GORDON GARNOS

(8/12/2005)

South Dakotans need to know more about people like Oscar Micheaux

By Gordon Garnos

AT ISSUE: Every community in South Dakota is unique in one way or another. Every community in the state has someone who is very special in its history. That person may have been a war hero, famous physician or, maybe, someone who made it all the way to Hollywood. Gregory has one of those famous people.

EVERY SOUTH DAKOTA town has someone from its past who has gone on to fame and fortune in one way or another. Huron and Watertown remember movie star Cheryl Ladd, Sioux Falls is the home to such people as Entertainment Tonight's Mary Hart and sportscaster and television host Pat O'Brien, Yankton and Pickstown are former homes of former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, USA Today's creator, Al Neuharth, grew up in Eureka and Alpena and world famous cancer surgeon Alton Ochsner was born and raised in Kimball, just to name a few. Gregory has a person from its past who is not necessarily on the tip of the tongues of most South Dakotans, but his fame is recognized worldwide. He is Oscar Micheaux.

If you weren't in Gregory last week you missed attending the 10th annual Oscar Micheaux Film and Book Festival. His contributions in both American literature and the movie industry ranks him as one of the famous people from South Dakota.

ACCORDING TO a brochure distributed by the Oscar Micheaux Center in Gregory, "The festival is unique because it celebrates the life and contributions of Micheaux, who made a considerable impact on black film-making and who took insurmountable risks being a Black businessman in the new field of movie-making. He is now recognized worldwide (as is the festival) as an historical figure depicting the difficulty of his race through his films and novels..."

Micheaux was born in 1884 in southern Illinois into a family of 13 children. At the age of 17 he left home for Chicago, working as a shoeshine boy and later as a Pullman porter traveling the USA.

He eventually landed in Gregory, which was part of the Rosebud Reservation and in 1905 he took over a failed homestead. When hard times hit the area he turned to writing novels and selling them from door-to-door and from farm-to-farm. He left South Dakota in 1918 and turned to the new movie industry.

HE MADE HIS FIRST movie, "The Homesteader," filmed in the Gregory area. Before his death in 1951 he had written seven books and 44 full-length silent and sound movies.

Through several stories in the Gregory Times-Advocate the life of this man unfolds like a Hollywood movie, itself. "Like thousands of other young men and women, Micheaux was caught up in the excitement of the last land boom in South Dakota."

However, unlike most of the others, Micheaux was a Negro, an African-American, long before that term was created. He missed the opening of Gregory County to homesteading in 1904, but the next year he took over a failed homestead southeast of Gregory. His first wife was the daughter of a Chicago minister, but after a few years in the Gregory area and through some of her family's intervention she returned to Chicago.

HIS HOMESTEAD and divorce experiences set the stage for his first novel, "The Conquest." The profits from this book led him to Sioux City where he started the Western Book and Supply Company, which published his second and third books, "The Forged Notes: A Romance of the Darker Races" in 1915 and "The Homestead" in 1917.

Micheaux's movies portrayed positive images of his race, which made them extremely popular among black audiences. They were very melodramatic, which became a trademark of his. By his death at the age of 67 Micheaux was given credit for giving exposure to Edna May Harris and Robert Earl Jones, the father of the modern day actor, James Earl Jones.

His characters in both his books and his movies depicted people he knew. For example, he wrote about the notorious Jackson brothers and their Mulehead Ranch near Bonesteel, now owned by Lynn and Joe Duling. The ranch is now the home of Mulehead Ranch Adventures, that features various kinds of hunting and trails for ATV riding. He also recalls the prairie fire in Dallas and the legend of Rattlesnake Jack, who was actually a woman, not to be confused with Rattlesnake Pete from the Reliance area.

AFTER THE DEATH of Oscar Micheaux he was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. He also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was the first African-American to produce a feature-length film, the first African-American to produce a talking feature film, the first African-American to produce a film that opened in white theaters and the first African-American to write and publish a best-selling novel. And he also was a South Dakotan.

South Dakotans have also honored this man through his earned induction a few years ago into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in Chamberlain, the home of where so many great South Dakotans are remembered....

Gordon Garnos was long-time editor of the Watertown Public Opinion and recently retired after 39 years with that newspaper.  Garnos, a lifelong resident of South Dakota except for his military service in the U.S. Air Force, was born and raised in Presho.