With a Crooked Stick—The Films of Oscar Micheaux

By J. Ronald Green

With a "crooked stick," filmmaker Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) sought to hit a "straight lick" by stressing the strategic importance of class mobility, or "uplift," for African Americans. A theme in all of his more than 40 feature-length, black-produced, black-directed, black-cast, and black-audience films, uplift would allow for the better things in life: fast cars and fancy clothes, freedom of belief, financial security, and an unencumbered intellectual life. Although racism was an impediment to uplift for Micheaux and other African Americans, race as a category was of a secondary order for him in the larger game of class. In With a Crooked Stick, J. Ronald Green pursues this seeming contradiction in a detailed analysis of each of Micheaux's 15 surviving films. He presents critical commentary on each film's plot and action and its contribution to the overall theme of uplift. Readers will also find this an invaluable guide to the preoccupations and features of Micheaux's remarkable career and the insight it provides into the African American experience of the 1920s and 30s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 18, 2004
• ISBN: 9780253027702

Book preview

Introduction

My first book on Oscar Micheaux, Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux, made a case for the importance of Micheaux’s cinematic art, including his style and representational politics, both of which were characterized by wit, originality, resourcefulness, drive, self-analysis, intertextual signifying, inexpensive production values, oppositional attitude, critique of racial stereotyping, and progressive goals for African Americans. Micheaux’s forty-some black-produced, black-directed, black-cast, black-audience films were all devoted to class advancement for African Americans in a racist society. In pursuing uplift, Micheaux also established one of the significant beachheads of middle-class cinema, a rare and undervalued accomplishment in the history of film.

With a Crooked Stick is designed to complement Straight Lick but also to stand on its own; in spite of its self-sufficiency as a guide to Micheaux’s films, there is very little repetition of material from the first book. This second book fills in the outlines of the argument of the previous book by concentrating on textual and contextual analysis of all of Micheaux’s existing films.

With a Crooked Stick is also intended as a useful and suggestive resource for teaching and studying Micheaux’s individual films. All of Micheaux’s existing films are discussed, each film treated in chronological order in terms suggested by its own concerns and traits, but always with one eye on its relationship to Micheaux’s overriding goal of class advancement and on his concomitant formation of a coherent, successful middle-class film style to accomplish his goal.¹

Sorting Out Race and Class

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

—C. L. R. James, quoted in Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Both race and class are vexed terms. The slippery nature of the idea of class is discussed in several sections of Straight Lick, including Appendix 1, On Class and the Classical. Later in this introduction, Micheaux’s particular idea of class is provided with an articulated list of specific, though hardly definitive, characteristics drawn from Micheaux’s films.

The idea of race is assumed in this study to be a historically constructed category that changes in meaning according to the context of its use. In this study, benchmark works such as Thomas Gossett’s history of the idea of race and Omi and Winant’s analysis of racial formations underlie every use of the term race.² Gossett gives countless examples of the slippery nature of the idea of race. One major example can be seen in the flexibility of the deeply held and scientifically proven belief by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans in the superiority of their Teutonic origins exemplified by German culture and intellectual attainment. Upon the arrival of World War I, the Teutons were redefined as a subcategory of the newly defined racial category of Alpine race, which was always and everywhere a race of peasants³ and clearly inferior to a scientifically proven superiority of America’s Nordic origins.⁴ Gossett shows that within nineteenth- and twentieth-century race science, the criteria for determining race might be color (three types—the white, the yellow, and the black. The whites are the great ‘masculine’ race ... [with] ‘an extraordinary instinct for order. [342]), region (Grant, following William Z. Ripley, an American student of race, divided the population of Europe into three races: the Alpines, the Mediterraneans, and the Nordics. [354]), nation (The nationalists ... have not been able to resist coining such anthropologically unintelligible terms as ‘the German race,’ ‘the French race,’ ‘the Italian race,’ ‘the English race,’ and even ‘the American race.’ [345]), and social class (For [Gobineau], it is not nations which create civilizations; it is the small aristocratic minority within nations— for him, race is much more a matter of class than of nation. [344]).

I hope that race in this study is never taken to be implicitly understandable without analysis. For example, we can say specific things about Micheaux’s idea of race: it is very clear that though he used race to describe his ethnic group, he did not ever mean it as a signifier of biological determinism, and he never meant it in the racist sense of a biological hierarchy and the inherent inferiority of races. Micheaux’s idea of race can be specified only after careful study of each use and study of Micheaux’s work and of its engagement with historical situations.

