Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 50
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in several Micheaux films. In The Homesteader, she is involved in a
domestic tragedy in which she kills her father and herself. The film
had difficulty getting past the censors because of its uncomplimentary
portrayal of an African American minister, believed to have been
patterned after Micheaux's father-in-law. Even the names of the
characters in the picture bear striking resemblances to those of
members of Micheaux's family. The film was reviewed by a
committee of local citizens that included Bishop Fallows, R. S.
Abbott and wife. Col. John R. Marshall, Oscar DePriest, Mrs. Ida B.
Wells Barnett, George W. Ellis, Mrs. George Hall, Mrs. Len Holt, and
N. Fields and Tony Langston of the Chicago Defender. The film was
considered controversial because it portrayed a black man who had
become romantically involved with a woman believed to be white
and because it portrayed a hypxKiitical minister whose actions were
"based upon the supposed hypocritical actions of a prominent colored
preacher of this city [Chicago]" {Chicago Defender, 1 March 1919:
11). Yet Micheaux was successful with this first film and continued to
create controversy with the production of his subsequent releases. In
1919, he produced Within Our Gates, alternately titled
Circumstantial Evidence, a film which re-created a lynching and
which he distributed in Europe. Micheaux believed that it was
equally important to distribute his films himself as to produce them.
In fact, Micheaux once stated:
The future of the Negro photoplay depends on the
ability to market the productions abroad in which
way we would make up the deficit forced on account of
the restricted showing in this country. I am
personally going to South America in September 1922
to establish our connections there; to Africa the next
winter, to India, Japan and in the next five years will
keep going until Micheaux productions are being
shown throughout the world. (Charles Waddell
Chesnutt Papers, Letter of October 30,1921)
Within Our Gates was another murder mystery in which a black
sharecropper accused of killing a white plantation owner, is lynched.
A review of this film d escrib e it as a drama that "while it is a bit
radical, it is withal the biggest protest against Race prejudice.