making decisions for ourselves, where is the “us” in our actions, and who,

then, are “we”?

In the period of Black silents, there are certain signifiers of Undie’s presence. For in-

stance, there is the relatively small number of race movies actually completed between 1910

and 1930—say 500—compared to the thousands coming out of Hollywood in the same pe-

riod. This number might direct us to the legal and economic prohibitions against competi-

tion. Even though there are popular arguments against measuring “equality of results,” the

inequality of production on this scale tells us something. That is, if one population is mak-

ing thousands of movies and another, admittedly smaller, one is making proportionately

fewer, and yet another group is making none, we might look for the reasons beyond the an-

swer that they didn’t want to or didn’t have the talent and guts—or to some other such jin-

goistic “science.”

One of the explanations for the relatively small number of Black silent films is segre-

gation laws. (Given the selective national memory, there will soon be a need to recall and

verify this system, lest some youths begin to disbelieve it ever existed.) Legal segregation of

people in movie theaters took di¤erent forms—from separate “White” and “Negro” theaters

to di¤erent sections in theaters to di¤erent screening times (“midnight rambles” for Blacks

after regular hours)—and gave race movie producers such as Noble Johnson of the Lincoln

Motion Picture Company a captive audience of people who wanted the experience of watch-

ing themselves in a movie where they were not humiliated. But it also made the invisible

hand of capitalism visible and forbidding when it came to reaching a larger audience or find-

ing the most suitable venues for race films. The memoirs of George P. Johnson (Noble John-

son’s brother) document the frustration of not being able to book a theater where their com-

pany was certain it could do good business with a White audience and speaks of a very

4 | clyde r. taylor



profitable run in a White theater to White audiences in

Long Beach, California, as proof that it could be done.

Some of these theater owners were downright indignant

at the thought that films that did not inferiorize Blacks

were being proposed for their spaces. The limited num-

ber of movie houses where Blacks could see a race movie

created an upper limit on the profit that could be made.

Right away we can see the distortion of what might be

thought of as artistic creativity. Oscar Micheaux soon

learned that with this absolute cap on profits, another re-

hearsal or another take would mean dollars spent that

could never be recouped.

Censorship was another signifier of Undie’s presence

at work. To be sure, in the era of silent movies, censorship

applied to everyone. But the unequal burden of censorship

for non-Whites is made evident by the number of times

Micheaux was faced with censorship for a variety of pos-

sible o¤enses, usually connected to race in one way or an-

other. Apparently, local censorship boards had wide or

varying leverage with regard to what they deemed inap-

propriate for their communities. We know, to take a cou-

ple of casual examples, that Micheaux’s Body and Soul

(1925) was pressured in some communities because of its

unflattering portrait of a Black preacher. The story persists

that Micheaux then started showing the film with alternate

endings, whichever got over in the territory he was working. And the anti-racist Within Our

Gates (1920) faced banning in Chicago and other cities on two grounds; first, that it might

inflame recently riotous neighborhoods, and second, that it again contained scurrilous de-

pictions of ministers. Micheaux soon suppressed the historically important Within Our Gates,

and never made another major assault on racism in his movies, nor did other filmmakers un-

til Melvin van Peebles in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971.

Along with the repression of social commentary about racism, censorship worked hand

in hand with Undie to inhibit race movies through the uno‹cial and o‹cial taboo against

miscegenation. When the widespread prohibition was formalized in 1934 under the Breen

O‹ce, it made o‹cial what was already in place. Under the category of Sex, not Race, comes

the injunction: “Miscegenation (sex relationships between the White and Black races) is for-

bidden.” Censorship, particularly sexual censorship, obviously pressured movie expression

for all filmmakers. But the ban on miscegenation was particularly burdensome for Black Amer-

icans, since it was based on the inference that the goal was to protect Whites, who would be

unequally lowered in social symbolic status by such imaginary commingling. Such a prohibi-

tion silently reinforced the policy of denying directorial roles to Blacks in the industry.

