The Symbol of the Unconquered (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1), after the 68th annual Grammy Awards lumbered to a close, my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies. One was The Symbol of the Unconquered: A Story of the Ku Klux Klan (1920), written, directed, and produced by Oscar Micheaux. Oscar Micheaux was the pioneering independent African-American filmmaker who made 44 films between 1919 and 1948, including at least two near-masterpieces, Within Our Gates (1920) and Body and Soul (1925). Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Illinois on January 2, 1884, one of 13 children in a farm family headed by his father, an ex-slave. After flipping back and forth between rural and urban life, Micheaux moved to Chicago at age 17 and lived with his brother, a waiter. Disappointed in his brother’s relatively low status, after stints in the legendary Chicago stockyards and steel mills, he opened a shoeshine stand near a popular African-American barber shop and started learning how to run a business and save money. Micheaux became a Pullman porter at a time when this was one of the higher-status jobs available to Blacks; it meant good pay, steady work, and the chance to travel. Then Micheaux moved to South Dakota and bought land, setting himself up as a homesteader, which inspired his first novel, The Conquest (1913), and his first film, an adaptation of The Conquest called The Homesteader (1919). According to the Wikipedia page on Micheaux, “His theme was about African-Americans realizing their potential and succeeding in areas where they had not felt they could. The book outlines the difference between city lifestyles of Negroes and the life he decided to lead as a lone Negro out on the far West as a pioneer. He discusses the culture of doers who want to accomplish and those who see themselves as victims of injustice and hopelessness and who do not want to try to succeed, but instead like to pretend to be successful while living the city lifestyle in poverty. He had become frustrated with getting some members of his race to populate the frontier and make something of themselves, with real work and property investment.” Micheaux’s second film, Within Our Gates, fortunately survives and is a great movie; essentially it’s an “answer film” to D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), though Micheaux denied that was his intention. Though Micheaux had no use for Griffith’s politics, it’s clear he learned from Griffith how to make a movie; Within Our Gates is state-of-the-art technically for its time, filled with close-ups, moving-camera shots, creative lighting, and the other innovations Griffith had pioneered. (Within Our Gates is being presented on Turner Classic Movies’ "Silent Sunday Showcase” Sunday, February 9, at 9 p.m. Pacific time, midnight Eastern time. If you haven’t seen this remarkable film, you owe it to yourself to grab that opportunity. I wrote about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html.)

As it stands, The Symbol of the Unconquered – Micheaux’s fourth film – doesn’t seem to be on the level of Within Our Gates or Body and Soul, though that may be because it doesn’t survive complete. The only known print is a partial one found in Belgium (which meant that the French titles had to be laboriously back-translated into English) that’s missing key footage, including the scene we’d most like to see (more on that later). It’s basically a frustrated love story between Eve Mason (Iris Hall), a light-skinned Black woman; and Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson), a virtuous Black prospector. In the opening scene, Eve is stuck in a big city and seeks shelter in a hotel run by light-skinned Black man Jefferson Driscoll (Laurence Chenault, who frequently appeared in Micheaux’s films as well as other relatively high-end productions aimed at Black audiences). Unfortunately, though Driscoll is Black (and looks it on screen), he’s tried “passing” for white, only to be repeatedly “outed” by his mother (Mattie Wilkes) in a situation Fannie Hurst would recycle for her 1933 novel Imitation of Life. This has given Driscoll an intense hatred for his own race, which he expresses by forcing Eve (whom he’s “outed” as Black by looking at her eyes) and a Black male who’s shown up the same night to sleep in a barn. Running out of the barn to seek shelter in the countryside, Eve encounters Hugh Van Allen, who’s also Black and is attracted to Eve but hangs back from expressing it because Eve looks white and he doesn’t want the opprobrium of an interracial relationship. According to TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, Micheaux used this plot situation again and again – a Black man falls in love with a woman he thinks is white but turns out to be a light-skinned African-American – because during his homesteading days he’d fallen in love with a (genuinely) white woman who wanted nothing to do with him because of the racial divide. So he used his authority as a writer to imagine a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the happy ending he hadn’t had in real life (though the real Micheaux was married three times and his last wife, Alice B. Russell, stayed with him from 1926 to his death in 1951). Skulduggery ensues as Jonathan Driscoll hooks up with discredited white ex-judge August Barr (Louis Dean, whom for some reason Micheaux billed as “Déan”) and Indian fakir Tugi (Leigh Whipper) to swindle local landowners.

From a letter accidentally dropped by a sloppy mail carrier, Driscoll learns that Van Allen’s land is valuable – though it’s not until later in the film that we learn why – and intends either to force Van Allen to sell or get him to give up the property some other way. The “some other way” is to get a local thug-type white guy Judge Barr knows to lead raids on the Van Allen property in the white-sheets regalia of a Klan-like organization called the “Knights of the Black Cross.” They take advantage of a two-day trip Van Allen has taken to buy furniture for his home (though all we’ve seen him living in is a shack and a tent). Eve learns of this and gets on a horse to ride to Van Allen and warn him, but in the meantime the Klan is doing a number of night rides, first with just one Klansman waving a firework and then with a whole cadre of them. (There’s a certain Ed Woodian uncertainty as to when this is taking place because Eve’s ride is taking place at twilight while the Klan’s is happening in the dead of night.) In the missing scene whose absence is the most frustrating part of the film because it’s the one we’d most like to see, the Blacks successfully beat off the Klan’s attack by throwing bricks at them. The only way we know of what these scenes contained was by a contemporary review of the film in the New York Age, a Black-oriented paper founded in 1887, which is quoted in the restoration’s intertitles. When the film resumes it’s two years later, Hugh Van Allen is now an oil millionaire, his land is a broad expanse of derricks, and he’s running the entire operation while Eve is still in touch with him. But he won’t pursue her because he still thinks she’s white until she gets a letter from “The Committee for the Defense of the Colored Race” (read: the NAACP) documenting that she’s really Black, and the two clinch as the movie ends. The version we were watching was put together in 1995 and the soundtrack was by the legendary jazz drummer Max Roach, though instead of assembling a band to score the film with the sort of music Roach had brought to his early-1960’s albums We Insist! Freedom Now Suite and Percussion Bitter Sweet, Roach used his drums as the only instrument. The effect is to watch the film while hearing a great jazz drummer practicing in the next room. The Symbol of the Unconquered is a frustrating film, not only because of its incompleteness – imagine the thrill, just five years after D. W. Griffith had glorified the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation, of seeing the Klan vanquished! – but because Micheaux didn’t bring the same level of directorial skill to it that he had to Within Our Gates or Body and Soul. Still, one thing Micheaux knew how to do as a director was get great, understated performances from his cast, and so he does here.