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Oscar Micheaux

Personal Profile

Oscar Micheaux
  • Date of Birth:
    January 2, 1884
  • Place of Birth:
    Metropolis, Illinois, USA
  • Place of Death:
    Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
  • Date of Death:
    March 25, 1951
  • Cause of Death:
    Heart disease
  • Height:
    6' 0"
  • Sex:
    Male
  • Nationality:
    American

Family

Oscar Micheaux
  • Spouse:
    Alice B. Russell

Career

Oscar Micheaux

Trivia

Oscar Micheaux
  • Working out of Chicago, Michaeaux subsequently made more than 30 films over the next three decades, including musicals, comedies, westerns, romances and gangster films.
  • Some of the popular themes in his work were African-Americans passing for white, intermarriage and legal injustice.
  • He used actors from New York's Lafayette Players, and always cast his actors on the basis of type, with light-skinned African-American actors typically playing the leads, and darker-skinned blacks the heavies.
  • That trait was part of the consciousness of the African-American community (and mirrored the very racism that he inveigled against) that persists to this day, and Micheaux was severely criticized for it by later critics.
  • However, no critic could deny the importance of Micheaux's movies, as they were a radical departure from Hollywood's racist portrayal of blacks as dolts, Uncle Toms, Mammies and dangerous bucks
  • As the most successful and prolific of black filmmakers, Micheaux was vital to African-American and overall American consciousness by providing a diverse portfolio of non-stereotyped black characters, as well as images and stories of African-American life.
  • Oscar Micheaux, the first African-American to produce a feature-length film (The Homesteader (1919) in 1920) and a sound feature-length film (The Exile (1931) in 1931), is not a major figure in American film just for these milestones, but because his oeuvre is a window onto the American psyche as regards race and its deleterious effects on individuals and society.
  • He also is a pioneer of independent cinema.
  • Though the end products of his labors often were technically crude due to budgetary constraints, Micheaux the filmmaker is a symbol of the artist triumphing over long odds to bring his vision to the public at large while serving in the socially important role of critical spirit.
  • "One of the greatest tasks of my life has been to teach that the colored man can be anything," Micheaux said

Biography

Oscar Micheaux
Last Updated: Saturday, August 15, 2009

Oscar Micheaux was born in 1884, in Metropolis, Illinois, one of 13 children of former slaves. When he was 17 years old he left home for Chicago, where he got a job as a Pullman porter, one of the best jobs an African-American could get in the days of Jim Crow laws that separated the races and were a legal bulwark of racism. Inspired by the self-help, assimilationist teachings of Booker T. Washington and the "Go West" pioneer philosophy of Horace Greeley, Micheaux acquired two 160-acre tracts of land in Gregory County, South Dakota, in 1905, despite no previous experience in farming.

Micheaux's experiences as a homesteader were the basis for his first novel, "The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer", which was published in 1913. He rewrote it into his most famous novel, "The Homesteader" (1917), which he self-published and distributed, selling it door-to-door to small businessmen and homesteaders in small towns, white people with whom he lived and did business with. "The Homesteader" not only elucidated Micheaux's understanding of societal cleavages but proselytized for assimilating black and white communities. Micheaux was firmly dedicated to the idea of art as a didactic medium.

Micheaux married Alice B. Russell in March 1926, and the two remained married until his death in March 1951. He was buried at Great Bend Cemetery, Great Bend, Kansas.

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