Today in Black History: 1884 Oscar Devereaux Micheaux, author and film director, was born in Metropolis, Illinois. Micheaux formed his own movie company and in 1919 became the 1st African American to write, direct, and produce a motion picture, “The Homesteader.” At the age of 17, Micheaux traveled to Chicago, where he worked as a shoeshine boy and Pullman porter. In 1904, he bought a homestead in South Dakota where the frontier environment gave him a generous amount of material for several of his most important books and movies. Micheauxs first creative work was the 1913 novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. Micheauxs first film. The Homesteader, in 1919 came from his second novel and was a product of his business, The Micheaux Book and Film Company. He went on to produce, write, and direct more than 30 films over the next three decades. Eventually, branch offices of his company opened in New York and Chicago. The first African-American feature length movie with sound, The Exile, was a 1931 Micheaux creation. The budgets for Micheauxs many films came from the directors own entrepreneurial efforts. He personally transported prints from town to town, sometimes for a single showing, and edited his movies on the road. His works portrayed the struggles of individual characters against prejudice within the black community as well as in opposition to racism. Micheaux returned to writing novels in the last decade of his life. A retelling of his pioneer memories appeared in the 1944 film, The Wind from Nowhere. Between 1919 and 1948, Micheaux wrote seven novels and wrote, directed, and produced 44 feature films, including “Within Our Gates” (1919), which attacked the racism depicted in “The Birth of a Nation,” and “Body and Soul” (1924) which introduced Paul Robeson. Micheaux died March 25, 1951. The Directors Guild of America posthumously honored him with a Golden Jubilee Special Award in 1986 and the Oscar Micheaux Award is presented annually by the Producers Guild of America. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Micheaux has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a documentary film, “Midnight Ramble,” was released about him in 1994. The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp in his honor in 2010. Micheaux’s biography, “Oscar Micheaux, The Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker,” was published in 2007 and the Oscar Micheaux Center in Gregory, South Dakota annually presents the Oscar Micheaux Film & Book Festival.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 13:43:06 +0000
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