Deep Archive Finds in the Vein of Within Our Gates: Cult Guide

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of The Homesteader perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

A young man named Jean in post-World War I Chicago falls in love with a beautiful girl named Edith. He proposes to her, but realizes that she's involved in the rackets and won't leave them, so he goes back home to South Dakota, where he becomes a successful rancher. There he falls for a white girl, but guilt drives him back to Chicago, where he runs into Edith again, and they agree to marry. When Edith is later found murdered, Jean is blamed for the crime.

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

The Homesteader involves six principal characters, the leading one being Jean Baptiste (Charles Lucas), a homesteader far off in the Dakotas, the lone African American living in the area. To this wilderness arrives Jack Stewart, a Scotsman, with his motherless daughter, Agnes (Iris Hall), who doesn't know that she is biracial. In Agnes, Baptiste meets the girl of his dreams. Peculiar fate threw her in the company of the Homesteader, but, because Baptiste is black and Agnes is presumably white, their love is forbidden by law. Baptiste eventually sacrifices the love of this girl of his dreams, goes back to his own people and marries Orlean, the daughter of a black preacher named McCarthy. McCarthy, the embodiment of vanity, deceit and hypocrisy, really admires the marriage his daughter has made. He speaks of the "rich" young man she has married, praises him to the highest. Baptiste does not know, however, that McCarthy requires and is in the habit of having people praise him. Baptiste does not do it because he is not of the temperament to do so. Because of this failure grows the tragedy of mismarriage to Orlean (Evelyn Preer), a sweet girl, kind and good, but like her mother, without the strength of her convictions. Baptiste, Orlean having failed him, is persecuted by McCarthy and by Ethel (McCarthy's other daughter), who, like her father, possesses all the evil a woman is capable of; she is married to weak-kneed Glavis. In the end, Orlean, driven insane by the evil she had been the innocent cause of, rights a wrong which causes Baptiste to go back to his land in the Dakotas, where he finds the girl he first discovered. Later, he learns[by whom?] the truth about her race and the story has a beautiful ending.

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of A Daughter of the Congo perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

A US cavalry officer rescues a mixed race girl, raised in Africa, from slavers.

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Birthright perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

A young black Harvard graduate fights against a variety of obstacles, including racist opposition, in order to build a school for black children.

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

A traditional minstrel show with an all black cast. It shows a choir singing and a vaudeville act of a comedy duo. It also levels criticism at a certain social class of the African-American community by using some racial stereotypes.

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of The Darktown Revue perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

The misadventures of a man who accepted a bet to spend a night in a haunted house.

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

A malevolent phony preacher plots to take advantage of a woman from his congregation who happens to be in love with his long-estranged identical twin brother.

Dir: Oscar Micheaux

Film producer Winston L. Jaune gives his brother J. Lee a job in his company. J. Lee promptly steals company funds, spends lavishly in cabarets, at wild parties, and on women. Hw thereby put the company in financial difficulties.