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Abandoned by her fiancé, an educated black woman with a shocking past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished black youths.

Director: Oscar Micheaux

Writer: Oscar Micheaux

Stars: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin
Transcript
00:00On this IMD Brief, we celebrate four unsung black heroes of film history, and four films
00:05to watch to get to know them better.
00:07The silent film days of Hollywood offered no chance for a burgeoning black writer to
00:10break into showbiz, but Oscar Michaud was never one to be discouraged, so he opened
00:14his own company to produce a feature adaptation of his first novel, The Homesteader.
00:19Although it was not preserved for posterity and no copy exists, the 1919 silent film made
00:24an indelible mark on history for confronting issues of race and miscegenation, cementing
00:28Michaud's legacy as the first black film director, ever.
00:37Our first watchlist recommendation is his 1920 film, Within Our Gates, a retort of sorts
00:42to D.W. Griffith's racist depictions of African Americans in Birth of a Nation.
00:46Later, Michaud made even more history by being the first black man to produce a talkie, a
00:50romantic post-World War I drama, The Exile.
00:58Our next unsung hero was forging her own path in Hollywood around this same era.
01:06Hattie McDaniel had already written and performed songs for Chicago record labels, OK, and Paramount,
01:10before moving to L.A. to make it on the big screen.
01:13She broke out in small, yet impactful roles alongside Mae West and Shirley Temple, before
01:17landing a major part in John Ford's Judge Priest, starring Will Rogers.
01:21McDaniel was usually relegated to playing stereotype maid and servant roles, but her vocal performances
01:33and on-screen presence transcended her time and place, like in the Broadway blockbuster
01:37Show Boat, or our second watchlist suggestion, her Oscar-winning role in that Civil War epic
01:42of classic Hollywood, Gone with the Wind.
01:44After McDaniel's 1940 win, a person of color didn't take home an Oscar for eight years,
01:55and it was an honorary award for James Baskett's portrayal of Uncle Remus in Song of the South.
02:00Despite a popular attraction based on the film being in three parts, Disney has rightfully
02:04locked this offensive musical in its vault, even if the film's Oscar-winning song will
02:08never leave our collective unconscious.
02:18However, there was a trailblazer for inclusion in the Mouse House within the next decade.
02:23Our third unsung hero, Floyd Norman, who became Disney's first black animator in 1956, starting
02:29as a clean-up artist on 1959's Sleeping Beauty.
02:39When Walt Disney spied a cartoon Norman Doodle to amuse his co-workers, he promoted the animator
02:44to the story department for 1967's The Jungle Book.
02:51Over a six-decade career that is documented in the incredible and watchlist-worthy Floyd
02:56Norman in Animated Life, he drew boards and wrote stories for everything from Josie and
03:00the Pussycats to Alvin and the Chipmunks and received screenplay story credit for two beloved
03:0490s Disney features, Mulan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
03:14We stay in the 1990s for our fourth unsung hero, Julie Dash, the first black woman director
03:19to have a widely released film in theaters, our final watchlist rec, Daughters of the
03:23Dust.
03:24Morning will begin a new life for my children and me.
03:31While other pioneering directors like Safi Faye and Kathleen Collins had released features
03:35in the years before, Dash's 1991 release of Daughters of the Dust is the very first to
03:40be available to a general theatrical audience.
03:43Since then, Dash has helmed films and TV movies, several music videos, and two episodes of Ava DuVernay's
03:49Queen Sugar.
03:50You don't have to live in the community to support it, but it helps.
03:53Although these four barely scratched the surface of unsung heroes, we've put together this
03:57watchlist as a place to start.
03:58Michaud's Within Our Gates, McDaniel's Gone with the Wind, documentary Floyd Norman in
04:03the Animated Life, and Dash's Daughters of the Dust.
04:06As well as a trio of trailblazing films like the Charles Burnett-directed Dark Turn for Danny
04:10Glover to Sleep with Anger, Madeline Anderson's incredible South Carolina strike doc, I Am Somebody,
04:16and Gordon Parks' badass blaxploitation sensation, Shaq.
04:21For more trending tales and heroes of cinema, stay glued to imdb.com slash imdbrief.