...This chapter examines the race films in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. It analyzes several such films including Within Our Gates directed by Oscar Micheaux, Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, and Dark Manhattan by Ralph Cooper...

... nineteenth-century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and early race films. The book argues that legal principles dealing with fugitives and indebted persons provided a sophisticated precursor to intellectual property law as it dealt with rights in appearance...