Oscar Micheaux's interrogation of caricature as entertainment

Film Quarterly

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 16-31

  Green, J Ronald ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349138908     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1213599     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. See Oscar Micheaux Society Newsletter, Charlene Regester and Jane Gaines, eds., Program in Film and Video, 107A Art Museum, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708. Phone (919) 684-4130 for up-to-date information, including preservation, distribution, and scholarship on Micheaux's films.
2. These stories are told in his novels, especially The Conquest and The Homesteader, both of which have been recently reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press.
3. See G.D. Pike, The Jubilee Singers, and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1873).
4. See Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) for detailed discussions of efforts to produce a film to answer Griffith's.
5. Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 260-61.
6. Oscar Micheaux, The Conquest (Lincoln, NB: Woodruff Bank Note Co., 1913; reprint, College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing Co., 1969; reprint, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 145.
7. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988).
8. Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 98-99.
9. Chris Albertson, Bessie (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 122.
10. See, for example, the discussion of racial self-respect in George Edmund Haynes' "The Trend of the Races" (New York, 1922) in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1910-1932, Herbert Aptheker, ed. (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1973), pp. 363-364. For example: "Enemies and some friends complain that Negroes show a lack of belief in their own race; that apparently their highest ambition is to be white. These criticisms apparently have basis in fact. They overlook, however, three cardinal conditions which Negroes confront. First, Negroes are surrounded by white people, ten to one, whose idea of physical beauty is a white skin, sharp features, and straight hair. By a well-known principle of group psychology the individuals in the minority tend to conform to the ideas and habits of the majority.... "In the second place, whoever has observed and reflected upon facts open to everyday inspection knows that, on the one hand, to have white skin or to be known as a white man or woman is to have an open door to whatever ability and effort can achieve.... Negroes have had many of their attempts to set up their own standards blown to the winds by derision. The wonder is not that a few of them want to be white, but rather, that the race has so persistently clung to racial ideas and excellencies through so many generations. "Finally, much of the white man's notion of what the Negro aspires to be is either an imaginative white man's construction of what he conjectures he would strive for, were he a Negro, or it is what some Negro has let the white gather in response to leading questions. The human mind is habitually seeing the thoughts and feelings of others in terms of its own. The Negro is a master in responding to the white man according to the latter's wishes."
11. In a private phone conversation (April 26, 1996), Oscar Micheaux's grandniece, Mrs. Mildred Micheaux Lewis, who lives in Columbus, Ohio (see J. Ronald Green, "Micheaux Family Members," Oscar Micheaux Society Newsletter, Summer, 1996), stated that Oscar was "fair skinned," and that all of his brothers and sisters were fair skinned except Swan. Mrs. Lewis said that it was commonly understood in Micheaux's extended family that he was not dark. The evidence of photographs and films of Micheaux suggests otherwise, but such evidence is perhaps not as conclusive as one might assume. Clearly, most scholars and critics have assumed Micheaux was relatively dark.
12. For discussion of skin tone in Micheaux's work, see "Light Skin in Black Films," in Richard Grupenhoff's The Black Valentino (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988), pp. 66-74;
13. and "Oscar Micheaux and Racial Slur," J. Ronald Green and Horace Neal, Jr., Journal of Film and Video (Fall 1988), pp. 66-71.
14. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 13-15.
15. Jessie Fauset, "Some Notes on Color," The World Tomorrow (New York), March, 1922, pp. 76-77
16. in Aptheker, A Documentary History, p. 354.
17. Micheaux, The Conquest, p. 145.
18. Micheaux, Philadelphia Afro-American, January 24, 1925.
19. All transcriptions from the film, such as this one, have been made from a video copy purchased from Phoenix in New York. The source of their video copy is the film print of Murder in Harlem discovered in Tyler, Texas, by G. William Jones of the Southwest Film/Video Archives in Dallas.
20. bell hooks, "Micheaux: Celebrating Blackness," Black American Literature Forum, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1991), p. 360.