FADED GLORY Oscar Micheaux and Black Pre-War Cinema February 6 – 19, 2009  The more you learn about Oscar Micheaux, the more remarkable he seems. A son of freed slaves, who left home early to become a successful farmer, writer, and publisher in South Dakota, he launched his own alternative cinema with his first film, based on his novel The Homesteader, in 1919. Over the next 20 years he would be the most prolific author among an essential core of black filmmakers who sought to simply affirm the presence of African-American lives and culture in a medium whose biggest producers only illustrated them as servants, comic relief, or, most frequently, villains. The fact that so many of Micheaux’s films dealt with controversial and provocative subjects—racism, lynching, interracial romance, the “color bar†in the black community, corruption in black churches—makes his output almost miraculous.
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