Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was an author, cinema director, and independent producer who worked on over 44 films. He was born on January 2, 1884. Although the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which only lasted a few years, was the first black-owned and managed film studio.
Micheaux is widely considered as the first significant African-American feature director, as well as a renowned producer of race films and ‘the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century.’ He worked on both silent and sound pictures.
Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Illinois, on a farm. Calvin S. and Belle Michaux had a total of 13 children, and he was their sixth. Micheaux added an “e” to his last name in his senior years. In Kentucky, his father was born a slave. His father’s family appears to have been enslaved by French-descended settlers because of his surname.
Micheaux decided to focus on writing and, eventually, filmmaking, a new field. He was the author of seven books. His first book, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, was published in 1913 and sold 1,000 copies. For unclear reasons, he released the book under a pseudonym.
The Conquest, Micheaux’s first novel, was turned into a film and renamed The Homesteader. This film was released in 1919 and was a critical and economic success. It is about a man named Jean Baptiste, also known as the Homesteader, who falls in love with many white ladies but refuses to marry one because of his race’s loyalty.
Micheaux died of heart failure on March 25, 1951, in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was laid to rest in Great Bend Cemetery in Great Bend, Kansas, where he grew up. ‘ A man ahead of his time’ his epitaph reads.
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