Editing Within Our Gates (section)

==Production==
''Within Our Gates'' was produced when early [[film studio]]s in [[America's first motion picture industry]] were based in [[Fort Lee, New Jersey]] at the beginning of the 20th century.<ref>{{Citation   | last = Koszarski   | first = Richard   | title = Fort Lee: The Film Town   | place = Rome, Italy   | publisher = John Libbey Publishing -CIC srl   | year = 2004   | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=5w0r8YKan04C&q=Fort+Lee:+the+film+town+Door+Richard+Koszarski   | isbn=  0-86196-653-8    }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web   | title = Studios and Films   | publisher = Fort Lee Film Commission   | url = http://www.fortleefilm.org/studios.html   | access-date = 2011-05-30   | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20181020130551/http://fortleefilm.org/studios.html   | archive-date = October 20, 2018   | url-status = dead}}</ref><ref>{{Citation   | last = Fort Lee Film Commission   | title = Fort Lee Birthplace of the Motion Picture Industry   | publisher = Arcadia Publishing   | year = 2006   | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=ViR3b72xkK0C&q=Fort+Lee+Birthplace+of+the+Motion+Picture+Industry   | isbn = 0-7385-4501-5}}</ref>

Often regarded in the context of [[D.W. Griffith]]'s ''[[The Birth of a Nation]]'' (1915), Micheaux's project has been considered by critics as a response.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Siomopoulos|first1=Anna |title="The Birth of a Black Cinema: 'Race, Reception, and Oscar Micheaux's' Within Our Gates." |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41167256 |journal=The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists |year=2006 |volume=6 |issue=2 |pages=111–118 |publisher=he Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, vol. 6, no. 2, 2006, pp. 111–18 |doi=10.1353/mov.2007.0017 |jstor=41167256 |s2cid=194092993 |access-date=23 November 2022}}</ref> The film's portrayal of lynching shows "what Blacks knew and Northern Whites refused to believe", turning the "accusation of 'primitivism'... back onto White Southern culture".<ref>Mellencamp, Patricia. ''A Fine Romance--Five Ages of Film Feminism''. 1995, pp. 230-1.</ref>

[[File:Film still of lynching from Micheaux's Within Our Gates.jpg|right|thumb|Still from ''Within Our Gates'', portraying the lynching of Jasper Landry (William Stark) and his wife (Mattie Edwards)]]
Also during this period was the [[Chicago Race Riot of 1919]], in which white mobs killed numerous Black people, and burned residential districts, leaving thousands of Black citizens homeless.<ref>Green, Ronald J. ''Straight Lick''. 2000, p. 24</ref> The critic Ronald J. Green believes that Micheaux had seen that Black citizens had fought back in Chicago, and chose the title with an allusion to the risk to whites in future racial violence.<ref>Green (2000), ''Straight Lick'', p. 1.</ref>

''Within Our Gates'' was the second of more than forty films directed by Micheaux. On a limited budget, Micheaux had to use borrowed costumes and props. He had no opportunity to reshoot scenes.