As stated in the concluding chapter of Straight Lick, Micheaux’s primary goal throughout his life and the primary theme in his art was upward class mobility, or uplift, for African Americans, including himself. Issues of class, however, were always, in Micheaux’s work, related to issues of racist discrimination. In emphasizing the strategic importance of class mobility, Micheaux always said a black man can be anything. However, he also agreed with W. E. B. DuBois about the impediments to uplift: the great problem of the twentieth century was the color line. The debate about how to accomplish African-American class mobility began decades before emancipation. The issues important to the African-American community—black assimilation to whiteness, color prejudice, fragmentation of identity and political community, racial essentialism, invidious class and gender relations, and economic and educational underdevelopment—form part of a long discourse that includes the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, and Frederick Douglass and the famous debate between Booker T. Washington and W E. B. DuBois. In consideration of Micheaux’s films, all of these issues are important, not only because they form part of the larger history of Micheaux’s main goal or because they are urgent for critical studies today, but primarily because they are the issues Micheaux explored in his films.

Micheaux had many concerns that might claim attention in explaining his artistic career. His films and novels are full of opinions about racism, racial caricature, the black bourgeoisie, the black underclass, skin-color fetish, interracial marriage, cultural whiteness, Hollywood cinema, black cinema, black theater, black literature, higher education, religion, sexual relations, black masculinity, gender relations, white philanthropy, capitalism, fascism, Jews, anti-Semitism, lynching, tenant peonage, Klan terrorism, censorship, D. W Griffith, passing for white, the migrations north, the Western frontier, black music, individualism, American patriotism, racial loyalty, and racial community. Some of those concerns could plausibly serve as a basis for identifying Micheaux’s principal concern—racism, racial caricature, skin-color fetish, or black masculinity, for example. Many of the other concerns could serve as topics for book-length studies of Micheaux.

Race would seem to be the logical candidate for the central focus of most race movies, including Micheaux’s. As DuBois said early in his career, in an 1897 lecture delivered to the American Negro Academy, The question, then, which we must seriously consider is this, What is the real meaning of race; what has, in the past, been the law of race development, and what lessons has the past history of race development to teach the rising Negro People? DuBois felt himself faced with a true science of race that had delineated eight major groups based on the criterion of shared descent.⁵ The following painful remarks from that lecture sound as if they were inspired by the same struggle with African-American identity that characterized Oscar Micheaux’s critiques of stereotyped and lower-class African-American behavior: No people that laughs at itself, and ridicules itself, and wishes to God it was anything but itself ever wrote its name in history. And if DuBois could say, at the time Micheaux was becoming a teenager, that African Americans "must be inspired with the Divine faith of our black mothers, that out of the blood and dust of battle will march a victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar people, to speak to the nations of earth a Divine truth that shall make them free,"⁶ it seems unlikely that any African-American issue could be found to be more important than race.

As a personal style, however, DuBois himself chose elitism—a kind of class system—and as a program for addressing the problems of race, he chose international socialism. DuBois’s choice of an aristocratic personal manner for himself expressed a certain idea of race in terms of class. His choice of socialism for his politics implied that he thought class relations were, if not a root cause of the racial predicament, at least a context in which racial oppression needed to be considered. If DuBois seems to have been in some ways confused about class and race, so was Ralph Waldo Emerson:

[A]ll men are born unequal in personal powers and in those essential circumstances, of time, parentage, country, fortune. The least knowledge of the natural history of man adds another important particular to these; namely, of what class of men he belongs to—European, Moor, Tartar, African? Because nature has plainly assigned different degrees of intellect to these different races, and the barriers between are insurmountable.⁷ [italics added]

