Oscar Micheaux: Father of Black Cinema

On the second of January, eighteen eighty-four, a child was born on a farm outside Metropolis who would become the most important African American filmmaker of the twentieth century. His name was Oscar Micheaux. His father Calvin had been born into slavery in Kentucky, on the south bank of the Ohio River, in a state where bondage was legal.

His son was born free on the Illinois side, in a state where it was not. That crossing of the river between one generation and the next is the frame for everything that followed. Oscar Micheaux left Metropolis in his teens and worked his way to Chicago, then found steady employment as a porter on a Pullman railroad car, traveling the country and learning its geography and its people.

In nineteen oh four he settled on a homestead in South Dakota, where he worked the land and eventually wrote a novel about the experience. That book, published in nineteen thirteen, led him into the film business. He founded the Micheaux Pictures Corporation in nineteen eighteen and over the next thirty years made forty-four films, working most often as writer, director, and producer simultaneously.

His movies addressed lynching, racial injustice, and the full texture of Black American life with a directness that the Hollywood studio system refused to permit. He released new films almost every year of the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, on tiny budgets, with Black casts, for Black audiences in segregated theaters. Scholars today describe him as the first major African American feature filmmaker and the most successful Black filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century.

The father of Black cinema was born on a farm in Massac County.