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D.W. Griffith's Ku Klux Klan-glorifying 1915 epic "The Birth of a Nation" had one positive side effect: It incited black Americans to take moviemaking into their own hands.
Half a century before Gordon Parks strutted fearless private eye John Shaft onto the big screen, an enterprising farmer-turned-novelist named Oscar Micheaux made dozens of "race" films in which black actors weren't obliged to shuffle their feet, roll their eyes or humble themselves to anybody.
Micheaux (me-SHOW) was the most prolific of dozens of filmmakers whose work played at black-neighborhood movie houses and late shows, known as "midnight rambles" at white theaters. Black audiences lined up to see black characters run businesses, pack six-guns, throw punches, kiss their costars and save the day. Micheaux's heroes even took on Klanlike night-riders, and won.
Because race films, like baseball's Negro Leagues, were coopted by integration and assimilation in the 1940s, most blacks under 50, let alone whites, are probably unaware that:
- The great Paul Robeson made his screen debut in Micheaux's 1924 "Body and Soul," nine years before Hollywood cast him as "The Emperor Jones."
- Jazz singer Herbert Jeffrey starred as "Bronze Buckaroo" Bob Blake, a singing cowboy in the Gene Autry vein, in several all-black Westerns.