During March and April, the American Cultures series focuses on films concerned with xenophobic attitudes toward various cultures within our borders. We begin with two classics-the first, a race film from the twenties, the second a social-conscience film of the thirties. Both deal with the practice of lynching in the South, inspired by the Lee Frank case, in which a Jewish man was lynched. Within Our Gates: Oscar Micheaux's controversial silent was a tale of black southern life, its hardships and racial divisions. A "prosperous" black sharecropper is brought down by the machinations of a pesky "white fo'kes nigger," who tattles on him to the local landowner. The film contains a scene of an attempted lynching-of the sharecropper and his family-and one in which a young boy, after the attempt, dreams that he is being lynched. Some Southern theaters boycotted it, and in the North, the Chicago Board of Movie Censors rejected it for fear of a recurrence of the previous year's "race riots." Civic leaders and members of the black press intervened on the film's behalf. As one reviewer noted, "There is nothing in the picture but what is true..."