Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 52
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Popular Culture Review
narrow escape from death for him at the hands of the
Ku Klux Klan. A love story of beautiful texture lends
added interest and some red-blooded scrapping and
hard-hard riding furnishes the picture with the
amount of exciting action required to make the blood
tingle through your veins at high speed. (Chicago
Defender, 8 January 1921: 4)
Lynching surfaced again with the making of the motion picture
the Gunsaulus Mystery, produced in 1921 and based on the Leo M.
Frank case. Frank had received a considerable amount of attention in
the press. A Jewish man, accused of murdering a young woman based
on the testimony of a black man, Frank was later lynched by a mob.
Micheaux, eager to capitalize on the attention which the case
received, produced this film and provided an advertisement that
read:
Was Leo M. Frank Guilty? Do you recall the strange
and tragic case of Leo M. Frank, charged with the
murder of little Mary Phagan; tried, convicted and
sentenced to be han g^ on the testimony (so claimed)
of Jim Conley . . . [who testifiedl that the defendant
led a double life? Oscar Micheaux, well known Race
author and motion picture producer, was in the court
room during this most sensational of all trials and
shortly afterward wrote a story of the same,
interweaving a romance . . . . (Chicago Defender, 26
March 1921: 5)
Given the controversial nature of the film, this was another
production which had difficulty receiving the censors' approval.
The intimidation of African-Americans by the Ku Klux Klan
reappeared in Micheaux's Son of Satan, produced in 1922, a film
which reflected Micheaux's insistence on exposing those groups that
attempted to strike fear in African-Americans. Perhaps, for
Micheaux it was a rebuttal of the way in which D. W. Griffith
glorified the KKK in his never-to-be-forgotten Birth of a Nation
(1915). Son of Satan was described as "a hair-raising, side-splitting