ublesome picture of race relations. The film is a fictional retelling of a real legal case, that of the Leo Frank lynching case. The Hollywood vision of black problems 15 years later would be sugarcoated to a great degree, making the whites more agreeable and the blacks stoic Christians, and with both bound together to face life. In the Micheaux version, though, reality is given a much more important role, and the images of the lynching in particular are haunting and show the nature of the conflict between black and white in a naked way:
Micheaux characterizes the White mob as crazed and barbarically cruel--so cruel that even innocents--women and children--are its victims. Landry's wife is dragged forward and beaten by the mob, and the noose is placed around her neck and the neck of her young son, although the boy wriggles out of it and narrowly escapes on a horse (Gaines 55).
The ability to show such scenes in a more brutal and critical way is a hallmark of independent films from this era, and the race movies did
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