Oscar Micheaux was an author, film director, and independent producer of more than 40 motion pictures between 1919 and 1948. As America’s first major African-American filmmaker, he is considered by many the forerunner of Tyler Perry and Spike Lee. His films portrayed racial injustice suffered by African Americans during his era. Beyond his groundbreaking artistic work, he was also a pioneer homesteader who acquired free land in South Dakota under the government’s 1904 Homestead Act and settled there. The son of a Kentucky slave, Micheaux was born on a farm in Metropolis, where he spent his first 17 years, received his formal education, and attended St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. He is remembered through annual film festivals that screen his films nationwide, a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, a U.S. Postage stamp, a special exhibition wing in the Academy of Motion Pictures, and an arts society at Duke University in North Carolina named for him. He was also the subject of the 2014 TV documentary Black Czar of Hollywood. In 2021, Oscar Micheaux, the Superhero of Black Filmmaking, a biographical movie featuring Morgan Freeman, Chuck D, and Jacqueline Stewart, aired on HBO Max and the Turner Classic Movie channel. Micheaux died in 1951 and is buried in Great Bend Cemetery in Great Bend, Kansas.