Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

Chapter One

1884–1900: Metropolis, Illinois

Chapter Two

1900–1904: Black Metropolis

Chapter Three

1904–1906: The Rosebud

Chapter Four

1906–1908: The One True Woman

Chapter Five

1908–1909: A New Persona

Chapter Six

1909–1912: Hammer Blows

Chapter Seven

1912–1914: Dark Days

Chapter Eight

1914–1918: The Film Bug

Chapter Nine

1919–1921: A Tongue of Fire

Chapter Ten

1921–1922: Harlem and Roanoke

Photographic Insert

Chapter Eleven

1923–1924: The Pale of the Law

Chapter Twelve

1925–1927: Straws in the Wind

Chapter Thirteen

1928–1931: A Miracle Rebound

Chapter Fourteen

1931–1935: Jews with Money

Chapter Fifteen

1936–1940: Reaping and Sowing

Chapter Sixteen

1941–1947: The Wind from Nowhere

Chapter Seventeen

1947–1951: Ahead of Time

Works by Oscar Micheaux

Filmography

Acknowledgments

Sources

Chapter Notes

Permissions

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Patrick McGilligan

Copyright

About the Publisher

Most people pronounced his last name “Mee-show,” though some who knew him insist it was “Mi-shaw.”

The correct pronunciation of his name is only the beginning of the ambiguities and mysteries associated with Oscar Micheaux. He had no middle name, or at least no legal document has ever been found that lists one. He started out in life with a different spelling of his surname: Michaux. Perhaps because his family spoke with a soft, Southern twang, his last name has been transcribed in old newspapers and government records in a host of variations: Maschaur, Measchaur, Mishew, Misher, Mischaux, Mischeux, Mischeaux, Mitcheux.

Usually, if nothing else, the reader of a biography can be assured of the name of the central figure, and the facts of his birth and death. Yet the precise place where Micheaux was born remains elusive. Nor does anyone know the exact circumstances of his death. For decades, even his burial site stayed unmarked and unknown.

It is unclear how many times Micheaux was married, or whether he fathered any children; arguable how much of a fortune he amassed, then squandered; uncertain how many times he went bankrupt, or was arrested, though on the record he suffered bankruptcy and found himself in court on several occasions, for different reasons.

Until now, his life story has never been fully told, partly because he lived a furtive existence. Beyond his pioneering work as a maker of all-black films, he was a pioneering author, though it is unclear how many
books he wrote: seven were published, some first-rate works, others potboilers. He wrote both memoirs and fiction, and blended the two freely. He embodied many walks of turn-of-the-century African-American life, fulfilling some roles that were archetypal (shoeshine boy and Pullman porter) and others that were special (South Dakotan homesteader). His most exceptional role was as a leading American filmmaker, who wasn't allowed to set foot in Hollywood because of the racism of his times.

When writing the biography of an important film director, one usually has the motion pictures themselves to watch, study, and appraise. In the case of Micheaux, however, even the simplest questions are still debated: how many films he actually wrote, directed, and produced, even whether some rumored titles made it before the cameras at all. Micheaux scholars concur that only about one third of his output survives today; the actual number of Micheaux pictures known to exist—in any condition—is fifteen, out of a possible forty to forty-five.

Because of such uncertainties, the merits of his movies can be argued. But the films that have been found and restored make it increasingly clear that, in the context of American film history, he deserves to be considered in the same breath as the sainted D. W. Griffith. In an era when black people were ignored or belittled by Hollywood, Oscar Micheaux had to work under remarkably restricted and unheralded circumstances to create his own distinctive body of work. In his determination, he cut legal as well as financial corners. But he possessed both storytelling élan and a social conscience, and drew repeatedly on his own life story to articulate universal themes concerning the black experience, working out deeply personal, iconoclastic feelings about America and his people's place within it.

The stories of Micheaux's life were also stories of his race. He pioneered with his heroes and heroines—idealized black doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers, but also cowboys and detectives—while salting his stories with warts-and-all villains. His films featured sex, violence, frank language, and situations “adult” enough that any studio in Hollywood would have vetoed them; as he struggled to get them distributed across the country, many censors did just that. (Just the fact his stories took place in a black milieu was enough for many Southern sheriffs to seize prints.) His were among the first films in history to attack lynchings, segregated housing, gambling rackets, corrupt preachers, domestic abuse, criminal profiling by police, and all kinds of racial inequities.