Just as White directors made an advantage out of sexual censorship, overcoming the ob-

stacles with cutaway shots to waterfalls or raging fireplaces, so Micheaux toyed with the bound-

aries of the permissible regarding race-mixing. Declaring that nothing would attract so racial-

ized a society as an advertisement saying “SHALL RACES INTERMARRY?,” he played

throughout his career with the scenario in which an apparently White woman discovers in

the eleventh hour that she possesses one drop of Black blood (enough in those apartheid days

to finalize a Black identity) and can therefore marry her Black lover. Micheaux was even ac-

Black Silence and the Politics of Representation | 5

Noble M. Johnson,producer and star for the Lincoln MotionPicture Company.



cused of trying to “pass” one of his films as a “White” film with actors so light and

the story so general that a White audience might take it for a typical Hollywood

product. Micheaux’s witty outfoxing of the system provides a certain malandro

satisfaction. But look at what this particular bit of unequal development did to the

possibilities of Black cinema. Can we miss the multifarious messages that trans-

late into a disproportionate number of light-skinned Blacks in race movies, par-

ticularly among women? And how does that disproportion, combined with a sim-

ilar imbalance in Hollywood movies, a¤ect African-American self-perception?

The destructions in the wake of unequal development are sometimes casual

accidents—the grass that is trampled when elephants fight. But sometimes they

arrive through a conscious, aggressive will to dominate. When the exploited pop-

ulation begins to pool its resources to shape alternative plans for prosperity, the

counteraction from the more powerful sector may be neither casual nor acciden-

tal. There is a telling exemplum in the dilemma Universal Studios presented No-

ble Johnson. This handsome, athletic actor was a featured player who played all

the races between White and Black in Universal movies, including Douglas Fair-

banks’s Thief of Bagdad (1924). But when he became the star of Lincoln’s race

movies (made by Lincoln, his own company), Universal saw it as unwanted com-

petition and gave him an ultimatum (if I were in Amos ’n Andy, I would be forced

to say “ultomato”): do one or the other, but you can’t do both.

The course of race movies was significantly altered by Johnson’s resigna-

tion from Lincoln Pictures, the most adventuresome and promising Black movie

company of its day, which collapsed soon after his departure. This repressive ac-

tion carries several features of Undie dynamics. Like Edison, Kodak, and other

industry entities, Universal was exercising the power of monopoly against

weaker competitors, in this case monopolizing talent the way the industry did

through contractual development of superstars. By all accounts, Noble Johnson

had the potential to become a very large star in race movies, a phenomenon they

had never produced. So his departure was also a kind of brain drain, yet another

one of Undie’s skills. Thereafter, major African-American performers such as Paul

Robeson and Lena Horne got involved in race movies but usually left as soon as

crossover bridges were stable enough, and they never looked back, except maybe

with embarrassment. Observing this pattern, we need not assess blame; the whole

point, in fact, is to watch the curvature of Black cinema in the making and how

it was influenced by factors other than commitment, race loyalty, or other per-

sonal issues.

The need of Undie is to take from a less technologically sophisticated society those things

of use to the developers, whether they be educated leadership or material resources, without

regard for whether the host society needs the resource or for the imbalance the removal of

that resource will leave behind. The revolutionary actions of capitalism have driven popula-

tions away from subsistence agriculture, whether it be enclosures in sixteenth-century En-

gland or the colonially administered taxation that forced farmers in Africa and other places

into a money economy. The force of action has been against what capital does not want. Also

prominent in this transformation is the implantation of what capital does want, frequently a

single cash crop such as co¤ee, cocoa, bananas, sugar cane, slaves, or tobacco, the kind that

original farmers could not subsist from alone. What this commoditizing drive eliminates of-

ten includes the cultural identity of the people and societies in its path.

Similarly, the American culture industry has consistently taken what suits it from

6 | clyde r. taylor

Noble M. Johnson asSweeney Bodin.



African-American culture, what amuses

it or strokes its illusions of superiority or

infuses the deadness of its industrialized

mentality with spirit. And it does so with

a single-mindedness consistent with

stereotyping. It makes raids on Black cul-

ture in ways that suggest single-crop eco-

nomic exploitation rather than exchanges

that facilitate sustained growth. The

stereotypes embodied in Step ’n Fetchit

comedy were a single cash crop for the

U.S. image industry. In fact, Black com-

edy, inflected by minstrelsy, has been a

perennial U.S. cultural cash crop whose

economic vitality only highlights the

di‹culties and the importance of serious

Black drama as a force to restore cultural

balance. All-Black cast musicals became

a single cash crop briefly during the Cabin

in the Sky (1943) period, enough to crip-

ple the growth of race movies, along with

the “Negro interest films” of roughly the same period. And in the late 1980s, New Jack gang-

banging movies became a single cash crop, while more nourishing forms of film representa-

tion languished.

