The Plow and the Pen: The Pioneering Adventures of Oscar Micheaux

Between 1919 and 1948, Oscar Micheaux produced, directed, and distributed more than forty feature-length films. Although his status as a pioneer in early African American cinema has been justly acknowledged, the films themselves, more often than not, have been damned with faint praise. Joseph Young, Micheaux's toughest critic, has written: "Micheaux was not an excellent filmmaker, nor even a good one. He turned out to be the best in a class of black filmmakers." ¹ Donald Bogle, an authority on African American cinema, argues that Micheaux's films were "technically inferior" to Hollywood products because they were made in less time, with less money, and often with amateur casts and improvised crews. In addition, he addresses Micheaux's self-imposed limitations, claiming that Micheaux's body of work, for better or worse, "reflected the interests and outlooks of the black bourgeoisie." According to Bogle, Micheaux's films depicted "a fantasy world where blacks were just as affluent, just as educated, just as ‘cultured,' just as well-mannered—in short, just as white" as their Hollywood counterparts. ²

Recently critics have begun to reassess Micheaux's few surviving films. Works once considered merely sensational and melodramatic now receive credit for dealing with such volatile and topical issues as rape, domestic abuse, lynching, and miscegenation. His focus on the black bourgeoisie and his defense of Booker T. Washington have been reunderstood as pleas for black independence, self-education, and laissez-faire competition. Micheaux has been called a "maverick stylist" and a "model for the independent black cinema" whose once "technically inferior" films have been heralded in some quarters as examples of guerilla, avant-garde filmmaking. ³ Midnight Ramble, a 1994 PBS documentary, has acknowledged Micheaux's contribution to race movies. ⁴ Since the mid-1990s, the Film and Video Program at Duke University has offered a Web site and newsletter dedicated to educating readers about the once forgotten African American filmmaker. Heading into the twenty-first century, the critical momentum propelling Micheaux to the front ranks among American artists has continued to build. In the fall of 2000, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in conjunction with the New York Film Festival, screened a restored version of Micheaux's 1925 classic, Body and Soul, with a new jazz score composed by Wycliffe Gordon and conducted by Wynton Marsalis.

Despite this renewed interest in Micheaux's films, it is sometimes forgotten that before he became a pioneer in black cinema, Micheaux was literally a black pioneer. Born in Illinois in 1884, the grandson of a slave, Micheaux moved to South Dakota in 1904, when parcels of land on the Rosebud Reservation were made available to settlers through an organized government lottery. In purchasing a quarter section and farming it, Micheaux became one of the earliest African American homesteaders on the United States frontier. After a drought in 1911, subsequent crop failures, foreclosure, and the collapse of his marriage, Micheaux turned to writing. In 1913, he self-published The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, an autobiographical novel. Throughout the rest of his career, in fiction and film, Micheaux reworked this same material. In 1917, he self-published The Homesteader, a longer, more complex, and less autobiographical work that also deals with the hardships of a black pioneer. In 1919, his adaptation of the novel became the first feature-length African American film. After filming The Homesteader, Micheaux stopped writing novels and became a full-time film maker. During his most fertile period, between the early 1920s and the late 1930s, and during his resumed career as a writer in the following decade, Micheaux produced urban crime dramas, mysteries, melodramas, romances, and musicals. But he returned to the West periodically. In 1931, he directed The Exile, a remake of The Homesteader, believed to be the first African American talking film, ⁵ and in 1944, he self-published The Wind from Nowhere, his...