Micheaux’s approach to race and class was not as learned as those of DuBois and Emerson, but it was just as complex while being much less confused. Micheaux did not choose socialism or (proto/pseudo) Darwinism as a way of explaining or solving the problems of racial discrimination (except in a primitive form in one of his grand visions of the frontier at the end of his fourth novel, The Wind from Nowhere). In fact, he accepted entrepreneurial capitalism as his preferred socioeconomic arrangement. A capitalistic orientation allowed Micheaux to create a vision in which African Americans competed on an equal footing with white Americans according to the accepted rules of liberal economics. This capitalistic orientation allowed him to argue not for a change in the basic rules of the game but for a fair chance to play. Thus, he was not arguing to change the American dream, which had worked better than any other available dream for most Euro-Americans. He did not see the economic rules of the game as white rules, any more than successful immigrant Jews saw them as Christian rules or Catholics saw them as Protestant rules—to accept capitalism as the game was not to accept whiteness and cultural assimilation whole-cloth. Critical accusations about Micheaux’s white bourgeoisness might strike Micheaux as unclear, since whiteness and bourgeoisness are separable terms, each with its own denotations and connotations. Micheaux and many African Americans welcomed the American rules, including those of capitalism, for the same reason those rules had attracted immigrants to America—those rules were supposed to give immigrants a chance to have a middle-class life.

Uplift would allow for the good things in life. Whether those good things are understood to include the fast cars and fancy clothes that Gordon Parks, Jr., has said that all Americans want⁸ or the connoisseur’s knowledge of Belgian beer or Italian wine or jazz or avant-garde music that might be another person’s equivalent of Gordon Parks’s choices or enough financial security to support a sexually loving relationship or a family or freedom of religious belief or non-belief or the relatively unencumbered intellectual life of an academic, most people pursue their idea of good things implied by the term uplift. In that sense, Micheaux’s concentration on class mobility was, and remains, consonant with the priorities of most economically developed societies.

So, although—crucially and uniquely—access to uplift was blocked for Micheaux and other African Americans by the gambit of racism,⁹ nevertheless the gambit of racism was of a secondary order in the larger game of class. If racism had, by some miracle, been ruled out of order in America, the daunting problems of the game of class would still have been there to be solved.¹⁰ Micheaux, like both DuBois and Booker T. Washington, had his eye not only on the racial gambit, but also on the larger game.

Visions of Uplift

Micheaux’s complex treatment of African-American class mobility calls for a detailed analysis of individual films. The following survey of his fifteen existing films is devoted to such an analysis. In order to provide a framework for displaying and evaluating evidence focused on a central thesis, the following rubric will be applied to each film surveyed.

First, the plot will be described, with critical commentary.

Second, the class position of the leading man and leading woman in every film will be assessed; most are middle class or, less often, upper class, and many of those leading men and women are faced with antagonists whose styles are similarly middle class or upper class. A comparative examination of motives and character traits—such as an ethic of work, fair play, delay of gratification, ambition, social responsibility, personal dignity and other qualities—however, will show Micheaux’s leading characters to be more legitimately middle class than their equally stylish antagonists. Since the identifying traits of class in Micheaux’s value system include traits of style as well as traits of character, there is often the possibility for confusion in assigning the class position of characters; this, for Micheaux, was also true of real life. Part of the challenge in interpreting Micheaux’s work is to determine the legitimacy of class markers; legitimacy is consistently founded in traits of character and only inconsistently founded in traits of style. Again, this attraction to, but distrust of, class (and classy and classic) styles, is part of Micheaux’s thematics and central to his film practice.

Third, the main actions of the stories in all of Micheaux’s extant films will be shown to be founded on uplift. The only film in which uplift might be considered secondary is Ten Minutes to Live, in which the actions seem concerned primarily with the overriding suspense and background stories of two impending murders. Though these actions are not primarily about uplift, they have grave implications for uplift, and all the trappings of and concern about class mobility are present, as they are in Micheaux’s other films.

Fourth, a pointed comparison between the middle-class status of the leading man and woman and the lower class of various sorts of characters is demonstrated in all the films. In the one film that does not have a story—the variety revue film, The Darktown Revue—an elaborate comparison between the middle and lower classes is, nevertheless, virtually the whole point of the film besides entertainment.

Fifth, the guiding themes of class and race will be identified and prioritized. Race, for example, is not overtly a central issue in Body and Soul, Ten Minutes to Live, The Girl from Chicago, and Underworld. In The Darktown Revue, race is an implied concern, but class is explicitly treated as the issue. Even when race is central, such as in Veiled Aristocrats and God’s Step Children, racism is sometimes not the point; the point is rather loyalty and personal identity within the African-American community. When racism is the issue, sometimes it is indeed central, as in Within Our Gates, Symbol of the Unconquered, and Murder in Harlem; but more often racism is not central, as in The Exile, The Girl from Chicago, Lying Lips, The Notorious Elinor Lee, and Swing!

