Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  *This may be Lawrence Chenault, making his first appearance for Micheaux billed under another name.

  *Walton, a pioneering critic of race pictures for the New York Age and Amsterdam News, had been a part-owner and manager of the Lafayette Theater at the time the Lafayette Players were organized, in 1916. Later, he was appointed Minister (Ambassador) to Liberia on behalf of the U.S. government, serving in that capacity from 1935 to 1946, before returning to journalism.

  *Shortly after filming Synbol of the Unconquered, Thompson suffered an illness which caused his death in 1922, at age 34.

  *This letter, incidentally, went on to demonstrate Micheaux’s technical know-how, deriding the camerawork of A Prince of His Race as inferior and attributing the inferiority “to the use of some Cooper-Hewitt banks alternating current[s] which flicker alternately through all the interiors and refuse to permit a fade-out with any degree of smoothness at all.”

  *Though, in this letter, Chesnutt does not specify which Micheaux picture he saw, it must have been Within Our Gates or The Brute.

  *In 1921, “race detectives” existed only in short stories and magazine fiction. Scholars generally pinpoint Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure Man, published in 1932, as the first black detective novel written by a black American.

  *The Afro-American was (and is) based in Baltimore and is sometimes referred to as The Baltimore Afro-American. But there were Washington, D.C. and other local editions, and the newspaper ranged over the mid-Atlantic in its coverage, circulating widely in many black belts south of Harlem. In its heyday it was as national a black newspaper as the Chicago Defender or the Pittsburgh Courier.

  *The one hundred dollar weekly salary was more than Micheaux normally paid his leads and the gross-income clause was also unusual. But this was canny dealmaking on Micheaux’s part, demonstrating Robeson’s naïveté. Certainly no Micheaux picture ever had grossed $40,000, and if one ever happened to do so over time, Micheaux would be the only person to know about it.

  *Not white or Hollywood enough for some theaters or critics, Micheaux films were “too white” and Hollywoodish for others. There was less consensus among black film reviewers than there was among white critics, who were in a better position to form big-city organizations like the New York Film Critics to at least pretend a united front with their annual “best” awards. Sylvester Russell, who had railed against Micheaux’s “objectionable race features” earlier in the decade, now complained, for example, that “all the features of artifice in scenario and scenic calculations to which the white man has resorted, Mr. Micheaux has now acquired.”

  *“Marcus Garland” may have started filming and shut down. But the project was resurrected as the 1932 race picture The Black King, which was written and directed by Donald Heywood, and starred A. B. DeComathiere as the Marcus Garvey figure.

  *“Vanity” is a title that no scholar has been able to authenticate as a published Zora Neale Hurston story. Likewise, the Mary White Ovington play, if it actually existed, was unproduced.

  *One mystery, among the many about Alice B. Russell, is the exact year of her birth, which fluctuates in official documents. The 1900 census, which shows her birth as June 30, 1889, is probably the most reliable. A few years were shaved off in the 1910 census. Her 1926 marriage certificate suggests she was born in 1893. Her social security application attests she was born in 1899. Her obituary and death certificate indicate 1892.

  *“Because of his fair skin and Venezuelan background,” wrote Bernard L. Peterson Jr. in his authoritative Profiles of African-American Stage Performers and Theater People, 1816–1960, Monagas “was thought by the White cast to be White himself, since it was the custom at that time for Black roles to be often played by White actors.”

  *Downing died at age 82 in February 1928, shortly before the release of Thirty Years Later.

  **But records are spotty and it is possible Russell, immediately after her marriage to Micheaux, took roles in The Millionaire and Thirty Years Later, which preceded The Broken Violin.

  *A unique musical combining comedy, drama, fantasy, folklore, and spiritual reflection, with some ninety-five black performers among the cast and chorus, Green Pastures was hailed by critics, including J. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, who said it was “best described as Uncle Remus’s ‘Story of the Bible.’” Harrison played De Lawd on Broadway, road, and revival companies for a total of 1,675 performances, before collapsing in his dressing room before the show at the Mansfield Theatre in 1935, dying shortly thereafter.

  *There were reports in the black press that the Hallelujah! cast challenged the “objectionable phrases” in the Hollywood script and that their salaries were “one-fifth to one-tenth of what they should have been” for white actors. According to a July 15, 1930 piece in The Baltimore Afro-American, one-time Micheaux actor William E. Fountaine had a scene in which he was supposed to call a black character a “big coon.” “O, my God!” he complained aloud, “you don’t mean for me to say that, I know. Not me. Why, man, I wouldn’t dare go back to Harlem.”

  *Henry Francis Downing was a relatively obscure author, better known in London than America, and by 1928, the year Charles W. Chesnutt received the NAACP Spingarn Medal for his lifetime of literary accomplishment, his books were out of print.

  *Lorenzo Tucker said Micheaux himself thought there was weak acting by the novice male lead. Tucker “insisted that a second version of the film [ The Exile ] was made shortly after the first version,” wrote Richard Grupenhoff in his biography of the actor, “because Micheaux was unhappy with the performance of Stanley [Stanleigh] Morrell in the title role. Tucker said that numerous scenes were shot over with him in the lead role, which probably accounts for the posters that announce him as a leading player. If Micheaux did make another version of The Exile it has been lost, or else he abandoned the idea of completing the second version.”

  *Leo Rosten’s reliable The Joys of Yiddish lists several definitions for “shvartzer,” including, simply, “black,” and “unskilled,” while noting that the term and its variants were “‘inside’ words among Jews—cryptonyms for Negro servants or employees.” Rosten wrote: “Since the growth of the civil rights movement, these uses have declined.”

  *Some filmographies indicate that Mrs. Micheaux took this producing credit on several of her husband’s last silent films before surrendering it briefly on The Exile. Interestingly, the “A. Burton Russell” allowed theater owners and managers to assume Micheaux’s producer was a man.

  *The third story in Ten Minutes to Live may well have been recycled from Harlem After Midnight, which also makes mention of the kidnapping of “a wealthy Jew” and has Micheaux acting a law-enforcement role.

  * While The Afro-American was sympathetic to the complaints of the hometown vaudevillians, the Baltimore paper acknowledged, when reporting the lawsuit, that “act-lifting is one of the most overworked practices of the stage,” and that Micheaux was hardly alone if he indulged in such borrowings.

  *A product of Chicago’s Black Belt, Ralph Metcalfe was a storied sprinter, a record-holder in college, who finished third in the 200-meter dash in the 1932 Summer Olympics and second in the 1936 Summer Olympics (behind Jesse Owens). He earned a gold medal as part of the 4-by-100-meter relay team that set a world record in 1936. Later, Metcalfe became a Chicago city councilman and U.S. congressman.

  *The actual note in the case contained similar language and colloquialisms and misspellings: “he said he wood love me and land doun play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.”

  *Hazel Diaz plays Eloise in Birmingham and Cora in Harlem, while Alex Lovejoy is Lem in the South and “Big Yellow” in New York. The name “Lem” might remind audiences of Lovejoy’s starring role in a previous Micheaux production, Lem Hawkins’ Confession.

  *The capital letters are Muse’s stylistic device in his original column.

  *Jones the son is well known to film fans for playing Darth Vader in the Star Wars seri
es. Since the late 1950s, he has had a long, high-profile career on Broadway and in other media, playing everything from leads in Shakespeare to recurring roles in television series. His famous voice is instantly recognizable in commercials or, for example, as the call-out of CNN. Jones wrote about his father and Micheaux in his autobiography Voices and Silences.

  *Although lynchings understandably haunt the African-American psyche to this day, in truth, lynchings had become more aggressively publicized and prosecuted, and by the end of the 1930s there was a decline in their frequency across America. Lynching statistics are notoriously unreliable, but data kept by the Tuskegee Institute shows a drop-off beginning in 1936.

  *The “talking parrot” was Micheaux’s curious grace note, but the main reference is to the blues song “Stagger Lee,” which is based on the myth of “Stacker Lee.”

  *Chesnutt’s hometown in North Carolina, disguised with another name in The House Behind the Cedars, is expressly identified by Micheaux in The Masquerade.

  *Like Sack Amusement Enterprises before it, Astor went over to foreign-language films almost entirely, and subsequently achieved tremendous success, in the early 1960s, as a distributor of Italian and French New Wave films, bringing La Dolce Vita and Last Year in Marienbad, for example, to American moviegoers.