The Symbol of the Unconquered at the Mayme Clayton Library

Screening of rare early cinema clips followed by Oscar Micheaux’s full length film, The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), with silent film musician Cliff Retallick on the Baldwin organ, supplemented with lectures by Galen Wilkes, ragtime music historian, and Les Wills, film historian. 

 A light-skinned black woman (Hall) settles the homestead she’s inherited from her grandfather and initiates a friendship with a young prospector who thinks she’s white. Awkwardly paced and overly melodramatic, but a fascinating slice of cultural history. The primary villains are an equal-opportunity lot–a white swindler, an Indian fakir, and a self-hating mulatto who conceals his racial identity–and the scenes featuring the Ku Klux Klan (here called the Knights of the Black Cross) starkly contrast Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Restored from a print found in Belgium’s Cinematheque Royale, with title cards describing the missing footage. Compare with Micheaux’s WITHIN OUR GATES (1920). Full title is THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED: A STORY OF THE KU KLUX KLAN.