Within Our Gates

Banned & Censored Cinema

Within Our Gates

Oscar Micheaux, USA, 1919/20, 79 min.

This is the earliest extant feature directed by an African-American. It follows, in flashback, the Southern heroine Sylvia Landry as she loses her surrogate family to a white lynching mob, is raped by a powerful white man, and journeys North to seek sponsorship of a school for Black children. Micheaux's attack on racism has caused critics to suggest that Within Our Gates is a response to Grifith's Birth of a Nation. Several local censor boards, including Chicago, banned the film for fear it would incite more "race riots" (which had erupted in more than 20 cities during the summer of 1919).

Produced, written, and directed by Oscar Micheaux.1920. Evelyn Preer (Sylvia Landry), William Starks (Jasper Landry), Mattie Edwards (Jasper Landry's wife), Grant Edwards (Emil Landry), E.G. Tatum (Efrem, the Girdlestone's servant), Jack Chenault (Larry Prichard), S.T. Jacks (Reverend Wilson Jacobs), Grant Gorman (Armand Girdlestone), Flo Clements (Alma Prichard), Charles D. Lucas (Dr. Vivian), Ralph Johnson (Philip Girdlestone), James Ruffin (Conrad Drebert), Bernice Ladd (Mrs. Geraldine Stratton), Mrs. Evelyn (Mrs. Elena Warwick), William Smith (Philip Gentry), LaFont Harris (young Emil).

Evelyn Preer stars as Sylvia Landry, an African-American Southerner who travels North to Boston to secure white benefactors for an ailing school for Black children.

Sylvia's adoptive family is lynched and she is sexually assaulted by a man who turns out to be her biological father. In the top center of the mis-en-scene hangs Abraham Lincoln's portrait.

Sylvia is visited in the hospital by Mrs. Warwick, who, after convincing another philanthropist not to donate to the school Sylvia is desparate to save, accidentally ran her down.

Oscar Micheaux, 1884-1951.
Micheaux is the most renown Silent Era African-American filmmaker, having been especially prolific in the 1920s and 30s as a director of Race Films (movies made for Black audiences), which ironically were able to thrive because of the widespread prohibition against integrated audiences.

In Micheaux's later film Body and Soul (1925), Paul Robeson features as an escaped convict masquerading as a Reverand. Micheaux's negative portrayal of the church incensed religious devotees.

REQUIRED READINGS & WEBSITES

• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, "Oscar Micheaux", The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (NY: The Free Press, 2000), course reader

• Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, "Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux", Film and Authorship, Virginia Wright Wexman, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), course reader

• Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, "Ch. 2: In Search of an Audience, Part I", Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), course reader

• Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, Charles Musser, "Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era", online
http://cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/previous_editions/edizione2001/micheaux.html

• Film Notes to "Within Our Gates" and "Body and Soul", online
http://cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/previous_editions/edizione2001/micheaux.html