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| Evelyn Preer and Jack Chenault in Within Our Gates |
Famous as the oldest surviving feature film made by a Black director -- Oscar Micheaux's first movie, The Homesteader (1919), is lost -- Within Our Gates is not only a powerful response to the kind of racism represented by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) but it's also a clear demonstration of Micheaux's skill as a director. It spares no one in its portrayal of the poison of racism: Its Black sycophants, toadying to the dominant white power, are as odious as its white bigots. The story centers on Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), an educated Black woman who has moved north to try to work on behalf of the people she left behind in the South. She carries with her a secret about her parentage that is finally revealed only when she returns to the South to aid a Black minister who is trying to run a school. Micheaux lays several subplots, and perhaps a few too many melodramatic coincidences, onto this central one, but he keeps the drive of the film moving steadily through the climactic lynching scene and the revelation of Sylvia's secret. Within Our Gates was reconstructed from a print found in a Spanish archive, and although there are some visible gaps -- the largest one explained by a title card -- the restored version is remarkably coherent.
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