Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  Swing!, God’s Stepchildren, and Birthright all appeared in theaters in 1938, a “Banner Year for Negro Movie Industry,” according to a headline in the Pittsburgh Courier. As film scholar Clyde Taylor has noted, though, 1938 was also a crisis year: Another headline—the Communist Daily Worker’s warning, “Negro Films Must Tell the Truth”—suggested “the opposing perspectives, the boosterism and the skepticism” that greeted each new “all-Negro” film. The skepticism came largely from urban dwellers, which included a burgeoning number of black members of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Their sweeping social critiques extended to the world of cinema.

  Micheaux considered himself apolitical, in part because he resisted being pigeonholed. Though Booker T. Washington had long since disappeared from the walls of the homes of characters in all his films, he still revered the Great Educator. But he was as mixed and catholic in his politics as he was interested in nearly every category of show business and literature and the arts. He briefly admired Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, expressed support for Liberia, and at different times in his book and film work he had championed W. E. B. DuBois.

  America’s black Communists, however, were too extreme for him—too orthodox, too downbeat. Micheaux found U.S.-style Communism a “crazy ideology” that thrived on “hard luck and discontent.” True, the Party supposedly made a priority of fighting for equality and justice for minorities. But Micheaux suspected that many overeducated black men were becoming Communists simply in order to marry the rich, white, often Jewish women, who dominated Party circles in New York. (When musing about Communism in his novels, Micheaux often used Native Son author Richard Wright—a one-time Communist who was married to a white woman, and lived downtown, not in Harlem—as a negative example.) Yet Communism was no mere abstraction for Micheaux; some of his Harlem acquaintances, including certain actors in his productions, were Communists, and some of them he liked personally.

  No doubt his hostile attitude toward Communism was exacerbated by the surprisingly antagonistic reception the U.S. branch of the Party, and affiliated left-wing groups, accorded one of his prize films: God’s Stepchildren.

  Micheaux’s answer to Imitation of Life opened quietly in mid-1938 at an RKO theater, the Regent at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Critics largely ignored the race-picture pioneer’s new film, but ticket sales were brisk—and the audiences included Harlem Communists who had been tipped off in advance. The Harlem Communists were affronted by the characters of Jimmie, who denounces lazy members of the race (“One Negro in a million tries to think”), and Naomi, who is so consumed with self-hatred that she deserts her baby and commits suicide. After the manager of the Regent met with a delegation of outraged viewers, but refused their demand to withdraw the picture, “a storm of protest” erupted (in the words of the New York Age), with members of the National Negro Congress, the Frederick Douglass Club, the Harlem Teachers Union, the International Workers Order, the American Youth Congress, the Young Communist League, the Workers Alliance, and the Harlem Committee for Better Pictures for Children assembling to picket the Regent and threaten any theater that dared exhibit the picture.

  When Micheaux consented to meet with the protestors, he was called on the carpet by none other than Angelo Herndon, one of the Party’s most popular black leaders. Herndon was only nineteen in 1932 when he organized a massive rally of the jobless in Atlanta, a largely peaceful demonstration that alarmed local officials because of the biracial turnout and Herndon’s avowed Communism. Herndon was arrested and charged with inciting insurrection, a capital crime; after being found guilty he was sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a Georgia chain gang.

  The Herndon case, like that of the “Scottsboro boys” rape trial in Alabama that same year, was such a notorious example of Jim Crow injustice that his cause stirred support throughout the United States. In 1937 the Supreme Court threw out his conviction, declaring the Georgia insurrection statute a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Herndon was mobbed as a hero in New York and feted at a Group Theatre benefit.

  Now, behind closed doors at the Regent, Herndon and other Communist spokesmen sternly lectured Micheaux. Beatrice Goodloe of the Young Communist League warned the press that the “all-star colored” film “slandered Negroes” by “holding them up to ridicule, playing light-skinned Negroes against their darker brothers.” The New York Communists demanded that Micheaux withdraw God’s Stepchildren, or delete the degrading scenes.

