The House Behind the Cedars is a 1927 silent race film directed, written, produced and distributed by the noted director Oscar Micheaux.
It was loosely adapted from the 1900 novel of the same name by African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, who explored issues of race, class and identity in the post-Civil War South.
Although Micheaux made some cuts to get the film distributed, he wrote to the board: "There has been but one picture that incited the colored people to riot and that still does.
[5] Micheaux promoted The House Behind the Cedars by calling attention to the current scandal in New York scandal related to the legal proceedings of Leonard Rhinelander, a wealthy socialite who sought to have his marriage to Alice Jones annulled after he discovered her mixed-race parentage.
[2] This was only a few years after the white Democratic legislature, which had disfranchised most black voters earlier in the century, had passed its Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
Officials found the film's story too threatening to its Jim Crow social order, despite the well-documented history of miscegenation and mixed-race slaves in colonial and antebellum Virginia.
[2] Micheaux agreed to make some cuts in the film, while remarking that no other state or censorship board had objected or required changes.
He also noted that when the Chesnutt novel had been published 30 years earlier, it was "read by over a thousand white people to every colored person."
[2] Afterward, the board used its review of the film into "a litmus test for the proper allegiance of white civil servants to the Racial Integrity Act.
"[2] Finding some of board member Arthur James' comments insufficiently critical of the film, they released them to John Powell, leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, an organization devoted to white supremacy.
Powell initiated threats to James' position and generated letters of strong criticism by the members of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs.