In the 1920 silent race film "Within Our Gates" by Oscar Micheaux, he shows the racial condition in America during the years of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the emergence of the "New Negro." The film is about an African-American woman who goes North to help a minister in the Deep South raise money to keep a school open for poor Black children. Her romance with a black doctor opens up stories about her family's past as well as the racial skeletons in America's closet. The release of D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" four years earlier made him want to make this film. Both films incorporate controversial subject matter; lynching, rape, and miscegenation are represented in the films, but from opposite ends of the political spectrum. In "Within Our Gates", Micheaux wants to educate his audience about racism, uplift of a people, and the urban "new Negro" emerging after the Great Migration. But how does Oscar Micheaux battle the racist representations from Griffith and portray the many different faces of the African American society through film?

In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Paula Massood demonstrates how the urban has functioned as a central organizing trope in the articulation of Black culture, progress, protest and subjectivity. Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century.

The most relevant chapter would be the second, which discusses city motifs in race films from the early sound era. Her two main examples of race films are The Scar of Shame and Within Our Gates as the illustrations for African American urbanscapes. She also goes on the discuss how the film upheld ideals of individualism and ambition, but was still targeted by both whites and blacks. She also states that the film’s message is, “racially motivated violence directed at African Americans was often caused by economic jealousy or lust rather than any actual illegal acts perpetrated by its victims.” This goes against Birth of a Nation clearly and she also mentions the race riots that occurred in Chicago during the time.

Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

While the book follows the stories and innovations of Madame CJ Walker, Thomas A. Dorsey, Oscar Micheaux and baseball's Rube Foster, it also provides a space in which we get to hear the thoughts and words of everyday people, those who sat in beauty parlors, enjoyed the early years of cinema, and made a way despite the racial, social and economic limitations. While the book is a scholarly monograph, Baldwin's expedition into social and cultural theory is so nuanced as to make the book accessible to a wider audience. Davarian Baldwin argues overall that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism.

This book overall is great wonderful if you want to learn about black innovators in Chicago. But if you are interested in Oscar Micheaux in particular, then the best chapter would be the fourth entitled, “The Birth of Two Nations: White fears, black jeers, and the rise of a race film consciousness”.  The chapter begins by discussing the history and impact of Birth of a Nation. It was an escape in which the traditional white power structure of the South was asserted and black migrants had never come north. But Baldwin proves this point invalid in his historical evidence and he also shows that Griffith’s film created two nations because people like Micheaux had to respond to the story that was told in Birth of Nation. A really interesting point that he mentions is that fact that films like Within Our Gates had to constantly battle with showing the truth of the South to the masses, but also still keeping the traditional black amusement forms. He calls this “sensational realism”. He then goes on the mention Micheaux’s life and Baldwin notes the significance of Oscar Micheaux's five silent and nine sound films in constructing a New Negro racial consciousness. He gives plenty of historical evidence and reviews from the time, which helps to put the films in a clear cultural perspective.

Gaines, Jane. “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama and Oscar Micheaux”. Black American Cinema. Ed. Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993, 49-70.

The work of early Black filmmakers is given serious attention for the first time in “Black American Cinema”. Individual essays consider such topics as what a Black film tradition might be, the relation between Black American Filmmakers and filmmakers from the Diaspora, the nature of Black film aesthetics, the artist's place within the community, and the representation of Black imaginary.

Both movies, Within Our Gates and The Birth of a Nation, have caused a lot of protest because of their racially brutal images. However the protests had different focuses. People did not want to see Micheaux ‘s film because it was too much of the truth, and people did not want to see Griffith’s film because it did not have enough. Gaines argues that the main issue was the idea of truth. The biggest difference between the two films is the fact that Micheaux has his film focus on black life and the middle class. Another interesting point that Gaines makes is that, “while the White supremacist version of the Civil War survived, Micheaux’s African American history lesson disappeared and was classified by film scholars as lost.” She discusses how the Spanish version, La Negra, that was found 70 years later is just a skeleton of the original. The lynching scene seems tangential to the story line, and yet it is the most important scene it seems for Micheaux. By turning this scene into such an important spectacle, he was trying to encourage indignation in the Black audiences, according to Gaines. Going along with many other articles on the subject, she discusses the cross-cutting in this sequence and how Micheaux displayed his unconventional style in his films.

