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215 The Secret Life of Oscar Micheaux Race Films, Contested Histories, and Modern American Culture ROBERT JACKSON The year 1884 is hardly remembered as an important one in the history of cinema. Indeed, Edison’s kinetoscope, widely considered the starting point for commercial motion pictures, was still a decade off.1 For historians of American culture, 1884 recalls less the dancing of celluloid images onscreen than the gliding of a makeshift raft down the Mississippi River. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s masterpiece of that year, chronicled the journey of its title character and the escaped slave Jim away from their hamlet in northern Missouri into the heart of the South, where their interracial bond—and indeed, the very character of their shared humanity—would face, and survive, severe trials. If things had been different, however, if Huck and Jim had not missed a key left turn at Cairo, Illinois, they would have come to a small town called Metropolis a few miles up the Ohio River.There in Metropolis, in 1884, Oscar Micheaux was born, one of eleven children of former slaves. Micheaux’s parents could identify both with the world of slavery Twain described and with Jim’s eagerness for freedom; determined to see their children take advantage of opportunities denied to themselves a generation earlier in the South, Calvin and Bell Micheaux had settled in Metropolis largely because of the town’s schools. At the nexus of slave memory and the promise of modernity, Micheaux matured in an American society that was itself in the midst of profound changes. From such beginnings along the border of North and South, Micheaux would go on to become the foremost African American filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century . Producing more than a film a year between 1919 and 1940 (and a final film, The Betrayal, in 1948, three years before his death), Micheaux was exceptional among blacks in cinema during his time, and his career gave shape to a larger body of “race films”—perhaps as many as 500 produced by blacks from 1910 to 1950, most of them not extant today—that marked 216 ROBERT JACKSON the burgeoning motion picture industry with a significant African American presence. To ground Oscar Micheaux in the imaginative topography of Huck Finn is more than merely a facile gesture to establish the filmmaker’s presence on a map of American popular culture. It is instead a reminder that Micheaux’s roots are a good deal deeper and more complex than much recent film studies scholarship, which has produced an admirable literature on Micheaux in recent years, has revealed.2 Certainly some of the power of Micheaux’s humane 1920 film Within Our Gates, which I will discuss at greater length below, arises from its brilliant and timely rebuttal of D. W. Griffith’s racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. And Micheaux represents a most valuable figure for film scholars to consider during the three decades of his career, particularly in order to counterpoint his struggles and achievements as a black independent with the developments of an increasingly studio-driven mainstream American film industry.3 But 1884, a seemingly prehistoric date in these contexts, still demands attention. Micheaux was born amid the initial consolidation of southern Jim Crow practices in the wake of Reconstruction, anticipating the larger accident that his entire lifetime almost exactly coincided with the segregation era in U.S. history.4 As a youth, Micheaux’s experience was informed both by blacks’ memory of recent slave life and by the seismic social shifts of the Gilded Age that were transforming America’s regional identities: the rise of the industrializing and corporatizing “New South,” harbinger of modern consumer culture; the Great Migration of African Americans to northern and largely urban destinations, as well as their movements from rural areas to urban centers within the South; the rise and fall of Populism, an insurgent political movement pitting North, South, and West in uneasy alliances and rivalries ; the disturbing creep of southern lynching and the clarion call of early jazz.5 Decades later Micheaux would address all of these concerns in his work. The South of Micheaux’s cultural roots during these late nineteenthcentury years, popularly viewed as, in H. L. Mencken’s notorious appraisal, “a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence,” was in actuality a region of enormous ferment, an active and improvisational space both grounded in the traditional folk cultures of the...

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