The film portrays the contemporary racial situation in the United States during the early twentieth century, the years of Jim Crow, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration of blacks to cities of the North and Midwest, and the emergence of the "New Negro".

The plot features an African-American woman who goes North in an effort to raise money for a rural school in the Deep South for poor Black children.

Noticing a scar on her breast, Armand realized that Sylvia was in fact his mixed-race daughter, born of his marriage to a local black woman and had paid for her education.

Within Our Gates was produced when early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey at the beginning of the 20th century.

Green believes that Micheaux had seen that Black citizens had fought back in Chicago, and chose the title with an allusion to the risk to whites in future racial violence.

A week later the Defender reported, Those who reasoned with the spectacle of last July in Chicago ever before them, declared the showing pre-eminently dangerous; while those who reasoned with the knowledge of existing conditions, the injustices of the times, the lynchings and handicaps of ignorance, determined that the time is ripe to bring the lesson to the front.Critics of the film feared that scenes with lynching and attempted rape would spark interracial violence in a city still tense from the riots of July 1919.

Officials in Omaha (which also suffered a racial riot), New Orleans, and other cities objected for similar reasons when they blocked the screening of the film or demanded that those scenes be cut.

For example, an article in the Defender reported that on February 24, 1920, Within Our Gates would be shown at the States Theater in Chicago "without the cuts which were made before its initial presentation."

It is considered an important expression of African-American life in the years immediately following World War I, when violent racist incidents occurred throughout the United States, but most frequently in the South.

In 1992, Within Our Gates was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant".

Micheaux constructed Within Our Gates to educate his audience about racism, uplift, peonage, women's rights, and the urban "new Negro" emerging after the Great Migration.

Griffith dramatized a white reunion of regions that canceled the legacy of the Reconstruction Era to leave blacks out of the national picture.

Together, they symbolically lay claim to the whole nation, despite discrimination against blacks in the military, and the racial riots of 1919, which were based in labor and social competition.

Critics (such as Jane Gaines, Ronald Green, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence) note how Micheaux intercut the lynching of the Landry family with the attempted rape of Sylvia by Gridlestone.

[citation needed] The film also touched on several current social and political events, including the death of Theodore Roosevelt, the contributions of African-American soldiers to the war, and debates in the US Senate over Jim Crow laws and labor peonage in the South.

Heroes and heroines included Sylvia Landry and Reverend Jacobs, criminals such as Larry, and "lackeys" such as a minister whom Mrs. Stafford supported, who encouraged African Americans to reject suffrage.

Green suggests that Bernice Ladd as Mrs. Statton represents a "Lillian Gish figure", referring to her role in The Birth of a Nation.

Vardaman justifies his action by stating: "from the soles of their flat feet to the crown of their head, negroes are undoubtedly inferior beings, therefore, how can we in conscience permit them to vote?

The character of Old Ned justifies the present racial system as God's ordained plan; being poor and uneducated are attributes that will lead African Americans into heaven.

He preaches to his congregation that "white folks, with all their schooling, all their wealth, will most all fall into the everlasting inferno, while our race, lacking these vices and whose souls are more pure, most all will ascend to heaven.

"[19] In one of the most heartbreaking and provoking scenes of the film, Old Ned after humiliating himself in a room full of whites, closes the door and turns from a smiling buffoon to a repulsed black man.