Ciraulo, Dina. "Narrative Style in Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates." Wide-Angle 1998 Oct, 20:4, 75-91.

In Dina Ciraulo’s article, she argues that Oscar Micheaux challenges history and race relations by using an unusual filmic approach to single shots and to larger narrative construction. She outlines the qualities of the shot, and then proceeds to analyze the narrative form in Within Our Gates. He uses tableaux style, which centers the characters and privileges character over filmic space by continually allowing his actors center stage. She also explains how Micheaux keeps the narrative outside the rules established by Griffin. With regards to narrative, Ciraulo states that, “the real story is the "unofficial" narrative, the divergences from plot in the form of dreams, memories, flashbacks and simultaneous but secondary action.” She then goes on to discuss certain flashbacks mentioned in the film.

Overall this article was extremely useful to read in reference to the thesis. It helps to clarify which parts of the movie are really the most important, like the flashbacks. The flashback, which is entitled "Sylvia's Story", has to be the most important in the film and for many reasons. It helps to show the brutality of the South. It is also the time when the audience learns of the lynching of Sylvia’s family and her rape by a white man. Another interesting thing that this article uses is other writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and Cornell West. Memories and Digression are important points in this article and very important to understand the Within Our Gates and the black struggle for true representative history at the time.

The 14 essays in this book cover a range of topics, from overviews of black American performance and cinema, to detailed analyses of Micheaux films, to thoughtful discussions of the work and impact of other groups of African American performers and filmmakers. The essays are lively and readable, casting light on an underrepresented facet of American film history. These essays shed light not only on Micheaux's films but also on his immense influence on other filmmakers, actors, and writers. What these authors have to say will fascinate the general public as well as scholars in the fields of film studies, cultural studies, and African-American history. This thoroughly readable collection is a superb reference work illustrated with rare photographs.

This book is the best resource on all things regarding Oscar Micheaux, but primarily with two essays in the Oscar Micheaux section. The first is by Michele Wallace, entitled “Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates: The possibilities for alternative visions” this essay focuses on stereotypes in the film and how it tries to subvert them. In order to understand what Oscar Micheaux has to say about race, the author tries to progress from the black stereotypes in Birth of a Nation, and then explains how they fit into Within Our Gates. He explains historian Donald Bogle’s list of black stereotypes and goes on to discuss blackface, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and other important films regarding race. While Micheaux follows some conventions in narration according to the author, he still uses his portrayals of blacks in the film as a tool of opposition. Overall, it is a very useful essay in particular in its breakdown of African American society shown by Micheaux.

Green, Ronald J. "Oscar Micheaux's Interrogation of Caricature as Entertainment." Film Quarterly vol. 51 no. 3 pp: 16-31.

In this article by J. Ronald Green he first gives a brief overview of Micheaux’s upbringing and then his early films. He mentions Within our Gates, but does not talk about the film specifically. However, there are a lot of interesting points in the article, which can relate to understanding the portrayals of African-Americans in his early films. Green talks about how caricature was perceived by Micheaux as a prime obstacle for black advancement and its removal was an early rhetorical objective necessary to his goal. Blacks in the performing arts desperately needed to shed the caricature being used as a shelter. One of Micheaux's principal missions was to show that a black man could be anything he wanted. The ABAB structure is used repeatedly by Micheaux as a narrative form for his cinematic, class-based critique. Micheaux presented a simple configuration of shot and edit that implies the "cutting" of the B figure by the A figure. When the minstrel and vaudeville performers, or B figures, are introduced in the same shot with the chorus members, or A figures, the B figures are gazed upon by the A figures in a way that implies reprobation. A/upper-class, B/lower-class structure of the cutting gaze manifested in its purist form in “The Darktown Revue”. In “Murder in Harlem”, the ABAB paradigm is integrated into a more complex narrative, and the idea of the entertainment stereotype as inhabiting the class relations of daily life is elaborated. The author breaks down these two Micheaux's films that include music and performance as subjects.

 Micheaux interrogated entertainment as a function of class in a direct way that takes entertainment to be a literal, not just representational, sociopolitical condition inherent in the films. This tools helps to show another way that he is able to educate his audience about racism and the uplift of a people. Caricatures are just another form of blackface and other demeaning portrayals that Micheaux did not like. I also found Green’s ABAB structure very interesting overall because it brings a new dimension to Micheaux’s work.

In a feat of historical investigation and vivid storytelling, this film biographer takes on one of the greatest and most complex figures in American entertainment, Oscar Micheaux, the son of freed slaves who formed his own film production company after Hollywood failed to bid high enough for film rights to his stories. Paced like a novel, the book is sprinkled liberally with Micheaux's own words. Micheaux's career began to fizzle, along with race films, in the late 1930s, and he died in obscurity in 1951. Rediscovered decades later, he is now considered, as McGilligan puts it, the Jackie Robinson of American film.

The book overall is a wonderful resource on background knowledge regarding aspects of Micheaux's life that others cannot find easily. The most important chapter would be Chapter 9, focusing on the years between 1919 and 1921. Since Within Our Gates came out in 1920, it gives a timeline of the events that were going on right before the movie and while filming was taking place. You can also learn some really interesting facts about the movie and how Micheaux was able to get this film out to the masses and how the original version has been lost. We also learn that he likes to always have some sort of message in his films, despite having them just be entertaining. The author also considers the flashback of the lynching to be “one of the most powerful sequences in Micheaux's body of work”.

Siomopoulos, Anna. "The Birth of a Black Cinema: Race, Reception, and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates," The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, vol. 6.2 (Fall), 111-118, 2006.

This article talks about Oscar Micheaux's film and how it provided a rebuttal to Griffith's depiction of black violence and corruption with a story of the injustices faced by African Americans in a racist society. Siomopoulos primarily talks about the style of editing that were in both films.  Siomopoulos states, “The complicated style of Micheaux's editing works to constitute a spectator who is more politically critical than the spectator constructed by the classical Hollywood style of Griffith's film” It compares the editing of the two films and talks about how live music plays a part in the spectatorship of the film.

This article helps to show the similarities and differences between the two films, but it uses Birth of A Nation as the main comparison piece. This helps to answer the question about how the films incorporate their views in opposite ways, by explaining the cutting. It also breaks down and explains the narrative juxtapositions in the films. Birth of a Nation uses crosscutting to present a very simple opposition between white virtue and black villainy; in contrast, Micheaux's film uses a complex editing pattern to present a larger social vision of many different, competing political positions within both white and African American society. so this article helps greatly to answer the questions about how these two film relate to each other, in style and content.

In "With a Crooked Stick", J. Ronald Green pursues this seeming contradiction in a detailed analysis of each of Micheaux's 15 surviving films. He presents critical commentary on each film's plot and action and its contribution to the overall theme of uplift. Green clearly establishes Micheaux's unrelenting critique of white supremacism and black complicity, his strong and original style, and his promotion of moderation, independence, and ethical integrity for class uplift. Readers will find this an invaluable guide to the preoccupations and features of Micheaux's remarkable career and the insight it provides into the African American experience of the 1920s and 30s.

In this book, the most relevant chapter for the topic would be the second chapter, which focuses on the movie. First he goes through the plot, characters, and the central action of the film. Then he talks about the most important themes of the movie, which would be overcoming oppression, class distinctions, race, and race in relation to class. Then he has a section on the style of the film, and also touches on the issues of cutting. So this seems to be a great overall resource for the film. It is not as specific as some of the articles mentioned, but it is a good beginning piece to read.