SOURCE:"'B'… for Black," in Film Comment, October, 1985, pp. 31-46.

[Bogle is the author of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (1973), a study of the representation of African Americans in movies. In the following essay, he discusses Micheaux's place in the history of African American filmmaking.]

The heroine of Oscar Micheaux's 1937 film God's Step Children is Naomi, a high-toned, light-skinned black girl who wants to be white. She frets, pouts, plots, whines, and, well, just plain acts up, turning her tiny black community topsy-turvy. Finally, Naomi does everyone a great service; she throws herself into the river and, like a nasty stain on her race, is washed away. For white moviegoers during the Depression, Naomi's trials and tribulations passed unnoticed. But for black audiences, Naomi's was a lopsidedly caustic and cautionary morality tale about cultural roots and loyalties, racial heritage and pride. It was only one of many such narratives told in a long forgotten branch of American movie history: race movies, independently produced films with all-black casts, made outside Hollywood, in an attempt to merchandise mass dreams for black America.

America's race movies—from the early years of the century to the late Forties—first turned up as a kind of alternative cinema, made in response to the general movie fare of the time, all those crude, corny, insulting, racist little ditties with titles that just about said everything: The Dancing Nig (c. 1907), For Massa's Sake (1911), and the Rastus series (How Rastus Got His Turkey, How Rastus Got His Pork Chops, Rastus and Chicken). In the early years of the 20th century, all a black audience could expect to see of itself was a shocking parade of stereotypes stumbling across the screen. Naive, doltish toms. Feisty mammies. Contorted comic coons. Worse, the roles were almost always played by white actors in blackface.

The same was true, of course, of even D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. More than any other movie in history, Griffith's 1915 Civil War epic, with its images of marauding Negro troops, power-mad mulattoes, and lusty black bucks, sent shock waves through black America, galvanizing its leaders into an uproar of protest and action. The NAACP launched a formal protest movement against the picture, setting up picket and boycott lines. And soon there appeared a group of independent black filmmakers—Emmett J. Scott, the brothers George and Noble Johnson, and the legendary Oscar Micheaux—who scrambled for money (from the black bourgeoisie or white backers) and quickly formed production companies, determined to make all-black films that stressed black America's achievements. Their first films—The Birth of a Race (1918), The Realization of a Negro's Ambition (1916), Trooper of Troop K (1916), and The Homesteader (1919), all initially serious tributes to black endurance and ambition—were important mainly because they proved that black cinema could exist.

Afterwards scores of other film companies (Reol Productions, The Unique Film Company, The Norman Film Manufacturing Company, The Frederick Douglass Film Company), some black owned, others white controlled, sprang up in places as diverse as Jacksonville, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, often using the abandoned studios of mainstream film companies that had fled to California. Their low-budget films, frequently crude and misshapen, were shown at segregated theaters in the South, at big city ghetto movie houses in the North, and on occasion, at black churches, schools, and social gatherings—almost anyplace where it was possible to reach a black audience. Before this movement of independents ended, approximately 150 such companies had come into existence. Hundreds of films had been produced. And race movies themselves had undergone two distinct phases and points of view.

Sometimes plodding, sometimes didactic, sometimes deliriously disjointed, some of the early race films were, quite frankly, terrible. A movie like Spying the Spy (1917), produced by a white-owned company (Ebony Pictures), was almost as stereotypical as any Hollywood product, with a bug-eyed lead character called Sambo Sam.

But others offered rousing, optimistic stories of black derring-do. The Bull Doggers (1923) featured Bill Pickett as a cowboy performing feats of heroism and honor. The Flaming Crisis (1924) focused on a tough black newspaperman falsely accused of murder, fighting to prove his innocence. The Flying Ace (1926) spotlighted a daring black aviator who, in midair, rescues a fair black damsel in distress. In these films, black Americans saw themselves incorporated into the national pop mythology, and a new set of archetypes emerged: heroic black men of action. Whether cowboys, detectives, or weary army vets, many of the early characters were walking embodiments of black assertion and aggression, and, of course, they gave the lie to America's notions of a Negro's place.

But the early race films touched on other matters, too. Among the most interesting were those that were high-minded statements on the nature of black life in America or on the racial dynamics—divisions and tensions—within the black community itself. Nowhere was a race theme more apparent than in the 1927 production Scar of Shame. Produced by The Colored Players of Philadelphia, this slow-moving and melancholy film told the story of an ill-matched marriage between a young, black concert pianist and a poor, lower-class, young black woman. Secretly ashamed of his wife, the young man keeps her hidden from his socially prominent middle-class mother. Through a series of likably implausible plot maneuvers, the two part. He begins life anew and falls in love with another woman, only to meet up with his wife again. She still loves him but knows she can never be his equal. Socially—despite both being black—they are of different worlds. Despondent, the wife commits suicide and frees him to marry the other woman, his social equal. Melodramatic but effective, Scar of Shame was a surprisingly eloquent statement on the class and color caste system that existed within the black community. Though Holly-wood would never have touched, least of all understood, the subject, the film reached and moved black audiences in a personal, intense way that Hollywood never did.

Of all the early black filmmakers, the most important (and one of the few to work in both silent and sound pictures) was the indefatigable producer/director Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951). A charismatic showman with a dash and flair he no doubt felt befitted a motion picture director, Micheaux was dedicated to his own concept of black cinema (a heady mix of subliminal social messages and sheer entertainment) and perhaps also to the creation of his own personal legend. He had once been a Pullman car porter, then a farmer in South Dakota, and by 1915, a self-published novelist. Within a few years, he turned to film, his fervid enthusiasm for moviemaking eventually carrying him to Chicago and later New York.

Early on, Micheaux realized (and relished) the importance of promotion. He is said to have toured the country to publicize one film and at the same time to seek financing for his next, often stepping out of cars and into meeting halls as if "he were God about to deliver a sermon." "Why, he was so impressive and so charming," said Lorenzo Tucker, an actor who appeared in several Micheaux films, "that he could talk the shirt off your back." On his tours, Micheaux approached white Southern theater managers and owners, often persuading them to show his black films at special matinee performances for black audiences or at special late shows for white audiences interested in black camp. Micheaux's shrewd promotional sense kept him in business, enabling him to produce, direct, and write, by some counts, almost 30 films from 1919 to 1948.

Micheaux's features were similar to Hollywood's, only technically inferior, resembling B-movies of the period. Lighting and editing were usually poor, and the acting could be dreadful—ranging from winging it to grandstanding. Often a scene was shot in a single take, as the camera followed an actor through a door or down a hallway. Since he was forced to shoot scenes so rapidly, he seldom had time (or money) to do retakes. Consequently, an actor might flub a line, then just pick up the pieces of his sentence and keep on going.

The action in Micheaux's films sometimes centered around one set. In God's Step Children, several key scenes occurred in front of a staircase. Filming in the home of a friend, Micheaux discovered that the staircase area offered the best lighting angles, and thus he worked his big scenes around it. Oddly enough, his limitations—the uncontrolled performances and the lived-in look of some sets—endowed his films with a strange realism. One half expects to hear Micheaux call "Cut" and to see the actors walk away from the camera or talk about how they're actually making a movie.

Intertwined in all his films is the consciousness of how race is a force in black life. Just as Negro newspapers and magazines took major news stories and reported them from a black angle, Micheaux took the typical Hollywood script and gave it a black slant. Underworld (1937) was a gangster film with a black gangster (he's the recent grad of a good colored college, who's gotten himself mixed up in Chicago's crime world) and a black gun moll. Daughter of the Congo (1930) was an African adventure story with a colored cavalry officer bent on rescuing a young Negro girl lost in the savage tropics. Temptation (1936) was a sophisticated sex drama in the DeMille vein.

On occasion, Micheaux focused exclusively on race as subject, as in Birthright (1924), the story of a young black Harvard graduate who returns to his home town in Tennessee bent upon founding a colored school to "uplift the race." Naturally, he encounters opposition, some of which comes from his fellow blacks, who agree with white Southerners that education ruins a Negro. In its own corny and sly way, Birthright made a definite plea for black unity while satirizing the old-style turncoats and toms. Micheaux liked this material so much that he remade the film in 1939.

Micheaux also gave his actresses vivid, important roles. Several of his films were also "women's pictures," with independent, strong-willed heroines. God's Step Children was part woman's film, part race-theme movie, its heroine Naomi punished with death perhaps precisely because of her free-wheeling independence.

Oscar Micheaux's greatest contribution is often viewed by some contemporary black audiences as his severest shortcoming. That his films reflected the interests and outlooks, the values and virtues, of the black bourgeoisie has long been held against him. Though his films never centered on the ghetto, few race movies did. They seldom dealt with racial misery or decay. Instead, they concentrated on the problems facing black "professional people." Then, too, his leading performers—as was typical of race films—were often close to the white ideal: straight hair, keen features, light skin.

To appreciate Micheaux's films one must understand that he was moving as far as possible from Hollywood's jesters and servants. He wanted to give his audience something "to further the race, not hinder it." Often he sacrificed plausibility to do so. He created a deluxe, ideal world where blacks were just as affluent, just as educated, just as "cultured" as their white counterparts. Oddly enough, as such, they remain a fascinating comment on black social and political aspirations of the past. And the Micheaux ideal Negro world view popped up in countless other race movies. His films likely set the pattern for race movies in general.

The audience for black films grew rapidly (particularly between 1915 and 1923; eventually there were about 600 theaters on the race-movie circuit). But a number of unfortunate events halted this burgeoning black industry. Distribution problems proved hard to lick. When talkies came in, many companies lacked the capital to keep up production and to acquire the new sound equipment. The release of the big-studio black musicals, Hearts in Dixie (1929) and Hallelujah (1929), spelled disaster for the small independents. Then the Depression killed many off.

Curiously, during this period (from the mid-Thirties through the war and postwar years), independent black films for black audiences underwent a significant change: They were made almost entirely by white filmmakers. Such men as Ted Toddy, Jack and Bert Goldberg, and Robert Savini, heading such companies as Herald Pictures, Astor Pictures, and Jubilee, eventually moved into the market.

During this second phase of the independents, there were some interesting films, among which The Emperor Jones (1933), starring Paul Robeson, was one of the best of the lot. In 1938 National Pictures released The Spirit of Youth, dramatizing the meteoric rise of a black boxer. Joe Louis played the central character, a figure closely related to the champ himself. As might be expected, Louis' acting was wooden. But what a hero for black audiences. In 1940, veteran Hollywood actor Clarence Muse also was able to co-write and star in Broken Strings, technically one of the better made features of the period. Spencer Williams, too, with white backers, directed two highly idiosyncratic films that touched on the black religious experience: The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Go Down Death (1944). Williams wrote the scripts for several other films, including Harlem On the Prairie (1939) and also directed Juke Joint (1947) and a raunchy black version of Rain called Dirty Gertie from Harlem, USA (1946). Ironically, Williams is best remembered today for his role as Andy Brown on TV's Amos 'n Andy.

For the most part, though, the producers of the later race movies were determined to make slick and glossy products that resembled typical Hollywood fare: black westerns, mysteries, boy-meets-girl stories, and gangster pictures. Concentrating more on entertainment unencumbered by weighty messages about race, the new features nonetheless—simply because of their all-black casts—could never leave the race issue behind. Thus the new leading players, whether dapper Ralph Cooper as a smooth-as-silk doctor in Am I Guilty? (1940) or Herbert Jeffrey as a spiffy cowboy immaculately dressed in tight riding clothes and fancy silver spurs and guns in Bronze Buckeroo (1938), remained indelible black middle-class heroes, still promoted as an ideal for the black masses.

Pepped-up and faster moving, escapist and high-spirited (some reflecting the optimism of the postwar era), the later films often featured musical stars or introduced new personalities. Lena Home, dewy-eyed and giddy, no doubt caught up in the excitement of making her first film, was the plump but very pretty ingenue in The Duke Is Tops (1938). Endearingly lovely and fresh in Ebony Parade (1947), Dorothy Dandridge became one of black America's great cultural icons of the Fifties when she starred in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959). Then she committed suicide. Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, The Mills Brothers, Nat "King" Cole, and jazz vocalist Helen Humes all performed for the later race-movie cameras.

So, too, did entertainers who, having endured the Hollywood grindstone for years, needed a break and a breath of fresh air. Stepin Fetchit, Nina Mae McKinney, Mantan Moreland, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Louise Beavers were launched as genuine stars in their race movies with roles tailor-made for them. Ironically, Fetchit was cast as the same shufflin', dimwitted soul he'd always played, but with a twist. In the all-white environment of his Hollywood features, Fetchit was a talented black comic yanked out of his cultural context; this man who had started in black vaudeville, performing for black audiences, was clowning it up for whites. In his all-black films, he's simply an oddball funnyman in a world full of diverse black images.

The later independents also made a place for a figure Hollywood seemed to have no use for at all: the un-abashed, unchangeable, raunchy or rowdy ethnic star who wasn't about to clean up his or her act (to tone down cultural differences or smooth out rough ethnic edges) to please a large white audience. Thus Jackie "Moms" Mabley, Dusty "Open the Door, Richard" Fletcher, Dewey Pigmeat Markham, and the great rhythm-and-blues star Louis Jordan did star spins in such films as Killer-Diller (1948), Boarding House Blues (1948), Fight That Ghost (1946), and Look Out Sister (1946).

In Louis Jordan's black films, Hollywood clearly missed something else. When the big studios did employ Negro entertainers, the black stars usually performed during an "interlude" when the white stars might rush off to a night-club or party for some fun. Thus in Rhapsody in Blue (1945), Hazel Scott suddenly appears in a European supper-club sequence, singing George Gershwin's "The Man I Love," in French and English. Scott's innate poise and dignity and her skilled performance evoke an enigma: She's a blazing symbol, a sophisticated black woman at home in the most continental of settings, yet we sense Hazel Scott's isolation, so completely cut off is she from everything else in the film.

But isolation or star alienation are the last things one sees in the old race movies. In Caldonia (1945), Beware (1946), and Reet, Petite, and Gone (1947), not only did Louis Jordan have a chance to jam with his Tympany Five group but he was the star as well: As Jordan moves from boy-meets-girl plot mechanics to musical sequences and then back to the plot, the pictures give a portrait of the Negro performer who's also a person with some semblance of an offstage life, with cultural connections and roots he can always return to.

Perhaps that's where so many of the later race films (as well as some of the more socially conscious earlier ones) succeeded best: as fundamental celebrations of cultural roots and communal spirits—and also as pure, undiluted celebrations of black style. Such movies as Broken Strings, Boy! What a Girl! (1946), Sepia Cinderella (1947), Bronze Buckeroo, and scores of others introduced a new rhythm to American cinema. Vocal inflections and intonations set the ears abuzz. The manners, gestures, postures, surprising double takes, swift inter-play and communication between the characters is a world unto itself, capturing, despite whatever other distortions or failings, a segment of black American life and culture.

By the late Forties, race movies were on their last legs, victims of changing attitudes within black America and of the major studios' budding interest in blacks as vehicles for the metaphor of American justice. In 1949, Hollywood released a series of problem pictures, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Lost Boundaries, and Intruder in the Dust, all of which dealt with a new view of the Negro and his role in American life. The old race movies could not compete with the technically well-made Hollywood products. Moreover, the black audience had an altered vision of itself.

Following World War II, black America, aware that black G.I.s had fought abroad for the freedom of whites only to return home to find economic slavery, had become increasingly more vocal about the nation's racial codes and divisions, its injustices and inequities. It sought a different kind of movie product, too, considering the racially hermetically sealed worlds of the race movies passé. In the Fifties, during the rise of the civil rights movement, black audiences preferred to see Sidney Poitier in No Way Out (1950), Edge of the City (1957), and The Defiant Ones (1958), which promoted the then acceptable themes of racial integration and cultural assimilation—and which also, despite serious compromises, touched on the conflicts between black and white. The latter was something race movies had rarely done. So they faded away.

Today, many of the old films have vanished or been destroyed. Surviving films are often dated, mangled, and sweetly naive, yet they remain vivid cultural artifacts, comments on black America's past fantasies, obsessions, attitudes, and aspirations, a rare glimpse of the way black America was once willing to look at itself. And sometimes, as in some of the films of Micheaux, of the direction in which black America once hoped to see itself move.