Within Our Gates - Production Background

Production Background

Often regarded in the context of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which had appeared five years earlier, critics have considered Micheaux's project as a response to Griffith. 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".

Also in this period was the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, in which ethnic white mobs killed numerous blacks, and burned residential districts, leaving thousands of blacks homeless. Micheaux took the film's name from a line in Griffith's film. With "Within your gates," he had suggested that people should not harm one another, lest they be harmed. The critic Ronald J. Green believes that Micheaux had seen that blacks had fought back in Chicago, and chose the title with an allusion to the risk to whites in future racial violence.

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.

Lost for decades, a single print of the film, entitled La Negra (The Black Woman), was discovered in Spain in the 1970s. A brief sequence in the middle of the film was lost. Only four of the original English intertitles survived, the rest having been replaced with Spanish intertitles when the film was distributed in Spain in the 1920s.

In 1993, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center restored the film as closely as possible to the original. Scott Simmon translated the Spanish titles back into English. He removed explanatory material added for Spanish audiences. He drew from the style and diction used by Micheaux in his novels and in the intertitles for Body and Soul, his only silent film to survive with the original intertitles. The missing sequence was summarized with an intertitle frame.