A good counter case can nonetheless be made that Micheaux’s critique of racism, which is explicit and hard-hitting in early films, such as Within Our Gates and Symbol of the Unconquered, does not disappear in the later films but is gradually submerged like a submarine to continue resistance beneath the surface. That case would try to demonstrate that Micheaux’s discourse on racism grew more implicit rather than explicit over the course of his career, because of the constant pressure of white censorship.¹¹ That point is important to keep in mind, though it is not developed in this study.

A central contention of this study—that Micheaux’s more basic concern was class—is founded on the fact that class mobility is demonstrably the most pervasive theme in his films and that it was also the underlying reason for Micheaux’s (explicit and implicit) attacks on racism. Racism in Micheaux’s films is a politically prodigious, but philosophically secondary and ultimately manageable, hindrance to the underlying desire for class advancement. There is room then for much more attention to Micheaux’s critique of white, black, lewish, and other racisms, both explicit and implicit, than will be found in the following survey. Indeed, racism will not be ignored, for as C. L. R. James emphasized, to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental [to the class factor] is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

Criteria for Assessing Class Position

Since class is such a problematic term with a confusing history of philosophical ambiguity and loose usage (see discussions in Straight Lick, Chapter 2, Micheaux’s Class Position and Appendix 1, On Class and the Classical), it would be helpful to establish clear criteria for determining what counts as a marker for membership in the various possible categories and hierarchical levels of class. What identifiable features must be present before we can identify a character or a style as lower class, middle class, or upper class? Under what circumstances does it become important to distinguish between the lower and lower middle classes or the upper middle and upper classes? What markers count as signaling such distinctions?

First of all, what are the implications of using terms of hierarchy—lower, middle, upper class—as opposed to terms of dialectic or conflict—working class versus owning class? Both these rubrics are important to the perspective of this study. When the hierarchical terms are used, which is the majority of the time, the implied context is class advancement, or uplift, the core concern of this study and the main concern of Micheaux. When the terms of class conflict are used, which is seldom, the implied context is specifically class dialectics or conflict between classes, an underlying concern of this study. Since this study is primarily a guide that explicates Micheaux’s chosen issues and his stylistic contributions, the focus is best represented by the terminology of class hierarchy.

There is an ongoing problem in Micheaux’s films in distinguishing between characters who are, in Micheaux’s opinion, truly middle class and characters who only appear to be middle class because of their adoption of certain stylistic traits associated with the middle class; they are not truly middle class because they lack more substantive middle-class traits. Most of Micheaux’s middle-class characters look the part, just as he looked the part of a successful filmmaker; but some of his middle-class characters appear, conversely, not to be middle class because, though they have the substantive traits required for middle-class status, they lack the more superficial stylistic traits.

The concrete criteria that determine membership in the individual categories of hierarchical class are material and identifiable, but they are never definitive and they are not necessarily of equal value for Micheaux. There are too many criteria—too many judgments required about the various combinations and interactions of criteria—and too many perspectives to take into consideration for there to ever be a rigorous accounting as to an individual fictional character’s membership in a given class.

Chapter 2 of Straight Lick provides a listing of some of the material characteristics that count as criteria for each level of class. These listings of criteria will be used also throughout this study—implicitly and often explicitly—whenever a judgment is made regarding the membership of a character in a specific class. Since such judgments are near the very center of this work, these criteria are listed again below and can be referred to by the reader as often as may seem necessary to reflect on and perhaps test and critique the judgments about class membership formulated in the discussions of each of Micheaux’s films in the following chapters. I want to emphasize again that such judgments cannot be definitive; though the considered judgments of thoughtful analysts help us understand the outlines—as well as the nature and function—of class, there is no point in trying to establish class memberships rigorously and in this study no attempt is made to do so. The difficulties of assigning class position notwithstanding, the effort to analyze the class position of specific characters is absolutely necessary to understanding Micheaux’s films and his vision of uplift. The slipperiness and difficulty of assigning class status to some of the characters, and the seeming inconsistencies among some of the criteria listed below, will suggest patterns and can produce insights about Micheaux’s values. For example, through the process of applying the long list of middle-class and lower-class criteria listed below to problem characters, we can refine our understanding of Micheaux’s priorities among those criteria and thus get closer to understanding his message about uplift.

