Within Our Gates (1920)

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Within Our Gates is a 1920 American silent race drama film produced, written and directed by Oscar Micheaux. The film portrays the contemporary racial situation in the United States during the early twentieth century, the years of Jim Crow, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration of blacks to cities of the North and Midwest, and the emergence of the "New Negro".

Production

Within Our Gates was produced when early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey at the beginning of the 20th century.

Often regarded in the context of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), Micheaux's project has been considered by critics as a response. The film's portrayal of lynching shows "what Blacks knew and Northern Whites refused to believe", turning the "accusation of 'primitivism'... back onto White Southern culture".

Also during this period was the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, in which white mobs killed numerous Black people, and burned residential districts, leaving thousands of Black citizens homeless. The critic Ronald J. Green believes that Micheaux had seen that Black citizens had fought back in Chicago, and chose the title with an allusion to the risk to whites in future racial violence.

Within Our Gates was the second of more than forty films directed by Micheaux. On a limited budget, Micheaux had to use borrowed costumes and props. He had no opportunity to reshoot scenes.

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