Editing Within Our Gates (section)

==Aesthetics==
Micheaux's work has often been criticized as lacking [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] finesse or artistic power. Micheaux constructed ''Within Our Gates'' to educate his audience about racism, uplift, [[peon]]age, women's rights, and the urban "new Negro" emerging after the Great Migration.

His movement in the plot between North and South was similar to that of D. W. Griffith, who used a north–south marriage plot, but also expressed the mobility of peoples during this period. Griffith dramatized a white reunion of regions that canceled the legacy of the [[Reconstruction Era]] to leave blacks out of the national picture. Micheaux's film ended with a wedding that united sophisticated African Americans from the North and South. Together, they symbolically lay claim to the whole nation, despite discrimination against blacks in the military, and the racial riots of 1919, which were based in labor and social competition.

Critics (such as Jane Gaines, Ronald Green, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence) note how Micheaux intercut the lynching of the Landry family with the attempted rape of Sylvia by Gridlestone. This editing deconstructed the white ideology that lynching was to punish black men for alleged sexual assaults against white women. Micheaux portrayed the more frequent sexual assaults of black women by white men, alluding to the widespread historical practice of white men taking advantage of black women slaves. Other passages were edited to deconstruct white visual traditions and white ideologies.{{citation needed|date=July 2012}} The film also touched on several current social and political events, including the death of [[Theodore Roosevelt]], the contributions of African-American soldiers to the war, and debates in the US Senate over [[Jim Crow laws]] and labor [[peon]]age in the South.{{citation needed|date=July 2012}}