Within Our Gates (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday, February 26 at 9:30 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite remarkable film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” as part of their commemoration of Black History Month. The film was Within Our Gates (1920), produced, directed and written by pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux was born in Metropolis,,Illinois on January 2, 1884,t he fifth child of a Black farm couple. Though his Wikipedia page doesn’t specify it I’ve long suspected Micheaux was mixed-race, not only because he had a French last name (many of the mixed-race Creoles in Louisiana had French last names, mainly because the French were more easygoing about race mixing than the Anglos) but because so many of his films,including this one, feature mixed-race characters. A number of Micheaux’ films feature a young Black man who’s strongly in love with a white-looking woman; he’s torn between his love for her and his desiree to marry within his own race, and it’s resolved when the woman turns out to be either a light-skinned Black person or mixed-race and therefore he can marry her and still be true to his racial identity. Micheaux got into filmmaking by writing a novel about Black homesteaders called The Conquest in 1913 and then filming it six years later as The Homesteader, He put a lot of his own life into this story, including calling the central character “Oscar Devereaux” (his full name at birth was Oscar Devereaux Micheaux) and basing much of the plot, including the hero’s failed first marriage, on his experiences.

Within Our Gates is Micheaux’ second film and the first one that survives, though the one extant print was from Spain and had intertitles in Spanish that had to be laboriously re-translated into English for this version. Its plot exposition is so complicated that Charles joked, “This film has more intrigues than The Birth of a Nation – and there isn’t even a war going on!” (A l;ot of people have interpreted Within Our Gates as a Black response to The Birth of a Nation, with its glorification of the Ku Klan and open advocacy of white supremacy, but Micheaux himself said he didn’t intend it that way.) The central character is Sylvia Landry, played by – as the credits advertise – “the renowned Negro artist, Evelyn Preer,” who moves back and forth between Boston and Piney Woods, Texas, where she’s been involved in founding a school for Black children so they can get the same sort of education as whites. Unfortunately the school is going broke, and in order to raise the money to save it Sylvia travels to Boston, where she meets white philanthropist Elena Warwick ()played by an actress billed only as “Mrs. Evelyn”). Sylvia is hospitalized when Mrs. Warwick’s driver accidentally runs her over, but Elena is sufficiently concerned, guilt-ridden or both, she visits Sylvia in the hospital. Sylvia talks Mrs Warwick into pledging a $5,000 donation to the Piney Woods school, but a white Southerner named Geraldine Stratton (Bernice Ladd) tries to talk her out of it. Stratton says the Blacks had no need of education, and instead of giving $5,000 to a school Elena should lust give $100 to the local Black preacher, Nick, who preaches to his Black congregation that they’re God’s chosen people and therefore they didn’t need to burden themselves with getting educated or winning the vote. Fortunately, Elena is so appalled by her friend's racism that she decides to up her donation to the Piney Woods school from $5,000 to $50,000.

There’s an extraordinary scene in which we see Nick alone lamenting that he’s sold his soul for a mess of pottage (a Biblical phrase that actually appears in the intertitle) and he’s getting lots of money from rich whites for preaching a message he knows is B.S. (Many of Micheaux’ films take a singularly dim view of the Black church; his 1925 film Body and Soul, the only one of Micheaux’ five extant silent films that survives with its original English titles, cast Paul Robeson in his film debut as a corrupt Black minister – and was a major financial flop because Black audiences of the time didn’t want to see a movie that criticized their church.) Sylvia was raised by a foster family in the South, and there’s a dark secret about her past that one of the film’s Black villains, a street criminal named Jake, tries to use against her. He’s fled from Boston to avoid arrest and ended up in Piney Woods, where he tries to blackmail Sylvia into marrying him by threatening to reveal her past. Eventually we learn just what her big, bad secret was in a flashback sequence that’s the best part of the movie: it seems that Sylvia learned bookkeeping from a local school (which explains why she puts so much importance on getting Black children educated) and offered to help her adoptive father, sharecropper Jasper Landry (William Starks), and his family from being cheated by the plantation owner, Philip Gridlestone (Ralph Johnson). Unfortunately, just as Jasper is confronting Philip Gridlestone and saying that because his daughter has been educated Philip can no longer cheat him, a white man who worked on the Gridlestone plantation and was similarly being cheated points a rifle through Philip’s window and kills him. Philip’s Black servant Efram (E.G. Tatum) sees the incident and gossips around tiwn that Jasper Landry killed Philip, and the white townspeople form a lynch mob and slaughter not only Jasper Landry but his entire blood family as well.