Micheaux was an eager courter of fame and attention, and in his time he became as famous—and controversial—as anyone in the field of so-called “race pictures.” Yet he was also a master of privacy and secrets. A self-made man who lived the American dream, who boasted a record of undeniable achievement in spite of the obstacles erected against his race, he also led a shadow existence, forced again and again to scrape together the means to continue; and in the end he was brought to ruin, tragedy, and obscurity.

In the twenty years after his death, his remarkable life of aspiration and struggle and conquest was forgotten. His novels and motion pictures were all but lost. In recent years, his reputation has been resurrected by the painstaking research and passionate advocacy of scholars and educators, white and especially black. Some of his films have been found and restored. Though his name is still unknown to most Americans—even to the most zealous motion picture fans—that is bound to change, because as his publicity claimed, Micheaux was truly “The Great and Only.”

Indeed, Micheaux was the Jackie Robinson of American film. No, a Muhammad Ali decades before his time, a bragging black man running around with a camera and making audacious, artistic films of his own maverick style, at a time when racial inferiority in the United States was custom and law.

 

Grover Cleveland had just been sworn in as president of the United States, the year a baby boy in southern Illinois was christened Oscar Michaux. The Emancipation Proclamation was just over twenty years old, and the hopeful, chaotic period of Reconstruction after the Civil War was ending. It took only that long before the equal rights measures of Reconstruction, fiercely opposed by most white Southerners, were subverted, and an economy once dependent on slave labor was reinvented on a foundation of racist social mores known as “Jim Crow.”

Emancipation had freed the Confederate slaves in 1863, and by the time of Appomattox, two years later, Southern roads and rivers were clogged with freed and fugitive slave families streaming northward. Slave families fleeing northwestern Kentucky could simply cross the Ohio River into southern Illinois, in order to pursue their dreams of a better life of opportunity and freedom.

The maternal and paternal branches of Oscar Michaux's family came from adjacent counties in northwest Kentucky, so they might have known each other before they crossed over to Massac County in southern Illinois. The southernmost counties of Illinois—those lying between the Wabash and Mississippi rivers and north of the Ohio River—were commonly known as “Little Egypt,” a name that alluded to the fertile farmlands provided by the confluence of rivers, and to the biggest town in the area, Cairo. Both sides of the Michaux family took up farming, the occupation they as ex-slaves knew best.

Besides being close to Kentucky, Illinois boasted a liberal state government. Black people could vote in Illinois by 1870, and in 1874, after a long debate, a statute was enacted protecting their right to attend public schools. Illinois was the land of Abraham Lincoln, after all, and home to Chicago, already a magnet for ex-slaves and soon to become “the freest city in the world for the black man,” as Micheaux later wrote.

But Chicago was 375 miles north of Metropolis, and southern Illinois, which had been pro-slavery, wasn't as hospitable. Stephen Douglas received 75 percent of the Massac County vote in the 1860 election, 873 votes to Lincoln's paltry 121. The newspapers ran “nigra” jokes on their front pages, and lynchings were part of the near-Southern environment. Massac County had its share of “night rider” episodes ending in “unsolved” murders, and if Micheaux himself never witnessed the mob murder of a black person, knowledge and fear of such incidents were seared into his consciousness. Wrongful arrests of black people would become a common motif in his films, and the graphic lynching scenes in his work provoked discomfort among censors and sometimes his audiences.

But fully one-third of Massac County's population was German American—most of them first-generation immigrants—and they had swung over to Lincoln and the Federal cause during the Civil War. As the ex-slaves went to work and multiplied in numbers, they formed their own close communities, “colored neighborhoods” where few ventured out of bounds, but some thrived. “Aside from a floating element” considered disreputable, as Massac County historian O. J. Page wrote in 1900, the ex-slaves were accepted as “industrious, and law-abiding,” while representing “considerable capital.”

Many earned modest livings off the land. This part of southern Illinois abounded with small lakes, timbered hills, and rolling earth with tillable soil. Tobacco and cotton were harvested in Massac County, but the
ground was better for corn, wheat, and oats. Fruits and vegetables could be grown in astonishing variety.

Oscar Micheaux's maternal grandparents, the Gough (or “Goff”) family from nearby Graves County, Kentucky, were listed in government records as “black.” They settled in southern Illinois as early as 1866, one year after the official end of the Civil War. Their only child, Bell Gough, born into slavery in Kentucky in 1856, would grow up and become the mother of Oscar Micheaux, and the first of the women who shaped and guided his life.

