What You Don't Know About Early Interracial Cinema

A Literal Literary Loser Mixes Fact and Fiction

In my May 2025 book, Go On Pretending, Rose Janowitz (fictional) works for Irna Phillips (real) on the radio soap opera, The Guiding Light (real).

To play the lead villain, Edmund Bard (fictional… in that said villain never appeared on The Guiding Light; otherwise, all the characters are fictional, making Edmund fictional twice-removed) Rose hires Jonas Cain (fictional), an African-American actor, as the (presumably) white Edmund.

As Rose and Jonas go out to dinner after work (a separate adventure in and off itself in 1950s New York City - real), Jonas tells Rose about his collaboration with Oscar Micheaux (real), an early Black filmmaker.

Go On Pretending will be my second book with History Through Fiction publishing. (My first was My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region.) HTF’s purpose is stated right there in the title: Sharing history… through fiction.

This objective calls for a delicate balancing act, juggling the real with the made up in a manner that preserves the spirit of what actually happened while plopping a canonical stranger into the fray.

There was no Rose Janowitz, but there was an Irna Phillips. There was no Jonas Cain, but there was an Oscar Micheaux. I’m employing the real to tell the tale of the fictional — in order to convey the stories of the real. And the fictional. See what I mean about the delicate balancing act?

Let me know how I did in this Go On Pretending excerpt:

“When I grew weary of the touring life,” Jonas said, “I took a stab at cinema. There were a few roles as Pullman porters. Yes, sir; No, sir; Thank you, sir; Your luggage, sir, were the extent of my dialogue. Quite the challenge to memorize, as you may well imagine. But I did notch one remarkable opportunity, a role in Oscar Micheaux’s final film.”

“Oscar Micheaux?” While Rose wasn’t a habitual moviegoer—she was, frankly, too busy with work and her own imaginary worlds—she did make an effort to keep up with that side of the entertainment industry. But this failed to ring a bell. “Who’s he?”

Any other man Rose had ever sat across a restaurant table from would have leapt on the opportunity to patronizingly fill in Rose’s tragic gaps of general knowledge and demonstrate that, no matter how much more money she made than him—it didn’t matter that Jonas was about to headline his own radio show, Rose still made more money than him—he, nonetheless, knew far more than she could ever hope to. 

But that wasn’t the case here. Jonas’ visible delight in spinning his story flowed not from the glee of putting Rose in her place, but out of his obvious passion for the topic. She could tell the difference. “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.”

Lincoln, Rose thought. Yes, she was familiar with entities named after Abraham Lincoln. She hoped Oscar Micheaux’s adventure had a happier ending than hers.

“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.”

“Oh,” Rose said. It was already more than she’d intended to say.

“Box office receipts were abysmal, and that was the end of Lincoln Motion Pictures. He died a few years later.”

So, no, then. No happier ending for this Lincoln namesake, either.

“I’d love to see it,” Rose said. “The movie, I mean. I’d love to see you in it.”

“Impossible, I’m afraid. All prints were destroyed, it’s considered a lost film. By the way, I don’t want you to think only the white press was hostile. The Chicago Defender hated it with equal fervor. For primarily the same reasons.”

“Oh,” Rose repeated. She was glad this wasn’t her and Jonas’ first meeting. He’d have assumed she was a complete idiot. Instead of merely a periodic one. Mark Twain may have been quoted as saying: It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt. But the former Samuel Clemens wasn’t the ideal person to turn to when wrestling with the correct response to a matter of racial delicacy, now was he? So, Rose ignored Twain, and compulsively filled the ensuing silence with, “That’s a tragic story. For an artist. To put so much of your heart and soul into something, only to have it disappear without a trace.”

Jonas nodded thoughtfully. Then changed the subject.

Was it that he didn’t wish to discuss the topic further? Or did he merely yearn to bring to an end her feeble and meaningless platitudes?