Micheaux’s Criteria for Class Membership

Analysis of Micheaux’s films shows that generally middle-class qualities for Micheaux were these: upright carriage; articulate, grammatical English speech; broad literacy; clean well-tailored clothes in the British and Northern European tradition or clean homespun clothes in rural environments; urban sophistication; thoughtfulness, even intellectuality; culture; education; sexual morality; self-reliance; entrepreneurial ambition; economic conservatism; political liberalism; patriotism; racial and ethnic loyalty; ethnic tolerance; broad travel and perspective; respect for privacy; the work ethic; fair play; collegial confidence and trust; candor; and romantic love.

Before proceeding to the lists of lower- and upper-class criteria, I want to briefly indicate on one hand the slipperiness of a given criterion or collection of criteria and on the other hand the possibilities of latent, meaningful patterns within this laundry-list portrait of one man’s middle class. The slipperiness can be seen when trying to assign the class position and valuation of a character like the mother, Martha Jane, in Body and Soul. She lacks most of the traits listed above, yet we know she is a good character, and Micheaux’s good characters tend to be middle-class. In Chapter 4 below on Body and Soul, I refer to her as working class because of her constant labor; her constant labor is an aspect of her character that allows her to lay the foundation for a middle-class life for her daughter, so one might call her proto middle class.

Micheaux’s characterization of the middle class was consistent with his tendency to take the middle path through most vertical hazards such as those of twoness (racial and ethnic stratification and assimilation) and expensiveness (economic class). Thus, a kind of bipolar dialectic can be abstracted from Micheaux’s works that places the (middle) class represented by the qualities listed above in a vertical bracket of grave dangers that threaten that class from below and above. Below lies the class characterized by disdainful qualities.

Micheaux’s lower-class qualities consist generally of weak, stooped, shrinking, or shuffling carriage; dialect and ungrammatical English; illiteracy and narrow interests; unclean or disheveled clothing or eccentric ostentation of dress; rural spiritualism; careless mental simplicity; cultural ignorance and philistinism; sexual promiscuity; social dependency; lack of initiative; economic profligacy; ethnic nationalisms and ethnic reaction; racial and ethnic betrayal and jealousy; African-American bigotry toward whites, Jews, and others; narrow travel perspective; loud and public exercising of private matters; fear of or disdain for work; unfair play through rackets and tricks; cynicism and distrust; furtiveness; and exploitative sexual love.

From above, the middle class is threatened by an upper class; Micheaux’s upper-class qualities include passing for white; racial, sexual, legal, social, religious, and economic exploitation and abuse of power; cooperation and collaboration with white supremacism; insouciance; alienation; hubris; patronization; ignorance; foolishness; and overt racial betrayal.

The three lists above represent, in one positive (middle-class) and two negative (lower- and upper-class) groupings, a picture of the American class situation according to Micheaux’s surviving film work; they constitute a set of material criteria that will be used in the film analyses below to determine what Micheaux intended as the class position of each of his characters.

Positive and Negative Images in Relation to Race

The association of these categories and traits with controversial issues of positive and negative images of African Americans is unavoidable; those issues are treated a great length in Straight Lick and occasionally throughout this study. However, it is worth repeating that Micheaux refused to see any character traits, on either the positive or the negative lists, as essentially connected with race or ethnicity, though he has been accused of doing so. On the one hand, he presented black people who conformed to the values and qualities of the first list, the middle-class traits, as good; such good characters include all of his heroes and heroines. On the other hand, he presented black people who conform to the values of the second and third lists as bad, including all of his major and minor antagonists. He presented relatively few white people in his films, but of those he did present there are very few who are middle class in his terms. There are some whites who are lower class, conforming to the debasing negative values listed above; these include the white crackers and lynchers in Within Our Gates (1919) and the white banker, the sheriff, and some townsfolk in Birthright (1939). On the whole, however, the lower-class threat in Micheaux’s films comes from prodigal African Americans. The inverse is true of the upper class. White people who conform to the qualities in the third list (upper class) are relatively plentiful, including the white planters who cheat and rape their black tenants in Within Our Gates; the white plant manager who is a rapist and believes himself also to be a murderer in Murder in Harlem; the white boxing managers who rig the fight in Underworld; the white club owners who prostitute their black chorus girls in Lying Lips; and the white southern philanthropist with fantasies of Aryan purity in Birthright.

