Within Our Gates

Within Our Gates is a 1920 American silent drama written, produced and directed by Oscar Micheaux, and it is the oldest surviving feature film known to have been directed by an African American filmmaker. The film follows a Black schoolteacher raising money for a rural school for Black children, and it directly confronts racial violence and lynching in the American South, widely understood as made partly in response to the racist depiction of Reconstruction in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Within Our Gates is widely regarded as a landmark of early African American cinema and one of the most historically significant surviving silent films to address American racial violence.