This was the third of five films bearing the title: BIRTHRIGHT. This film was produced by the Micheaux Pictures Corporation by Oscar Micheaux and released in 1939. Micheaux was inclined to adapt from his screenplays from novels. Micheaux based this one on T.S. Stribling's novel of the same title which was about a black student who graduated from Harvard University who confronted the racism of of his time. The film had a subtitle also, it was: A Story of the Negro and the South, it referred to the heroic young man in his attempt to found a school for African-American children in a small town in Tennessee so as to "Uplift the Race," a phrase used by Spike Lee half a century later. Micheaux also made the earlier silent-movie of the same title in 1924.
Review of Birthright
