The most important African-American filmmaker of the silent era, Oscar Micheaux was also the first African-American man to produce a “talkie” and is the only African-American to have produced films in both the silent and sound eras. Veiled Aristocrats is his 1932 sound remake of The House Behind the Cedars (1925), based on Charles Chesnutt’s novel. One of Micheaux’s most controversial films, Veiled Aristocrats addresses the question of the price of success in a middle class black community through the story of racial “passing.” Lorenzo Tucker (known as the "Black Valentino") stars in this story of a lawyer who returns home to find that his light-skinned sister is about to marry a dark-skinned man, while his mother has picked a more suitable candidate.

Preceded by a selection of silent film shorts which consider questions of race and representation including Sidney Olcott’s The Octoroon (1913), Edwin Porter’s Laughing Gas (1907), What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903).