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Michaeux who had pioneered in the world of film. Oscar Michaeux’s name would go down in history for his early films about Negro cowboys; domestic bliss and tragedy amongst Negroes; historical films about Negro accomplishment, and so on; before finally succumbing to the monopolistic ways of Hollywood. Had this other Micheaux not been cruelly crushed, had he found the financial and behind-the-scenes support obtained by men with last names like Cohn, Goldwyn, Mayer, and so on, whose studios became Hollywood legends, there is no telling how far Negro achievement in a variety of arenas might have spread. The same could have been said during the height of the Harlem Renaissancefor gangsters squeezed out of the clandestine activities they pioneered. In the numbers racket, for example, Bumpy Johnson was replaced by the likes of Mafiosi such as Lucky Luciano, who, in turn, helped finance posh entertainment outlets like the Cotton Club, which featured the music of Duke Ellington and the hedonistic shimmying of the cafe-au-lait Cotton Club dancers for the pleasure of prosperous Caucasians only, eagerly “slumming” up in Harlem. Johnson, too, might have plowed clandestine wealth into the entertainment industry. There were all kinds of “what ifs” to consider when one really stopped to think about things. And Lewis Michaeux, to the consternation of plenty of Negroes considered more pragmatic, was always stopping to think about things and doing something in protest after thinking as long and hard as he thought necessary.
    Born near Newport News, Virginia, in 1884, Micheaux migrated to New York City in his early twenties. After saving enough money from selling books from his Harlem pushcart, in 1930 he opened a bookstore on Seventh Avenue, near the corner of 125th Street, catty-corner from where King was to speak twenty-eight years later at the September 19th rally; the spot became known as Harlem Square due to the constant political activity that took place there. Through the years activists of all kinds harangued passersby with their political agendas (beginning in the 1940s, when 125th Street stores were integrated and the center of Negro Harlem moved from 135th Street and Lenox Avenue to 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, the political street activists moving with the tide). Michaeux called his bookstore the NationalMemorial African Bookstore and, in the beginning, slept in the back and washed windows for people when proceeds from selling his books couldn’t make ends meet. Eventually, proceeds did make ends meet and he maintained what for most of the next twenty-eight years was the only bookstore in Harlem. During Christmas season, the bookstore would sell as many as five hundred Bibles to the community. It would also earn a reputation as the most comprehensive bookshop on Negroes in the world. Over time it would earn the informal name of “The House of Common Sense and Proper Propaganda”—the words displayed on a sign Michaeux placed in the front window. The National Memorial African Bookstore became a meeting place for students, scholars, African diplomats, and politicians. All kinds of books about Negroes were stacked up to its high ceiling. And there were portraits of famed Negro men and women, too. Harlem Square street activists often stopped in to check historical claims about the Negro before mounting their ladders and haranguing the crowds of pedestrians. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen often stopped by to discuss with the small, wiry bespectacled Michaeux the hardships of being a Negro writer; others who stopped by included Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson; Louis Armstrong; W.E.B. Du Bois (when he was still living in America before moving to Ghana); and the irascible Harlem congressman and pastor of historic Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
    Yet perhaps it was Micheaux’s reputation for militancy that caused King to avoid signing books at his store. This was the man who featured on his bookshelves