American independent filmmaking did not begin with Ida Lupino and others in the 1950s. One of cinema's earliest (and most fascinating) mavericks was Oscar Micheaux, a South Dakota farmer turned filmmaker who became the first African American auteur.

As Jill Jordan Sieder notes in Gadfly (March/April 2000), a Micheaux resurgence has been under way in recent years, marked by the release of several books and films about the man and his racially charged works. A book, lecture, and film program, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, is scheduled to begin touring museums and schools next year. There's even talk of a made-for-TV movie based on Micheaux's intriguing life.

Born the son of a former slave in Illinois in 1884, Micheaux held a string of blue-collar jobs in Chicago before buying himself a piece of farm land in South Dakota. To augment his meager earnings, he began selling his own self-published novels door-to-door. Increasingly drawn to the social and political influence he could exert through the then-new medium of film, he reinvented himself yet again. With the success of his first movie, The Homesteader (now lost), he started his own film company and moved to Harlem. Between 1918 and 1948, Micheaux produced, directed, and edited 40 feature films--an impressive accomplishment for a director whose work was shown only in segregated theaters of the South and urban ghettos. He died in 1951.

'A natural at creating and marketing heroic black characters in conflict, Micheaux didn't flinch at difficult subjects,' writes Sieder. This was especially true in two early silent films, Within Our Gates (1919) and Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), which deal vividly with miscegenation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan. Lost for 60 years, these silent movies astounded film scholars when they were rediscovered in Europe in the late 1980s. They are now regarded as Micheaux's masterpieces.