Reclaiming the Frontier: Oscar Micheaux as Black Turnerian

Abstract

Oscar Micheaux is best known as one of America's first black film makers. In highly productive career spanning 1913-1948, Micheaux published seven novels and directed and produced at least thirty-four all-black-cast films. Before starting down his controversial road to cinematic fame, Micheaux settled in South Dakota and penned some distinctly autobiographical novels built around his life as an African-American pioneer. In these books, Micheaux brings to Great Plains ideals of homesteading as cemented in Homestead Act of 1862 (1) and Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. Believing that supposedly inherent opportunities of open and unbroken Great Plains could help uplift African Americans as whole, Micheaux also weaves into his pioneer narratives principles of vocational industrial training championed by Booker T. Washington. In Micheaux's novels, this amalgamation of principles annuls autobiographical character's race with reference to ownership and agricultural development, though he consistently maintains race loyalty in his marriages. Turner's of opportunity comes to forefront of Micheaux's novels as he builds an occasionally successful farm under guidance of Washington's admonition of hard work, thrift, and practical training. Looked at another way, Turner's West provides raw materials for Micheaux's success; Washington provides methodology. Micheaux becomes an Old West pioneer who, rather than bringing issues of race to South Dakota frontier, subordinates his black identity in West in favor of transracial humanism based on financial success. Carrying Booker T. Washington's ideals to Great Plains, Micheaux becomes Black Turnerian. In order to sketch image of Micheaux as Black Turnerian, I will first reiterate basic principles of Turner's Frontier Thesis, theory so rhetorically powerful that its ideology held sway as defining logic of Western progress well into late twentieth century. In 1893, Turner presented paper entitled Significance of Frontier in American History to tired and bored collection of historians at World's Pan-Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His paper garnered neither questions from audience nor much mention in press. Turner's basic thesis connects American democracy and American exceptionalism to its historically peculiar Western frontier. For Turner, frontier was meeting point between savagery and civilization. ... it lies at hither edge of free land (32-33). As white Americans flowed across continent from east to west, they experienced a return to primitive conditions on continually advancing frontier line (32). Traveling west from Eastern seabo ard, one could pass by historical evolutionary phases in country's development. Starting with established cities and towns in East, one would travel first through permanent agricultural areas, then past pioneer farming settlements, and then past ranches. Further west, settlement of any kind disappeared, and one found hunters, then trappers, and, finally, moving into realm of savagery, only Indians and buffalo. Turner writes, Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along single line, but return to primitive conditions on continually advancing frontier line (32). Therefore, for Turner, frontier, just at the hither edge of free land, continues to move west over time, and corresponding evolutionary phases creep westward accordingly, all driven by existence of an area of free land (31). Turner argued that frontier was single most definitive force shaping American sensibility. Specifically, frontier took Eastern man, still replete with European germs or ideological kernels, and transformed him through kind of frontier mill to form new consciousness: The wilderness masters colonist. …