Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 50

48 ^Pogular^ultureRev^^ 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.