The oldest known surviving film made by an African-American director, “Within Our Gates” is a 1920 American silent film by the director, writer and producer Oscar Micheaux, which portrays white supremacy as a conduit to racial violence in the United States during the early twentieth century, the years of Jim Crow, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration of Blacks to cities of the North and Midwest, and the emergence of the “New Negro”.