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No Business Like Micheaux Business
The heroine of Oscar Micheaux's 1937 film God's Step Children is Naomi, a high-toned, light-skinned black girl who wants to be white. She frets, pouts, plots, whines, and, well, just plain acts up, turning her tiny black community topsy-turvy. Finally, Naomi does everyone a great service; she throws herself into the river and, like a nasty stain on her race, is washed away. For white moviegoers during the Depression, Naomi's trials and tribulations passed unnoticed. But for black audiences, Naomi's was a lopsidedly caustic and cautionary morality tale about cultural roots and loyalties, racial heritage and pride. It was only one of many such narratives told in a long forgotten branch of American movie history: race movies, independently produced films with allblack casts, made outside Hollywood, in an attempt to merchandise mass dreams for black America.
America's race movies - from the early years of the century to the late Forties first turned up as a kind of alternative cinema, made in response to the general movie fare of the time, all those crude, corny, insulting, racist little ditties with titles that just about said everything: The Dancing Nig (c. 1907), For Massa 's Sake (1911), and the Rastus series How Rastus Got His Turkey, How Rastus Got His Pork Chops, Rastus and Chicken). In the early years of the 20th century, all a black audience could expect to see of itself was a shocking parade of stereotypes stumbling across the screen. Naive, doltish toms. Feisty mammies. Contorted comic coons. Worse, the roles were almost always played by white actors in blackface.
The same was true, of course, of even D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. More than any other movie in history, Griffith's 1915 Civil War epic, with its images of marauding Negro troops, power-mad mulattoes, and lusty black bucks, sent shock waves through black America, galvanizing its leaders into an uproar of protest and action. The NAACP launched a formal protest movement against the picture, setting up picket and boycott lines. And soon there appeared a group of independent black filmmakers Emmett J. Scott, the brothers George and Noble Johnson, and the legendary Oscar Micheaux- who scrambled for money (from the black bourgeoisie or white backers)...