Classics in the Browning
Directed by Oscar Micheaux
With Evelyn Preer, Floy Clements, James D. Ruffin
Not Rated, 79 minutes, Blu-ray
Still early in the canon of films by trailblazing director Oscar Micheaux, Within Our Gates is generally cited as the oldest surviving feature film by an African-American director. The plot follows a North-South journey storyline: A Southern school sends Sylvia (Flo Clements) to Boston in order to raise funds to educate underprivileged children at a rural school in the Deep South. In Boston, she meets and falls in love with a Black doctor who learns from her the scourge of Jim Crow racism.