  Here was a new form of censorship, one that Micheaux had not expected or encouraged. Surely he was taken aback to be confronted by the heroic Herndon, whose battle with Southern injustice was known to every man and woman in Harlem. The RKO management buckled, promising to withhold God’s Stepchildren until Micheaux altered the film. Then the race-picture pioneer met with reporters, according to the New York Age, and announced that he would delete “offensive portions” of God’s Stepchildren and preview his next two pictures to “representatives of all the protesting groups” before releasing them to theaters and the general public.

  Then God’s Stepchildren jumped to the Apollo, the Tompkins, and Subway theaters in Brooklyn, probably benefiting from the controversy. And perhaps Micheaux did tinker with the “offensive portions” of the New York prints, but probably not, as evading any kind of censorship was his specialty.

  Distribution of God’s Stepchildren continued in any case, and when the Micheaux picture was advertised for the Ritz Plaza Hall in Boston later in 1938, it was the same original version, uncut and uncensored. The local alliance of the New England Congress for Equal Opportunities, New England Congress of Colored Youth, the South End Progressive Club, and South End Educational Committee called on the Ritz Plaza Hall management to cancel the engagement. The theater owner demurred. The New Englanders picketed and passed out flyers.

  “No favorable publicity was given Mr. Micheaux,” according to a press account. “Contrary to all speculation, however, the picture found many colored patrons anxious to judge it for themselves.”

  That was true wherever God’s Stepchildren was shown in 1938.

  Another Micheaux film had benefited from headlines, and indeed God’s Stepchildren became one of the director’s most reliably popular films, cropping up intermittently in theaters nationwide until his death.

  And God’s Stepchildren has stood the test of time. After racism and financial problems, censorship was probably Micheaux’s worst enemy, and the politically motivated censors of 1938 misjudged the movie.

  Technically, it’s one of Micheaux’s most accomplished sound-era films, with a style that is a triumph over budgetary restraints. The outdoor sequences are lyrical: groaning trees, rustling wind, gathering storms that echo people’s inner turmoil. The interiors are spare, but even here extra care was taken in the decor and lighting, with people tightly silhouetted against walls, or sometimes trapped in a car next to each other, having troubling talks.

  The principals gather at intervals at “The Raccoon Club.” “Let’s set aside our cares and watch this number,” says Jimmie (Carman Newsome) at one point, a typical cue for Micheaux to bring on his potpourri of acts. But for once, even the musical numbers take a backseat to the ideas, and Naomi’s story unfolds with a grim inevitability. Micheaux invested a lifetime of his concerns and craft in this intense tragedy of a mixed-race woman who is torn apart by her identity crisis—her story singular, like his, but with lessons for all. God’s Stepchildren can be seen as his ultimate “passing” film, condemning racial categorization as a social madness.

  As J. Hoberman of the Village Voice has written, the Communists couldn’t appreciate the film’s complexity without an awareness of Micheaux’s lifetime of work. Part of the greatness of God’s Stepchildren, Hoberman noted, was that it made “overt the formula” of his long career, unleashing “the full force of Micheaux’s racial neurosis.” Another prominent white film critic, Time’s Richard Corliss, has also hailed the picture as brilliant, synoptic Micheaux, “ever
ything to condemn and cherish” about his unique oeuvre in one concise package. “The twisted melodrama of his plots reveal the social anguish of his characters,” Corliss argued. For Corliss, the race-picture pioneer was a master of his métier, and God’s Stepchildren his true “masterpiece.”

  Nineteen thirty-eight was a watershed for the race picture business, its last banner year. All-black films would fill a void and persist with occasional surges into the early 1950s, but the “Golden Age,” if it ever existed, was over.

  Sack Amusement Enterprises had made little headway pushing Micheaux films into white theaters. Still, even the managers and owners of black theaters (who were overwhelmingly white) preferred to book the latest Hollywood movie with seamless production values and big-name stars. Micheaux’s all-black films were routinely “nixed” by the biggest Harlem theaters, according to Dan Burley, the Showlife editor of the New York Amsterdam News, “in favor of pictures made by white concerns.”

