Oscar Micheaux was a pioneering African American filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, and novelist.

 

The motion picture industry was in the silent film era, and blacks were not welcome in the industry. The only way a black could become a movie producer was to start his own company. Micheaux did just that, and turned his autobiographical novel, The Homesteader, into a movie in 1919. This was the first feature length film produced by an American black.6 Actor and director Tim Reid summed it up: “Not only did he do the impossible, creating a Black film industry at a time when Blacks weren't even considered photographical by White filmmakers, but here was a man who pioneered by writing, producing and directing his own movies...”

His next film, Within Our Gates (1920), was his response to D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that had glorified the Ku Klux Klan and justified the violent oppression of African-Americans to prevent miscegenation. Though Griffith's flawed masterpiece was the most popular movie until the release of another Civil War potboiler called Gone with the Wind (1939) in 1939, it was loathed by African-Americans due to its crude and hateful racial stereotypes. "Within These Gates" was made to rebut Griffith and show that the reality of racism in the U.S. was that African-Americans were more likely to be lynched and exploited by whites than the reverse. The movie showed African-American and white communities that the racism of the dominant society could be challenged. Micheaux's place in history was assured as he injected an African-American perspective, via the powerful medium of the motion picture, into the American consciousness.

 

Working out of Chicago, Michaeaux subsequently made more than 30 films over the next three decades, including musicals, comedies, westerns, romances and gangster films. Some of the popular themes in his work were African-Americans passing for white, intermarriage and legal injustice. He used actors from New York's Lafayette Players, and always cast his actors on the basis of type, with light-skinned African-American actors typically playing the leads, and darker-skinned blacks the heavies. That trait was part of the consciousness of the African-American community (and mirrored the very racism that he inveigled against) that persists to this day, and Micheaux was severely criticized for it by later critics. However, no critic could deny the importance of Micheaux's movies, as they were a radical departure from Hollywood's racist portrayal of blacks as dolts, Uncle Toms, Mammies and dangerous bucks. As the most successful and prolific of black filmmakers, Micheaux was vital to African-American and overall American consciousness by providing a diverse portfolio of non-stereotyped black characters, as well as images and stories of African-American life.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/sisterthundershow/2014/02/24/micheaux-was-a-pioneering-african-american-filmmaker