Within Our Gates

For the 1915 Australian film, see Within Our Gates (1915 film).

Within Our Gates
Directed by	Oscar Micheaux
Produced by	Oscar Micheaux
Written by	Oscar Micheaux
Starring	Evelyn Preer Flo Clements James D. Ruffin Jack Chenault William Smith Charles D. Lucas
Distributed by	Micheaux Book & Film Company
Release date(s)	January 12, 1920
Running time	79 minutes
Country	United States
Language	Silent film English intertitles

Within Our Gates (1920) is a silent race film that dramatically expresses the racial situation in America during the violent years of Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration, and the emergence of the "New Negro". The story focuses on an African-American woman who goes North in an effort to help a minister in the Deep South raise money to keep a school open for poor Black children. Her romance with a black doctor eventually leads to revelations about her family's past that expose the racial skeletons in America's closet, most famously through the film's depiction of a lynching. Produced, written and directed by novelist Oscar Micheaux, it is the oldest known surviving film made by an African-American director.

Plot

The film opens with Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), a young African-American woman, visiting her cousin Alma in the North, while she waits for Conrad to return and marry her. Alma is also in love with Conrad, and prefers to see Sylvia married off to her brother-in-law Larry, a gambler and criminal. She hides a letter sent by Conrad, announcing his arrival. Alma arranges for Sylvia to be caught in a compromising position by Conrad when he finally returns. Conrad storms off and leaves for Brazil, while Larry kills a man during a game of poker. With nothing to keep her up North, Sylvia returns to the South.

Sylvia meets Rev. Jacobs, a minister who runs a school for black children. People from a wide area turn to the minister to educate their children and give them a chance for the future. The school is overcrowded, and he cannot continue on the small amount offered by the local government for education. With the school faced with closure, Sylvia volunteers to return to the North to raise $5,000.

At first, it seems she will fail. She cannot raise the money and her purse is stolen, but a local man, Dr. Vivian, manages to get it back for her. Sylvia is almost hit by a car as she saves a young child playing in the street. The car belongs to a wealthy philanthropist, Elena Warwick. Learning of Sylvia's mission, she decides to give her the needed money. Warwick's friend, Mrs. Stratton, a southerner, attempts to discourage her, but Warwick is angered and increases her donation to $50,000. With this amount, the school is saved, and Sylvia can return home.

Still from Within Our Gates, portraying the lynching of Jasper Landry (William Stark) and his wife (Mattie Edwards)

Still from the 1919 Oscar Micheaux film Within Our Gates featuring actress Evelyn Preer

Meanwhile, Dr. Vivian has fallen in love with Sylvia. He goes to Alma, who tells him about Sylvia's past: these scenes are portrayed in the film.

She was raised by a poor Black family, the Landrys, who managed to provide her with an education. During her youth, the senior Landry was wrongfully accused of the murder of an unpopular but wealthy white landlord, Gridlestone. A white mob attacked the Landry family, lynching the parents and hunting down their son, who escaped after nearly being shot. The mob also lynched an Uncle Tom servant of Gridlestone named Efram. Sylvia escaped after being chased by Gridlestone's brother, who tried to rape her. When the attacker noticed a scar on her breast, he realized that Sylvia was his mixed-race daughter through his affair with a local black woman. He had paid for Sylvia's education.

After hearing her tragic story, Dr. Vivian goes to Sylvia and encourages her to love her country and take pride in the contributions African Americans have made to it. He professes his love for her, and the film ends with their marriage.

Production background

Often regarded in the context of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which had appeared five years earlier, Micheaux's project has been characterized as a response to the racism of Griffith's work. The film's depiction of lynching shows "what Blacks knew and Northern Whites refused to believe", turning the "accusation of 'primitivism'... back onto White Southern culture".

Two events spurred the film's creation: the release of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) four years earlier, with its heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan after the American Civil War; and the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, in which ethnic white mobs killed numerous blacks and burned so many houses and apartments that thousands of blacks were left homeless. Micheaux chose the film's name as a response to D. W. Griffith, who used the line "Within your gates" in a film to suggest that people should not harm one another, lest they be harmed. For Micheaux, the tables could turn and whites could be harmed in the future.

Within Our Gates was the second of more than forty films directed by Micheaux. With a limited budget, Micheaux used borrowed costumes and props, and he had no opportunity to reshoot scenes.

Lost for decades, a single print of the film, entitled La Negra (The Black Woman), was discovered in Spain in the 1970s. A brief sequence in the middle of the film was lost. Only four of the original English intertitles survived, the rest having been replaced with Spanish intertitles when the film was distributed in Spain in the 1920s.