  Clarence Muse, one of the most famous black actors in Hollywood movies (he had started out with the Lafayette Players) and a leader of the Hollywood branch of the NAACP, devoted an installment of the column he wrote for a string of black newspapers to Micheaux. He praised the veteran as a “BROTHER of the RACE,” a “HERO,” who had devoted his career to race pride. But Micheaux, Muse wrote, was having a harder and harder time getting his pictures into “SOME theaters in LARGER cities, particularly in NORTHERN cities.” Muse added, “Of course, in our survey, we FIND that has never occurred in HOUSES owned and OPERATED by NEGROES.”*

  Though there were still numerous small theaters and eager audiences for his films throughout the South and Southwest, Micheaux couldn’t hope to make up what he was steadily losing in the Northeast and Midwest.

  As the end closed in, Micheaux only intensified his work on a new script. Lying Lips, another story in the nightclub-musical vein, started filming in February 1939 at the former Biograph Studios in New York.

  Micheaux could turn any cow’s ear into a silk purse, and he cast one leading role in unique fashion. A prizefighter from Mississippi, a rising star in boxing, had knocked out a rival in a Harlem bout; his photo had appeared in the black press, fiercely looming over his slumped victim. That is when the prizefighter, afraid he might kill his next opponent, quit the ring. He decided to try acting, and his first job was as Joe Louis’s sparring partner in The Spirit of Youth, a “sepia biopic” of Louis, the reigning heavyweight champion, produced in 1937.

  When Micheaux recognized the ex-boxer from Mississippi among the picketers outside a New York theater showing God’s Stepchildren, he asked him if he wanted to play a Joe Louis–type boxer in a future picture he was planning. First, the former fighter could try a secondary role in Lying Lips. The anti-Micheaux picketer said yes; his name was Robert Earl Jones, and he was the father of the deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones, well known to audiences today.*

  For his leading lady Micheaux chose Edna Mae Harris, daughter of a well-known Harlem family. Her mother ran a boardinghouse for performers near the Lafayette Theatre, and several of the Harris girls went into show business. The dark-eyed Edna Mae catapulted to fame as Zeba in Green Pastures on Broadway before going to Hollywood and recreating her role in the 1935 film. She lingered in Hollywood, playing small parts in studio pictures like The Garden of Allah and Bullets or Ballots. Harris was another alumna of The Spirit of Youth, where she played opposite Joe Louis. These days she danced, sang, and made patter onstage at Connie’s Inn.

  The tough-talking villainess with lying lips would be portrayed by Frances Williams, who came from Cleveland’s prestigious Karamu Theatre. Williams may or may not have been picketing alongside Robert Earl Jones, but everyone knew how she lined up politically; she was among the stream of sympathetic black artists and intellectuals, including Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

  Micheaux’s story centered on good-girl Harris’s attempt to steer clear of anything but her entertainment obligations while working at a nightclub owned by underworld figures. The owners of “The Poodle Dog Cafe” are white, but day-to-day management of the club is left to Carman Newsome, once again playing Micheaux’s nice-guy hero. Newsome quits his post when his bosses try to pressure Harris into trysts with the clientele.

  Newsome has been studying to be a private detective, however, which comes in handy when a mysterious murder occurs and Harris is framed for the slaying of her heavily insured aunt. Robert Earl Jones plays the police officer who subscribes to Harris’s innocence and teams up with Newsome to prove the facts of the murder. A series of linked flashbacks reveal complicated motives rooted in past relationships and the Deep South.

  “Micheaux was really struggling,” Harris recalled. The budget was stretched. It was a running joke in Micheaux’s circles that he always paid his actors last. “He would pay you,” Harris insisted loyally. “He had a good word.” Yet his leads were still making the same money they were paid twenty years earlier. “Ten dollars a day,” Harris remembered. “That was good for the time.” (She got only $75 a week in Hollywood for her billed appearance in Green Pastures.)

  In the early 1930s, amid bankruptcy and battles with Frank Schiffman, Micheaux had made movies like a man running from a subpoena, which he was. His good humor suffered, and so did the films.

