School Reform Needs Oscar Micheauxs

When we think of black filmmakers, our thoughts turn to Tyler Perry, photographer-turned-director Gordon Parks, or even to Melvin Van Peebles. But long before Van Peebles even thought of directing a film, there was Oscar Micheaux, who successfully dramatized the lives of African Americans in the early part of the 20th century — and challenged the bigoted thinking of D.W. Griffith and Jim Crow segregationists in the American South with his 1920 classic, Within Our Gates — without any form of support from Hollywood’s studio system. For school reformers, Micheaux’s iconoclasm, entrepreneurial spirit and forceful dedication offers some lessons on the kind of driving forces we need to reform American public education.

At the time Micheaux started producing films, Hollywood had little use for African Americans and gave even less attention to the black experience. Save for the occasional Spanish-American War soldier, images of blacks were relegated to crude, bigoted stereotypes of being chicken thieves, maids and slaves supporting their Antebellum masters against northern denigration of their way of life. Those images became even nastier in 1915 when Griffith adapted notorious (and now-forgotten) preacher-turned-race propagandist Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood’s first blockbuster film. The sellout crowds, along with the tacit endorsement of the film by President Woodrow Wilson, helped fuel a period of violent bigotry that included the revival and growth of the Klu Klux Klan as a major political force even in Midwestern and Eastern states such as Indiana and New York.