There are also some upper-class whites who play positive roles, such as the northern philanthropist who contributes to the southern black school in Within Our Gates; the white school-board chairman who defends the slandered black schoolteacher in God’s Step Children; the white theater owner who, though something of a fool, nonetheless benevolently invests in the black musical production in Swing! and the white southern aristocrat in Birthright, who, though even more of a fool than the theater owner in Swing! still hires and protects the black hero, finally leaving his entire white-aristocratic fortune to him, allowing the hero to establish two institutions of African-American uplift.

Most of Micheaux’s lower classes are black, but some are white; and most of his upper classes are white, but some are black. Also, not all the lower classes, black or white, are bad; and not all the upper classes, white or black, are bad. Micheaux’s portrayal of light and dark skin reflects a complex value system that cannot easily be simplified to accommodate charges of racism or self-hatred. It is true that there may have been a tendency to favor light-skinned characters in Micheaux’s work, in other words to correlate light skin with the character traits of the first list above and to correlate dark skin with the second list. That tendency was anything but consistent, however, and its contradictions are often significant and telling. Micheaux was himself dark, though his own dark color would not necessarily have prevented racial self-hatred from affecting his work as a project of denial.

Micheaux’s work is not racial or ethnic in its basic rhetoric. Rather, it is middle class. The goodness and badness of characters in Micheaux’s films and novels are not primarily defined by their being white or black, light or dark.

The Idea of the Middle Class

Micheaux’s critics have often denigrated his identification with the middle class. For some critics, the middle class that Micheaux honored has represented implicitly the unflattering traits associated with middling lives of reduced expectation, of endlessly delayed gratification that devalues pleasure, and of conformity that produces alienation, self-diminishment, quietism, and joylessness. The middle class, however, was and is also the vast repository of most citizens in the developed world. Virtually 100 percent of the critics and scholars who have made judgments about Micheaux’s middle-class values are themselves of the middle class; so is the writer of this study and, most likely, the reader. Thus, the term middle class, though clearly appropriate in many ways to Micheaux’s values, seems too inclusive to help in differentiating among the critical responses that have employed the term and thus too vague to assist in assigning a significant class position to Micheaux’s films and their style. Critical confusion surrounding Micheaux may thus be partly a semantic problem. In the search for relevant specificity within the idea of the middle class, a perspective needs to be constructed within the basic definitions of class.

An appropriate beginning point is provided by William Julius Wilson:

Since class is a slippery concept that has been defined in a variety of ways in the social science literature, I should like to indicate that in this study the concept means any group of people who have more or less similar goods, services, or skills to offer for income in a given economic order and who therefore receive similar financial remuneration in the marketplace. One’s economic class position determines in major measure one’s life chances, including the chances for external living conditions and personal life experiences.¹²

Wilson’s definition is appropriate in that it appears in a work that attempts to redirect attention from race to class, as Micheaux’s work did.

Class and Evaluation

Aside from the relevance of class to Micheaux’s identity and overriding goal of uplift, class—because of its association with artistic evaluation—is of theoretical interest in any attempt to assess the accomplishment of Micheaux. The classic films of the 1930s had class in the sense meant by Gellius in the second century a.d. (see Appendix 1 in Straight Lick for a discussion of the relation of class to the classicisms of Tullius, Gellius, and Amiri Baraka). The films by Lubitsch, Cukor, and Hawks were not only artistically thoroughly elegant, beautiful, literary, witty, and well made, they were also expensive, and they were parables and icons of first-class citizenship as defined by Tullius in the sixth century b.c. Compared to such standards of beauty, much of Micheaux’s work has been found wanting.