  Now, in the late 1930s, the filming was still hurried and the bills as worrisome as ever. But Micheaux seemed more comfortable with circumstances, at ease with himself. By and large, the cast liked and empathized with him. “He was very nice,” Harris recalled. “He didn’t holler at actors. He humored you.”

  “I’ve always been impressed with large gentleman who are gentle,” echoed costar Frances Williams. “I can see that slow smile of his now and that twinkle in his eye. He was a very charming man. I never saw him upset.”

  Alice B. Russell was always close by—“big woman, tall, very neat, very nice and proper,” in Harris’s words. “He loved her and she was beautiful,” agreed Williams. Mrs. Micheaux helped with the ladies’ casting; she’d organize the wardrobe (out of the actors’ closets) and “show the other actors how to make up,” said Harris.

  One of her important jobs on the set was to hold the script and make sure her husband’s lines were followed precisely. After a short rehearsal, Micheaux would announce, “Now this is for real. This is a take…” Even then, despite the pace they were forced to keep (Harris jokingly recalled that Lying Lips was shot in only “three days”), Micheaux sometimes called for retakes. “Oh, if you made a mistake, you had to do it over again,” Harris said.

  Most of Lying Lips was simpleminded, even preposterous. Even though Harris was playing the young innocent in the story, Micheaux kept her busy undressing, or lolling in the bathtub (talking aloud to herself to prolong the shot), for sexy highlights that were intended to have an Ethel Moses–like effect on audiences.

  The only message of Lying Lips was entertainment; the “preachment” was minimized. But Micheaux planned a comic scene that turned on the idea of lynching, something he had done as far back as The Symbol of the Unconquered in 1920.* In his original script, the detectives (Newman and Jones) stage a mock lynching of the villainess’s brother, forcing him to confess. But a comic lynching, predictably, was too much for the New York censors. Micheaux was forced to revise the idea, dashing off pages of palaver and refilming the scene with the two threatening their victim (Cherokee Thornton) with a visit to a haunted house. But the jokes are funny and full of Micheaux self-references (allusions to “The Ghost of Tolston Manor” and “A Fool’s Errand,” among other “ghost films”).

  Lying Lips was in the editing room by late March 1939, in theaters by May. The leads jumped into Micheaux’s automobile and traveled from city to city promoting the picture, even handing out flyers in a few cities down South. But theaters were increasingly scarce, and so were reviews. Wherever the latest Micheaux production played, however, some critics—like Lynette Dobbins of the Chicago Defender—overlo
oked its flaws and found it “praiseworthy and commendable.”

  By now, Micheaux was desperate for a lifeline.

  On paper, Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian might have looked like Micheaux’s newest savior. But Julian was neither a creative artist nor a financial wizard. His fame was as an aviator, and the bankrolling of his disparate flying adventures was sometimes as nebulous as Micheaux’s. His main attraction as a partner was his publicity value.

  Born in Trinidad, Julian had emigrated as a student to England, then moved to Canada, before finally settling in Harlem. Dating from the early 1920s, when flying was young and as subject to Jim Crow restrictions as every other major occupation and industry—black pilots were extremely rare—Julian staged many bravura air demonstrations and parachute jumps into public arenas. He had made an unsuccessful attempt to be the first man to fly from the United States to Africa, and even served a spell in Abyssinia as Haile Selassie’s personal pilot.

  Julian was a front-page favorite of America’s black press, which avidly followed his stunts and pioneering, dubbing him “The Black Eagle of Harlem.” He even infiltrated white newspapers and national magazines like Time and American Mercury. Tall and prepossessing, the Black Eagle affected a monocle and bowler, wore a Savile Row suit decorated with a boutonniere, and carried a briefcase attached by chain to his belt.

  Somewhere along the way, Micheaux and Julian had struck up a friendship, and now it seemed possible that Julian could serve as a conduit to fresh money and publicity. His name might help Micheaux obtain bookings in Harlem as well as on Broadway, and once again the press releases hyped the hope of slipping Micheaux films into white theaters nationwide. The new partners announced their intention to manufacture short subjects about black newsmakers, too. Their first feature would be an ambitious boxing saga starring Robert Earl Jones.