ABSTRACT
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly spawned innumerable theater productions throughout the second half of the nineteenth century including touring “Tom Shows,” loosely based on the original story and varying wildly according to audience, from moral reform dramas to blackface minstrel shows that perpetuated gross racial stereotypes. On March 3, 1915 what has been called the most racist movie ever made opened in New York. The Birth of a Nation had debuted in Los Angeles on February 8, and ten days later became the first feature film to be screened in the White House. Among the many race films that could be interpreted as correctives to The Birth of a Nation’s misrepresentations, Oscar Micheaux’s work emerges as the most successful for his ability to create a complex fiction that conveyed its social message via compelling pictorial effect.