Sylvia escapes by hiding out with a friend, but is later confronted by Phili’s brother Armand Gridlestone (Grant Gorman),who attempts to rape her when he suddenly notices a scar on her chest. The scar convinces Armand that Sylvia is actually his daughter, produced by his brief marriage to a Black woman – and Miciheaux’ titles stress that the two were “legally married,” even though I couldn’t help but wonder where this could have happened in the early 20th century. Certainly not in the United States, where all states had laws banning interracial marriage until the California Supreme Court ruled theirs unconstitutional in 1949, 18 years before the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case aptly named Loving v. Virginia ruled that interracial marriage bans voilated the U.S. Constitution. Sylvia’s deep, dark secret is out at last, and after having resisted Jake’s blackmail attempt and broken up with her previous boyfriend, Conrad Drebert (James D. Ruffin) when he took a job with a mining company in Brazil, she’s free to marry by far the most interesting man in the movie, Dr. V. Vivian (Charles D. Lucas). Though Micheaux’ Wikipedia page quotes him as saying, “I am too imbued with the spirit of Booker T. Washington to engraft false virtues upon ourselves, to make ourselves that which we are not,” it seems to me likely that he based the character of Dr. Vivian on Washington’s fierce critic and arch-rival. W. E. B. DuBois. Like DuBois (and unlike Washington), Vivian writes articles denouncing segregation and calling for civil rights and racial equality. He particularly argues that Black Americans must demand equal opportunity in education and slso fight for the vote. When he and Sylvia finally get together at the end, it’s clearly not only a love match but a meeting of equal minds and a triumph for racial progress and the nascent civil rights movement.

Within OUr Gates has its flaws, many of which would grow worse in Micheaux’ later work – particularly the awfully preachy intertitles, which judging from the clips I’ve seen of Micheaux’ sound films (I’ve never seen a Micheaux talkie start to finish) got even worse when sound came in and he could have his characters preach at length to his audiences his ideas about racial uplift. But it’s also a surprisingly well-made film for 1920, especially from an independent director (though in the silent era it was possible to make a film on virtually no money and give it the look, finish and “feel” of a major-studio production; that became impossible in the sound era and guerrilla filmmaking only became possible again as both cameras and recording equipment became cheaper, simpler and more portable starting in the 1960’s). Whatever his personal feelings about D. W. Griffith and his use of state-of-the-art cinema technique to deliver the racist message of The Birth of a Nation, Micheaux clearly had learned from Griffith; Within Our Gates contains elaborate cross-editing, superimposition shots, iris-out effects and the entire panoply of cinematic effects Griifith, more tnan any other filmmaker, had pioneered. There are even a couple of sequences – a dream poker game in which someone is killed and several shots in the big flashback – that anticipate film noir.

Within Our Gates is a movie that deserves to be better known, not only as a benchmark for the self-depiction of Blacks in the cinema but as a masterpiece in its own right. It’s also finely acted, by Evelyn Preer in particular; Paul Robeson called her the greatest Black actress of his time, and she delivers a powerfully restrained performance not at all like what most people who’ve never seen a silent film start-to-finish think they were acted like. While some of the other players fall into the traps of overacting and hammy gestures that were endemic to silent acting, Preer avoids them completely. She also avoids the trap of coyness a lot of silent-film heroines fell into; it’s a marvelous portrayal and it’s easy to see why Micheaux used her in seven more films.