The challenges Hollywood encountered in the face of Hays O‹ce moral censorship can

give us, through metaphor, a lesson. The prohibitions against explicit eroticism, as said be-

fore, provoked cute substitutions. The camera pans away from the steamy, groping lovers to

waves crashing onto rocks on the beach. The waves can be read as an image displacement, us-

ing one image where another might have naturally, realistically been put into place. The ques-

tion then becomes: Given the prohibitions against picturing Blacks as humans, which also

implied the muzzling of attacks against their dehumanization through racism, how did the

various framers of Black imagery “make waves”? In other words, when we look at this body

of representation, particularly the self-portraits of Blacks in silent race movies, what is a di-

rect projection of unequal development, the signature work of Undie, and what is image dis-

placement, including the self-censorship of the oppressed? Are the stu¤y, genteel manners of

Black characters in race movies the “waves” that, first of all, compensate for the demeaning

stereotypes and then stand in place for a more realistic portrayal that had to be rejected as

possible ammunition for further denigration? Might not the same calculation enter into the

quotient of brilliance smuggled into the minstrel performances of Step ’n Fetchit as “waves”

winking at another reality?

The development of character types is a place where this image displacement shows up

as a major determining factor in race movies. In Hollywood, a powerful change came through

the rise, along with sound movies, of the common man as hero—the likes of John Wayne,

Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, and so forth—to supplant a more European gen-

tleman type, such as John Barrymore or Ronald Coleman. The advance in the power of films

to communicate e¤ectively with large democratic audiences was retarded in race movies by

the mimicry of refined snob behavior. It was not until Ralph Cooper injected an entirely new

style of acting—a more demotic language of personal presentation—in Dark Manhattan (1937)


A scene from The Thief of Bagdad (1924), directed by Raoul Walsh and starringDouglas Fairbanks. Noble Johnson is in the center, playing the role of Indian Prince.On his left is Sojin as the Mongrel Prince; on his right Mathilde Comont as the PersianPrince.



that we can measure the loss (through

sti¤ness) in earlier race movie perfor-

mances. This overcompensation toward

“proper manners” counts as one of the

distortions Samir Amin attributes to un-

equal development. The number of such

distortions in the personal fates of mi-

nority cultural producers soon become

too astronomical to contemplate except

in individual biographies. But to cite

one more, as emblematic of the many,

Cooper was arguably the most charis-

matic actor to come out of race movies

since Noble Johnson, but his potential

was squashed between Hollywood and

race movies, at great loss to the Ameri-

can screen.

For this history, the image dis-

placement of race is more important than

any personal losses. After the debacle of

Within Our Gates—it was banned or

challenged by censors in several cities—

Micheaux altered his course. He stopped

trying to distribute the film, in the United

States at least, and never made another

film addressing racism so frontally. And

other race films became, if possible, even

more timorous than before. The attitude

of social uplift was present throughout

the race movie era, but in attenuated

form, in which many issues of group improvement were addressed—any issues other than

race and racism. At a time when apartheid was the law of the land and savage lynchings were

too common, this was the most macabre silence of Black silent cinema.

One imaginable response to this history and its interpretation through the notion of un-

equal development might be “Get over it! To brood over what might have been is a wasteful

luxury.” This makes sense, if what has been said so far is read as a guilt trip over the horrors

and injuries of bigotry. But that perhaps oversensitive reading misses the object lesson—the

impact on the screen in terms of supposed “aesthetics”—of these social and political cir-

cumstances. To the practical reaction that these film directors should not have worried about

racism but instead made do with what they had, I want to suggest that that is just what they

did (particularly Micheaux, who attacked leaders who made an issue of racism), and then to

turn our attention to what came out of their adjustments.

Looking at these films from this history, I am convinced that the concern with racism

and the caste-like status of African Americans was sublimated within several themes that

encoded the motif of racial/social development upon the body of the young Black woman.

Just as the metaphor of children as the future is pivotal in several African and contempo-

rary Black independent films, the perils and fate of the young Black woman is the issue

around which many—I think I can say most—surviving Black silent race movies revolve.

8 | clyde r. taylor

Vincente Minnellidirecting Lena Horne and Eddie “Rochester”Anderson in Cabin in the Sky (1943).



And through this narrative motif, anxi-

eties about “the Race” were aired, de-

bated, and maybe purged. The figure of

the endangered young Black woman was

not constructed as a quintessential spirit

of the people, as a Joan of Arc might be.

Instead, she is presented as an iconic

representation of the dilemma and situ-

ation of Black people.