Micheaux's father's parents had relocated from Calloway County, Kentucky. Both David and Melvina Michaux show up in record books as “mulatto”—a significant fact considering Micheaux's lifelong preoccupation in his books and films with the problem of “mulattos” passing as white. Their first son, Calvin Swan Michaux, was born in 1847. “Fair of complexion,” as Micheaux later wrote, Calvin grew up as a slave in Kentucky, before coming to Massac County while still in his teens, and meeting Bell Gough there.

The surname Michaux, as Micheaux explained in one of his novels, was probably French in derivation and adopted from the family's Kentucky slave-owner. That slave-owner, in fact, had David Michaux's own father “sold off into Texas during the slavery period,” according to Micheaux, and the family lost track of him. Micheaux's paternal grandfather David died in Illinois around 1870, long before Oscar was born.

Though Calvin Swan Michaux and his family lived in Illinois for several decades, other Michauxes didn't last long there. They were a restless clan, always hearing the siren song of the frontier. In the 1870s David Michaux's widow took three of her children to Kansas, joining the Exoduster Movement (a phrase inspired by the Book of Exodus), which found thousands of black Americans heading west after the Civil War. This Kansas branch of the family was the first of the homesteading Michauxes, and successful at that: One of Calvin's brothers, Andrew Jackson Michaux, eventually accumulated seven hundred acres in Barton County and became known as “the richest Negro in Kansas and banker to the black community,” according to Karen P. Neuforth, who has researched the Micheaux genealogy definitively. Andrew Michaux would become an early investor in Micheaux's motion picture company.

At least one of David and Melvina Michaux's children went farther west. Edward Michaux moved on to California, turning up in voter rolls
in Oakland in 1892 and 1896, before following his muse and embracing the back-to-Africa movement, moving overseas to the Republic of Liberia. Edward died in Monrovia in 1910, with his estate turned over to an editor of the local English-language publication,
The African League.
So it is quite possible that Uncle Edward was the first Michaux to embrace writing as a profession.

Calvin Michaux and Bell Gough were joined in marriage in Metropolis, Illinois, in 1875, but the first extant deed in the name of Calvin “Mishew,” dated 1872, attests that the twenty-eight-year-old former slave was already a landowner. He paid six hundred dollars that year for “the South West quarter of the South East quarter of Section Twenty Eight (28) in Township Fifteen (15) South Range Five (5) East,” a parcel of land about six miles northwest of Metropolis and the Ohio, in a southern corner of Washington Precinct.
*

The origin of the phrase “forty acres and a mule” lies in broken promises of restitution made to slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but it was a standard equation used for land purchases by ex-slaves; it can be fairly speculated that both sides of the Michaux family borrowed start-up sums of money from the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Co. of Kentucky. Such a loan would have allowed Calvin Michaux to purchase his first forty acres. And according to surviving records he did own one mule, sometimes two.

Ten of Michaux's forty acres were “unimproved” woodland; twelve were planted with wheat, sixteen with corn, three with other “field products.” According to the 1880 and 1881 Assessor's Books, the Michauxes also owned a horse or two, two cows, six hogs, two dogs, one wagon, one clock (“Value: 1 dollar”), one sewing machine, agricultural tools appraised at twenty dollars, and household furniture; the total value of their material goods was estimated at $126 to $130. (Even the mules were apparently of modest account: the Assessor's Books list other neighbors with mules worth as much as $68, whereas the Michauxes' were valued at
only $35.) Their land was taxed at a value of $220. The Michauxes' net worth was approximately $350.

Into this humble life Oscar Micheaux was born on January 2, 1884, the youngest of five in a family that would eventually have eleven children. He had a sister, Ida, older by eight years, and three elder brothers, William (b. 1878), Lawrence (b. 1879), and Finis (b. 1882). The family would ultimately grow to five sons and six daughters, with the last Michaux child, a boy named Swan, born to Calvin and Bell in 1895.

So much about the vanished world of Oscar Micheaux is difficult to conjure up today. But the hallmarks of his character—optimism, resilience, grit, and pride—were bred early and deep in him. His strengths and values came from his parents who believed in hard work, devotion to family, the rights and responsibilities of the law, the teachings of the Bible, and the higher law of God.