suffered a racial riot), New Orleans, and other cities objected for similar reasons when they blocked the screening of the film or demanded that those scenes be cut. When released in January 1920 against reports of the controversy, the film garnered large audiences in Chicago. It was screened in differently cut versions. For example, an article in the Defender reported that on February 24, 1920, Within Our Gates would be shown at the States Theater in Chicago "without the cuts which were made before its initial presentation." Other evidence of cuts were extant film stills of scenes that did not appear in the surviving film copy, and viewers' descriptions that differed from the current version of the film. It is considered an important expression of African-American life in the years immediately following World War I, when violent racist incidents occurred throughout the United States, but most frequently in the South. In 1992, Within Our Gates was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant". DJ Spooky created a new score for the film as part of a box set with Kino Lorber. In 2023, Within Our Gates was named by Slate as one of the greatest films ever created by Black directors. The film was also the earlier film listed by Slate as being part of the "new Black film canon." Aesthetics Micheaux's work has often been criticized as lacking aesthetic finesse or artistic power. Micheaux constructed Within Our Gates to educate his audience about racism, uplift, peonage, women's rights, and the urban "new Negro" emerging after the Great Migration. His movement in the plot between North and South was similar to that of D. W. Griffith, who used a North-South marriage plot, but also expressed the mobility of peoples during this period. Griffith dramatized a white reunion of regions that canceled the legacy of the Reconstruction Era to leave blacks out of the national picture. Micheaux's film ended with a wedding that united sophisticated African Americans from the North and South. Together, they symbolically lay claim to the whole nation, despite discrimination against blacks in the military, and the racial riots of 1919, which were based in labor and social competition. Critics (such as Jane Gaines, Ronald Green, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence) note how Micheaux intercut the lynching of the Landry family with