The oldest surviving film by an African-American director, Within Our Gates paints a devastating picture of race relations in the United States just a few short years after D.W. Griffth’s incendiary The Birth of a Nation. The plot is rather disjointed – perhaps the result of the original inter-titles being lost – but involves a young African-American woman’s attempts to raise money for a poor southern school by traveling north. The show-stopper occurs in the film’s final twenty minutes, where the woman’s past – which involved the lynching of her family after her father is falsely accused of murder –
Read More