Her role in this narrative redresses,

with resentment, the exclusion of Black

women from “the cult of true woman-

hood.” From the nineteenth century,

Black women had been counted out of

the mystique cultivated around the

woman of breeding who was idealized as

carrier and nurturer of civilization and its

higher values. Sojourner Truth was chal-

lenging this assumption when she ques-

tioned, “Ain’t I a woman?” And Harriet Jacobs apologized in her ex-slave narrative for the

unseemly side of her tale, which involved sexual harassment, narrow escapes from rape, and

so forth, that raised spectacles common to the experience of Black women but which refined

women were not expected to read about or mention. Black people generally were outraged

by the public perception that Black women’s honor was not something deserving of respect,

from Blacks nor Whites. Just as during the campaign against slavery there had been an anx-

iety to demonstrate that despite the mythology, Black people cared about their families, now

there was eagerness to show that they were determined to protect their young women. This

was a concern particularly troublesome to the egos of Black men, exacerbated by the extreme

di‹culty of protecting Black women against sexual assault and harassment in reality.

With this motif in the foreground, race movies can be read as allegorical, national melo-

dramas. The story where a young Black woman in peril is rescued by a principled Black gen-

tleman functioned almost as a master narrative. The one surviving clip from the early race

movie melodrama, By Right of Birth (1921), shows a young lady on horseback when the horse

bucks and runs wild, until a Negro gentleman who happens to be happening by comes gal-

lantly to her rescue. These films take pains to frame the young Black woman as treasured ob-

ject and in need of protection. That this protection usually arrives, and in time, vouches for

the viability of Black society and the social optimism that race movies tried to cultivate.

Through this allegory, the will to struggle and survive is re-articulated as insistently as in any

corpus of cultural mythology, however derivative and convoluted.

Very few silent race movies escaped this theme. In Ten Nights in a Barroom (1926), the

evils of drink are demonstrated when, in a saloon brawl, a thrown glass strikes the daughter

of a sympathetic but pathetic alcoholic, and she is killed. The very fact that this warhorse tem-

perance drama was adapted for Black audiences hints at the intent to upgrade Black repre-

sentation by serving it up through the same vehicles that were used to address White audi-

ences. The title of Micheaux’s Symbol of the Unconquered (1920) might very well apply to the

young African-American woman who moves into strange territory to claim an inheritance

and is aided by an eligible Black man against those who would defraud her. Other race movies

in which the endangerment of a young Black woman is central to the story are Body and Soul


Armand Girdlestone(Grant Gorman) is aboutto rape Sylvia Landry(Evelyn Preer)—until hediscovers that she is hisbiological daughter.



(1925), Eleven P.M. (ca. 1929), The Scar of Shame (1929), Ten Minutes to Live (1932), The Girl

from Chicago (1932), The Girl in Room 20 (1943), Within Our Gates (1920), and God’s Step Chil-

dren (1938).

If we see the construction of this theme as a massive, rather dominant, note in race movies,

then we also see how forceful was the e¤ect of unequal development in producing a dispro-

portionate focus on this narrative pattern. The films deserve the hard scrutiny they will get in

feminist readings. The portrayal of young Black women shows the thumbprints of what Toni

Cade Bambara calls the “protection racket,” the further subjection of women under the guise

of protecting them—one of the disabilities of the cult of true womanhood that also befalls

Black women once they are written into that narrative. The movies were, however, very

popular among Black women. However that may be, in drumming the theme of the woman

in peril, race movies were treating Black women to the leftovers of the mystique of true

womanhood.

If this thematic pattern is inadequate for the needs of women’s liberation, it is even more

bizarre as image displacement for a discourse on race. But rather than ride its curiosity as an

excuse to vent our ideological superiority to an earlier historical epoch, we might address the

challenge of reading these films through this complicated network of recoded and miscoded

significations. In race movies, we see the collision and negotiation, often under heavy pres-

sure, of several discourses, including the self-serving narrative of (unequal) social develop-

ment, the muzzled resistance to racism, and the dated discourse of “true womanhood.” I main-

tain that much of the pleasure we take in watching race movies comes from being opened up

to these complex historical dialectics, even by way of their sometimes cardboard delivery, as

well as their capacity to evoke in us admiration for the determined and radical resistance that

went into the making of these films, however much that political energy might have been re-

fracted on its way to the screen. These films have a way of speaking vehemently, even through

the veil of their silence. The distortion and oblique resistance in race movies under Undie’s

influence may also suggest interpretive angles through which we can more articulately read

many films outside the sphere of overdeveloped cinema.

10 | clyde r. taylor



oscar micheaux and his circle (excerpt)

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