Abandoned by her fiancé, an educated black woman with a shocking past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished black youths.Abandoned by her fiancé, an educated black woman with a shocking past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished black youths.Abandoned by her fiancé, an educated black woman with a shocking past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished black youths.
- Awards
- 2 wins & 1 nomination
- Jasper Landry
- (as William Stark)
- Rev. Wilson Jacobs
- (uncredited)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe film has been repeatedly censored over the years. In its first outing, the rape and lynching scenes were heavily edited as they were deemed too provocative after the 1919 Chicago race riots.
- Quotes
Mrs. Elena Warwick: Since I have decided to give her my assistance, I would be grateful if, as a Southerner yourself, Geraldine, you could point me the best way to do so.
Mrs. Geraldine Stratton: Lumber-jacks and field hands. Let me tell you - it is an error to try and educate them. Besides, they don't want an education. Can't you see that thinking would only give them a headache? Their ambition is to belong to a dozen lodges, consume religion without restraint, and, when they die, go straight up to heaven. Wasting $5,000 on a school is plain silly when you could give $100 to old Ned, the best colored preacher in the world... who will do more to keep Negroes in their place than all your schools put together.
- Alternate versionsIn 1993, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center restored this film as close to the original as possible, from the only known surviving copy in Spain. The Spanish intertitles were retranslated into English using typical Micheaux language. Only one short sequence was missing and that was summarized with an intertitle frame. The running time is 79 minutes.
- ConnectionsFeatured in American Experience: Midnight Ramble (1994)
The fact that nearly a hundred years ago this film was made at all is remarkable enough; that it's actually survived (in Spain, of all places) is miraculous, particularly as Micheaux's final film, the three hour-long 'The Betrayal' (1948) - made over a quarter of a century later - is ironically lost. In addition to its indictment of institutionalised racism in the United States - where in the South any available negro could be lynched just for the hell of it - 'Within Our Gates' is also remarkable for criticising bible-thumping snake oil salesmen like the black preacher Old Ned, who exhorts his congregation not to bother themselves with the injustices of this world as their reward will come in the next.
Micheaux not surprisingly gives short shrift to the American South, where the poor white trash are depicted as being treated as contemptuously by the land-owning classes as their black brethren (the identical appearance and beards worn by a trio of yokels suggesting in-breeding), and titles are written in dialect to lampoon the Southern drawl, rather than just black speech as tended to be the custom in silent films. The cross-cutting between a lynching and a rape attempt by a white man near the film's conclusion serves as a well-aimed raspberry at the equivalent sequence in D.W.Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation'; although the abrupt uplifting speech about America by the handsome Dr. Vivian at the film's very end feels extremely tacked on. But 'Within Our Gates' has already hit home with enough ugly home truths by then.
American women, incredibly, still didn't have the vote when 'Within Our Gates' was made; and Micheaux equates women's suffrage with black civil rights, in the process marshalling a cast of formidable female characters, both black & white. In one of several elaborate narrative strands that 'Within Our Gates' packs into less than eighty minutes, black heroine Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) is taken under the wing of wealthy white philanthropist Elena Warwick, whose friend Geraldine Stratton is a rich Southerner and "a bitter enemy of woman's suffrage, because it appalls her to think that Negro women might vote."
- richardchatten
- Mar 31, 2017
- How long is Within Our Gates?Powered by Alexa
Details
- Runtime1 hour 19 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1