Oscar Micheaux was a pioneering filmmaker in every sense of the word — an independent Black writer/director/producer who made socially engaged melodramas for Black audiences and a literal pioneer who memorialized his tumultuous stint as a South Dakota homesteader in a series of self-published novels. Within Our Gates, Micheaux’s earliest surviving feature, is a characteristic mix of earnest uplift and righteous fury, a history lesson and an intra-community communiqué about the betrayal of the race from within and without, and finally, a patriotic ode to the horizons of Black excellence in spite of all that America has arrayed against it.

Shot in Chicago in the aftermath of the deadly 1919 race riots, Within Our Gates opens with a wry reminder that the North is a land “where the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist—though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro.” Micheaux regular Evelyn Preer plays Sylvia Landry, an educated Black woman who returns to the South after a romantic betrayal and devotes her time to saving a rural school on the verge of closure. Upon returning north on a fundraising trip, Evelyn meets a passionate doctor but must flee again when an unsavory suitor from her past attempts blackmail.

Micheaux often took a circuitous route from a story’s beginning to its end, and Within Our Gates has its share of peculiar choices — flashbacks within flashbacks, digressions and diatribes —but emerges as a powerful story of everyday people living in the shadow of terror and trauma.  

***35mm from Library of Congress***

About The Alvin Cobb, Jr. Trio: 

Composed by its leader, an original film score will be performed live by the Alvin Cobb, Jr. Trio, a Chicago-based music group led by drummer/composer Alvin Cobb, Jr. featuring bassist/vocalist Katie Ernst and pianist Julius Tucker. Heavily inspired by straight-ahead jazz trio playing, their music also incorporates folk melodies, free improvisation, and modern Black music elements.