In 1993, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center restored the film as closely as possible to the original. The Spanish titles were retranslated back into English by Scott Simmon. He removed explanatory material, which had been added for Spanish audiences, and drew from the style and diction that Micheaux used in his novels and in the intertitles for Body and Soul, his only silent film to survive with its original intertitles. The missing sequence was summarized with an intertitle frame.

Response

Within Our Gates was initially rejected by the Board of Censors in Chicago when Micheaux first submitted the film in December 1919. An article in the Chicago Defender of 17 January 1920 asserted, "This is the picture that it required two solid months to get by the Censor Boards." A week later the Defender reported, "Those who reasoned with the spectacle of last July in Chicago ever before them, declared the showing pre-eminently dangerous; while those who reasoned with the knowledge of existing conditions, the injustices of the times, the lynchings and handicaps of ignorance, determined that the time is ripe to bring the lesson to the front."

Critics of the film feared that the vivid lynching and attempted rape scenes would spark further interracial violence in a city still tense from the riots of July. Officials in Omaha, New Orleans, and other cities objected along those lines when they blocked the screening of the film or demanded that these scenes be cut. In the context of this controversy, the film garnered large audiences in Chicago when it was released in January 1920. Apparently the film often screened in different cut versions. For example, an article in the Defender reported that on Tuesday, February 24 of 1920, Within Our Gates "will be shown" at the States Theater in Chicago "without the cuts which were made before its initial presentation." Other evidence of cuts included extant film stills of scenes that did not appear in the surviving film copy, as well as viewers' descriptions that are different from the film as it is now known.

The film is considered an important document of African-American life in the years immediately following World War I, when violent racism was still rampant throughout the United States. In 1992, Within Our Gates was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant".

Aesthetics

Early judgments that Micheaux's work lacked aesthetic finesse or artistic power now appear short-sighted. Micheaux carefully constructed Within Our Gates to educate his audience about racism, uplift, peonage, women's rights, and the urban "new Negro" emerging after the Great Migration.

His movement back and forth from North to South repeated that of D. W. Griffith, who used a North-South marriage plot. Griffith dramatized a white reunion of regions that canceled the legacy of Reconstruction to leave blacks out of the national picture. Micheaux's film ended with a wedding as well, but his occurred between two sophisticated African Americans. His protagonists from the South and the North lay claim to the whole Nation. They did this in the face of discriminatory treatment of blacks in the military during World War I, and eruptions of violence that met some returning African American veterans.

Critics (such as Jane Gaines, Ronald Green, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence) celebrated the skill with which Micheaux intercut the lynching of the Landry family with the attempted rape of Sylvia by Gridlestone. This editing deconstructed the ideology that whites had used in justifying lynching as punishment of black men for alleged sexual assaults against white women. The real story, as Micheaux demonstrated, was quite the opposite. His work reminded the audience of the long-standing practice of sexual predation by white men against black women, which has its roots in slavery days. Many other episodes turned out to be cleverly edited in ways that both showed and deconstructed white visual traditions and white ideologies.

Notable, too, was the detailed layering of allusions to current social and political events, from the death of Theodore Roosevelt to the heroism of African American soldiers in the war to debates in the Senate over Jim Crow and peonage. The film's weaknesses may be excused by Micheaux's extremely limited budget and punishing schedule, and by the fragmentary nature of the only surviving print. In fact, we will probably never know what the "original" film looked like, or whether the only extant version is what Micheaux originally intended.

Representation of racism

The film attempted to portray the many different faces of contemporary African American society. There were heroes and heroines, like Sylvia and Reverend Jacobs, but there were also criminals like Larry and lackeys like a minister whom Mrs. Stafford supported, who tried to encourage African Americans to reject suffrage. Some critics have suggested that Bernice Ladd, who plays Mrs. Stafford, represents a "Lillian Gish figure", referring to the actress' role in The Birth of a Nation, for the anti-feminist and racist characteristics she embodies. Ladd also bears a physical resemblance to Gish, suggesting a deliberate continuity by Micheaux.

Mr. Gridlestone's servant Efram attempted to ingratiate himself with the local white population by denouncing Mr. Landry as the murderer, even though he did not actually see the crime committed. Though he celebrated his relationship with the white community, Efram was lynched when the mob failed to find the Landrys.

Micheaux recognized the complexity of African American life, particularly in the Deep South. He was reluctant to blame only whites for the poverty of Blacks. He criticized Blacks who helped to perpetuate their condition for personal gain.

See also

• List of rediscovered films

External links

• Within Our Gates at the Internet Movie Database
• Within Our Gates is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• Within Our Gates at AllRovi
• Stace England & The Salt Kings Original Song Within Our Gates With Film Clips