Micheaux, << mee SHOH, >> Oscar (1884-1951), was a pioneering African American filmmaker. From 1918 to 1948, Micheaux made almost 50 movies, serving as producer, director, and screenwriter. Micheaux made his movies for black viewers who were excluded from the mainstream American motion-picture industry.
Most of Micheaux’s films are lost. Many were crude melodramas, but several dealt with controversial themes for their time. These subjects included lynching, interracial romance, intimidation by such antiblack organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, and black characters trying to pass as white. The African American singer and actor Paul Robeson made his movie debut in Micheaux’s film Body and Soul (1924).
Micheaux was born on Jan. 2, 1884, in Metropolis, Illinois. His parents were freed slaves living in poverty on their farm. Micheaux worked on the family farm until he left home at the age of 17. He worked at a variety of jobs before buying the first of two tracts of land as a homesteader on an Indian reservation in South Dakota in 1904. Micheaux wrote seven novels, beginning with three autobiographical works, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (1915), and The Homesteader (1917).
Micheaux began his film career by adapting his novel The Homesteader for the silent screen. The film was released in 1919. His major silent movies include Within Our Gates (1920), Symbol of the Unconquered (also called The Wilderness Trail, 1920) and The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921).
Micheaux made fewer sound films than silent films, and critics consider the sound films lower in quality. They include A Daughter of the Congo (1930), The Exile (1931), and God’s Stepchildren (1937). By the mid-1930’s, Micheaux’s technically primitive films were declining in popularity with black audiences as tastes changed. His last film was The Betrayal (1948).
Micheaux resumed writing novels with The Wind from Nowhere (1941). He then wrote his most commercially successful novel, The Case of Mrs. Wingate (1944). His final novels were The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, Based on a Great Insurance Swindle and a Woman! (1946) and The Masquerade (1947). Micheaux died on March 25, 1951.
See also Robeson, Paul .
