Michele Prettyman: Self
Quotes
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Michele Prettyman : Land figures extremely prominently in his imagination; but, in the life of black people of the time. Because, many in the South were promised their '40 acres and a mule' and virtually no one gets that. Micheaux, again, saw something, I think different with that. He was sort of running through some of the political theory and some of the ideology of the time. So, I think land is symbolically important; but, to him it was - it embodied something more.
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Richard Peña : I think he was someone who looked forward. And, you know, in many ways, the key experience for Micheaux, I believe, was when he worked as a Pullman Porter on the American railroads. Even though they were waiters and sort of cabin people, people who made up rooms, they did, in a sense, mingle with very high class white people and talk to them and get to know them and, I think, Micheaux in that experience said, "If these people can live like this, I can live like this and African Americans can live like this."
Michele Prettyman : Its no surprise to me that someone like Micheaux would, like someone like Malcolm X, their early life, their formative years, be shaped by some degree of working on the train, working on a railroads. That's a defining, sort of, modernist impulse. And so, Micheaux is a part of that. He is a part of this ebb and flow culture and ideas and imagination that the train really embodies.
Patrick McGilligan : He met people. He talked to them. He got books from them. He learned about society, about politics, about entertainment in different cities. It really him a worldly man - much more than a lot of people who spent their lives entirely in the midwest.
