Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific African-American filmmaker of the race film genre, had previously addressed the issue of violence by whites against blacks in his 1920 feature
Within Our Gates, which aroused controversy. That film's storyline, which included a portrayal of racial lynching and the sexual attack by a white man against a black woman, resulted in censorship rulings in Atlanta and other major cities throughout the U.S. Micheaux tackled another controversial subject with his 1921
The Gunsaulus Mystery. The plot was based on the 1913 murder of
Mary Phagan and the trial of
Leo Frank. After an African American was first interrogated, police attention turned to Frank, the
Jewish-American manager of the factory. He was prosecuted and convicted of the crime. After appeals had failed, he received commutation of his death sentence, but Frank was kidnapped and lynched on August 17, 1915. Micheaux shot
The Gunsaulus Mystery at the Estee Studios in
New York City and distributed the film through his Micheaux Film Corporation. Evelyn Preer, the star of
Within Our Gates, also starred in this production. Micheaux revisited the subject again in 1935 with a sound remake, which was released under the titles
Murder in Harlem and ''Lem Hawkins' Confession
. Especially in this version, Micheaux used the conventions of the detective story to introduce differing narratives and rework the binary nature of the trial, in which an African-American man and Jewish-American man had testified against each other. Events of the Mary Phagan murder would be covered in detail in the 1988 four-hour TV miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan''. ==See also==