film's portrayal of lynching shows "what Blacks knew and Northern Whites refused to believe", turning the "accusation of 'primitivism'... back onto White Southern culture". Also in this period was the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, in which white mobs killed numerous Black people, and burned residential districts, leaving thousands of Black citizens homeless. The critic Ronald J. Green believes that Micheaux had seen that Black citizens had fought back in Chicago, and chose the title with an allusion to the risk to whites in future racial violence. Within Our Gates was the second of more than 40 films directed by Micheaux. On a limited budget, Micheaux had to use borrowed costumes and props. He had no opportunity to reshoot scenes. After being presumed lost for decades, the film was found when a single print, titled La Negra (The Black Woman), was discovered in Spain in the 1970s. A brief sequence in the middle of the film was lost. Only four of the original English intertitles survived, the rest having been replaced with Spanish intertitles when the film was distributed in Spain in the 1920s. In 1993, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center restored the film as closely as possible to the original. Scott Simmon translated the Spanish titles back into English. He removed explanatory material added for Spanish audiences. He drew from the style and diction used by Micheaux in his novels and in the intertitles for Body and Soul, his only silent film to survive with the original intertitles. The missing sequence was summarized with an intertitle frame. Response Within Our Gates initially was rejected by the Board of Censors in Chicago when Micheaux submitted the film in December 1919. An article in the Chicago Defender of January 17, 1920, asserted: "This is the picture that required two solid months to get by the Censor Boards." A week later the Defender reported, Those who reasoned with the spectacle of last July in Chicago ever before them, declared the showing pre-eminently dangerous; while those who reasoned with the knowledge of existing conditions, the injustices of the times, the lynchings and handicaps of ignorance, determined that the time is ripe to bring the lesson to the front. Critics of the film feared that scenes with lynching and attempted rape would spark interracial violence in a city still tense from the riots of July 1919. Officials in Omaha (which also