Micheaux’s Class Position

The criticisms surrounding Micheaux’s middle-class and bourgeois values reflect a confusion about Micheaux’s own attitude toward the middle class. Despite the confusion, it is clear that Micheaux’s work is not intended as a critique of capitalism, though it can certainly be taken as such, as this two-volume study indicates. The tendency for some criticism of Micheaux to bifurcate into admiration for his capitalistic entrepreneurship or disdain for his déclassé production values is symptomatic of a polarity of normative values behind such criticisms and is indicative of the need to discuss Micheaux’s relationship on the one hand to capital and on the other hand to the underclass, or truly disadvantaged. These issues are discussed extensively in Straight Lick, which claims that Micheaux’s work is middle class and was demonstrably in conflict with the true bourgeois class, exemplified most notably by Hollywood cinema.

The Media Arts in Society

Micheaux’s goal and strategy of uplift imply a thesis about the media arts in society. Micheaux recognized early in the history of cinema that not just books but also films were an appropriate medium of education, inquiry, and public debate. If American democracy depended on citizen participation in American education, then access to the ecology of cinema—financing, production, distribution, exhibition, promotion, and criticism—had to be a part of the American dream and of African-American uplift. Micheaux’s praxis, which understood and developed the entire ecology of an independent cinema, anticipated the formulations of Gerald O’Grady and others during the rise of the media arts center movement in the United States in the 1970s.¹³

Certainly Griffith and the mainstream film industry knew the importance of the media arts in the forum of citizenship and nationhood. America’s most professorial president, Woodrow Wilson, recognized Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as like writing history with lightning. Micheaux’s cinematic challenge to Griffith’s, and Wilson’s, version of history was proto-litigious—Within Our Gates v. The Birth of a Nation, Micheaux v. Griffith, were cultural antecedents of Brown v. Board of Education.

History versus Lightning

Wilson was serious about Griffith’s history, but he and everyone else were most impressed with its lightning. One of the principal characteristics of Griffith’s construction of the media arts, in contrast to Micheaux’s, was a privileging of spectacle over inquiry. Griffith wielded spectacle as an offensive weapon for class dominance by playing the money card. Micheaux wielded education as a defensive weapon for uplift by playing the knowledge card. Both money and knowledge inflect power in complex ways, and money and knowledge also inflect each other.

Griffith and Micheaux staked out compelling and opposing visions of money and knowledge in the media arts. The purpose of this study is to look more carefully at Micheaux’s end of the spectrum—his less-expensive, less-spectacular, self-made middle-class (crooked-stick) visions of uplift. But before addressing those visions it will be useful to hear something about Micheaux’s self-made middle-class life and how he came to write books and make films. It is a story worth telling.

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1. Micheaux’s thematic concerns and his stylistic accomplishment are briefly reviewed in this introduction and are reconsidered in the concluding chapter of this study. Also, for an extended review of the critical literature on Micheaux, see Charlene Regester, The Misreading and Rereading of African American Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Film History: An International Journal 7, no. 4 (1995): 426–449; J. Ronald Green, Straight Lick: The Cinematic Accomplishment of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and J. Ronald Green, The Reemergence of Oscar Micheaux, in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; co-published with Le Giornate del Cinema Muto).

2. Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

3. Gossett, Race, quoting from Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), 355.

4. Gossett, Race, Chapter 5, The Teutonic Origins Theory, and Chapter 14, World War I and Racism.

5. See Gossett, Race.

6. The DuBois quotations are taken from Anita Haya Goldman, Negotiating Claims of Race and Rights: Du Bois, Emerson, and the Critique of Liberal Nationalism, The Massachusetts Review (Summer 1994): 185–186.

7. Goldman, Negotiating Claims, 182. Emerson’s implication that class was a matter of race did not, among other things, go very far in answering the questions of class difference between England and America that Emerson was concerned about elsewhere.

8. See Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 102.

9. See Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

10. That is the subject of William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

11. Such a case was made by Cinda Becker in an unpublished student paper, Rape, Murder and Censorship in the Films of Oscar Micheaux, in the spring of 1994.

12. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race, ix. Wilson includes the following as a footnote to the above quotation: This conception of ‘class’ is a modified version of Max Weber’s explication of the concept. See From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited, with an introduction, by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 181–182.

13. See Gerald O’Grady, The Spectrum of Cinema, Film Library Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1975): 7–16. See also J. Ronald Green, Film and Not-for-Profit Media Institutions, in Film/Culture: Explorations of Cinema in its Social Context, ed. Sari Thomas (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1982), 37–59; and Green, Film and Video: An Institutional Paradigm and Some Issues of National Policy, Journal of Cultural Economics (June 1984): 61–79.

