A gravestone in Great Bend, Kansas reads simply: a man ahead of his time. This episode argues that phrase is a massive understatement for Oscar Micheaux, who wrote, funded, directed, and distributed more than 40 independent films at the height of the Jim Crow era. Born in 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, the fifth of thirteen children and the son of a formerly enslaved father, Micheaux rejected farm life, opened a strategically placed shoeshine stand in a wealthy white neighborhood, and then took a job as a Pullman porter that became his informal MBA on the rails.

The conversation follows his failed South Dakota homestead, the autobiographical novel that grew out of it, the collapsed deal with the Lincoln Motion Picture Company over creative control, and the briefcase of stock certificates he carried to former railroad contacts to fund his own ...