Born: January 24, Metropolis, IL

Education: Metropolis public schools

Died: March 25, 1951, Charlotte, NC

A pioneer filmmaker, Micheaux produced Race Movies during the Jim Crow era. He left Illinois at seventeen to be a writer, but worked as a Pullman porter and lived on a South Dakota farm.

Eventually, he began writing and self-publishing books and operating a film company, which issued The Homesteader (1919). Based on his novel, it showed blacks “in dignified roles” and was the first silent race movie. Micheaux made “44 of the 82 all-Negro pictures” advertised from 1920 to 1950, though most of his are lost. He financed production primarily with book sales, paid previews, and companies in New York City and Chicago, the large movie markets.

Micheaux's films captured the black experience. Some reviewers charged that he glorified elite and ignored poor blacks, but Micheaux exposed lived realities, including blacks’ light-skin prejudice and whites’ racist violence. A lynching witness inspired Within Our Gates (1919), which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan's wartime revival. Birthright (1924) depicted a black teacher's successful battle to build a school in the segregated South, while Body and Soul (1924) unveiled a hypocritical black preacher. The Exile (1931) became the first black sound film. Fittingly, the US Postal Service issued a Micheaux commemorative stamp (2010).