The Conquest

Oscar Micheaux is the most prolific African American filmmaker---and perhaps independent filmmaker---in the history of American cinema. He wrote, produced, and directed nearly 40 features between 1919 and 1948, although few of them have survived. Most of his movies, like those of other early African American filmmakers, were independently made "race films," which featured African American actors in major roles, unlike the all-white-produced studio films of the time, which employed white actors in blackface, as in D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation." The racism of this film, in particular, prompted the formation of many all-black companies, including the Lincoln Film Company of Nebraska, which first sparked Micheaux's interest in the cinema.

Micheaux worked shining shoes, doing farm labor, and as a porter until 1904, when he purchased a homestead in South Dakota. By 1913, he owned 500 acres and had published the first of 10 semiautobiographical novels, "The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer" (1913), which he sold successfully door-to-door. In 1918, the Lincoln Film Company approached him about filming "The Homesteader" (1917). When the company refused to produce the film on the scale he wanted, Micheaux decided to do it himself. He founded his own production company and shot the movie in an abandoned studio in Chicago, where it opened in 1919, inaugurating a decade of successful filmmaking for Micheaux. Much of this success can be credited to the promotional strategies he developed while selling his novels. Micheaux toured theaters in African American neighborhoods, soliciting advances from owners and securing screening dates, circumventing the cash flow and distribution problems that other African American companies encountered. He employed relatively cheap, nonprofessional actors and billed actors as black counterparts to white stars. Micheaux was virtually the only African American filmmaker to survive the 1930's and the Depression, the skyrocketi