1

Biographical Backstory

Oscar Micheaux was born into a rural working-class African-American family in mid-America in 1884. He was not formally educated beyond the most modest and basic public schooling and he was subjected all his life to race and class prejudice, yet he created an impressive legacy in one of the most sophisticated, expensive, and fragile cultural endeavors of the twentieth century—commercial cinema. In the process of making himself into the first African-American film auteur, without the slightest help from the huge film industries on either coast of the United States, Micheaux lived in two of the most sophisticated and competitive cities in the world, Chicago and New York; he (probably) traveled to Latin America and Europe to establish his own business connections; and he circulated continuously through the great black communities of America’s northern cities and throughout the American South. During that time, 1913 to 1951, he wrote, published, and distributed his seven novels and he wrote, produced, directed, and distributed his forty-some feature films, more than any other black filmmaker in the world. How did this improbable narrative unfold?

Most accounts of Micheaux’s career begin with his homesteading on the newly opened Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota soon after the turn of the twentieth century. Micheaux’s first novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, the first of his many accounts of his life, was written and published in 1913, shortly after his homesteading venture failed. There are good reasons, however, for the purposes of analysis and assessment of Micheaux’s films, to begin the story earlier, as Micheaux himself does in The Conquest.

As a member of a large farming family near the Ohio River in southern Illinois in 1884, Micheaux showed an early talent for selling his family’s produce in the nearby town of Metropolis. He learned to resent black ministers because they monopolized his mother’s (and other women’s) attentions and because they were given the best cuts of meat at Sunday dinners.¹ He also somehow grew to be what the elders of the church called worldly, a free thinker, and a dangerous associate for young Christian folks. At sixteen he was fairly disgusted with it all and took no pains to keep [his] disgust concealed. Already thick-skinned enough not to care what people thought of him, Micheaux characterized his own outspokenness and his unpopular ideas at that tender age in what is still a good description of his reputation and his attitude throughout his life:

Another thing that added to my unpopularity, perhaps, was my persistent declarations that there were not enough competent colored people to grasp the many opportunities that presented themselves, and that if white people could possess such nice homes, wealth and luxuries, so in time, could the colored people. You’re a fool, I would be told, and then would follow a lecture describing the time-worn long and cruel slavery, and after the emancipation, the prejudice and hatred of the white race, whose chief object was to prevent the progress and betterment of the negro. This excuse for the negro’s lack of ambition was constantly dinned into my ears from the Kagle corner loafer to the minister in the pulpit, and I became so tired of it all that I declared that if I could ever leave M—pls [Metropolis] I would never return. More, I would disprove such a theory and in the following chapters I hope to show that what I believed fourteen years ago was true.²

Even today, long after his death, this position is still held by many intellectually respectable African-Americans, and it is still resented by many others. For example, at the celebration at Oscar Micheaux’s gravesite in Great Bend, Kansas, in March of 2001—marking the semi-centennial of Micheaux’s death—one of Micheaux’s relatives, Marcia L. Lewis, a Creedmore, North Carolina, dentist, told me that she felt that if she had listened to all the protest rhetoric she heard growing up, she would never have amounted to anything. This is still a controversial, but not uncommon, attitude.

Controversial as a sixteen-year-old in his home town in 1900, Micheaux could write thirteen years later with continuing pride about his teenage arrogance; and today, twenty years after the centennial of his birth, not much has changed—Micheaux has as many enemies as friends, and even some of his friends are divided in their loyalty.

The passage above from Micheaux’s novel suggests that at sixteen he was conscious of class in a way that some critics found, and will still find, problematic for racial politics. His emphasis on individual competence and initiative, on the attainment of wealth and luxuries, and his disdain for the rhetoric of protest, or what he called excuse, places him squarely in the midst of issues of race and class today. That and the complexity and thoughtfulness of his vision are what make him perennially fascinating. Micheaux’s proclivity for using class as a larger paradigm than race seems to have been fully developed in his adolescence, was not fundamentally altered during his career, was bound to stir debate in his time, and is just as likely to stir debate today.

Micheaux’s first novel is a good guide to his first three decades because it is a thinly disguised biography. Though critics have been careful to call The Conquest a fictionalized account of Micheaux’s first twenty-nine years, the biographical and historical accuracy of the book should not