Bestselling author, online storyteller, and electonic book consultant In 1994 Alina Adams became a writer at E!
02/04/2025
For :
“Mr. Micheaux was America’s first colored filmmaker. He has quite the biography. Son of a freed slave, he was a homesteader, a mill worker, a Pullman porter, naturally—we do it in real life, not merely in the movies—a shoe-shiner, and a novelist. Had seven books published. And that was all before he turned to film production. His company, Lincoln Motion Pictures—note who is credited in the title—was the first owned by a colored man. Mr. Micheaux wrote, he directed, he produced. Forty-four finished films, silents and talkies. He was quite the success, even sold stock in his corporation—primarily to wealthy white folks he charmed during his days with the railroad. I only met him briefly on The Betrayal. It was the first race story to open at a white theater, right here in New York City at the Mansfield, in 1948. A generous critic called it the greatest Negro photoplay of all time. The New York Times, of course, hated it. Especially the suggestion that Negroes and whites might find many points of commonality, not merely in professional and community endeavors, but possibly in marriage.”
A Literal Literary Loser Mixes Fact and Fiction
