The Black independent writer-producer-director Oscar Micheaux had a knack for weaving incidents from his own life into uplifting, politically charged, and often caustic entertainment. Though Micheaux had lost his South Dakota homestead to foreclosure years earlier, he continued to extol the pioneer ethic in numerous novels and movies, including The Symbol of the Unconquered, filmed on the New Jersey frontier. Upon inheriting a modest woodland cabin from her dying grandfather, Eve (Iris Hall) journeys from Selma to Oristown, a small Northwestern community where the color line has been bent but not yet broken. She soon befriends her Black pioneer neighbor Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson), who cannot act upon his feelings for Eve because he mistakes her light complexion for white skin. Arrayed against Van Allen’s sunny striving and self-reliance is a motley assortment of local hypocrites, phonies, and two-bit villains: horse thieves, a duplicitous fakir, a defrocked minister, a hotelier-turned-land speculator who denies his own Black identity and turns his enmity back on the race itself. United in their hatred under the guise of Shadow of the Black Cross, they ride at midnight in a fiery effort to drive Van Allen from his land. Released five years after The Birth of a Nation had revived the Ku Klux Klan, The Symbol of the Unconquered sought to turn the routing of a KKK-inspired terror cell into rousing catharsis for Black audiences. (“See the Ku Klux Klan in Action and Their Annihilation,” read Micheaux’s original ad copy.) Ironically, Micheaux’s all-American film survives thanks to a single copy with French and Flemish intertitles in the Royal Belgian Film Archive. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from Turner Classic Movies.

Preceded by: “Two Knights of Vaudeville” (Ebony Motion Picture Company, 1915) – 11 min – 35mm from Library of Congress