2. Sylvia Landry (Within Our Gates)
Sylvia Landry is the protagonist of Oscar Micheauxs 1920 film Within Our Gates. A very kind woman with a traumatic past, she perseveres through many kinds of intense hardship to find happiness. She is a well-written character who journeys very organically between the many excellent points the movie makes. The journey is intelligent and actually still very relevant to the current situation of the United States in many ways. Sylvia makes several very strong emotional decisions on her own terms, and uses truly positive, open-minded, educated logic when dealing with racismovert or subvertfrom whites or blacks. She, like many of the characters in the movie, is the face through which problems that concern many people can be talked about in constructive ways while also being entertaining to watch. Sylvia conveys a wide range of emotions very well (and overall, the movie makes its range of ideas seem easy to implement with its steady pacing), and her role has plenty of layers, but she is interesting to watch even before the audience knows that she has a traumatic past. This movie seems to be very much ahead of its time, but maybe Hollywood has in fact been lagging over the last few decades. People always respond to characters like Sylvia. Before Hollywood runs out of 1980s properties to look to for inspiration, it should look to the 1920s.