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#OTD: February 8, 1915 The 3-hour long blockbuster silent film “Birth of a Nation” debuts in Los Angeles. It was a white supremacist propaganda film that takes place during Reconstruction. It depicts the Ku Klux Klan as the noble saviors of an embattled South and white womanhood.
The white supremacist propaganda film featured white men in Black face as freedmen and Union soldiers. It showed Black people as slovenly, drunk, and lustful. Griffith said he wanted to “create a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored men.”
“Birth of a Nation” was directed by D.W. Griffith and adapted from a book called “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon Jr. It was the first film shown inside the White House and President Woodrow Wilson, who showed it, purportedly said, “It is like writing history with lightning.”
The film helped inspire the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan when a white preacher, William J. Simmons, led a group of white men to the top of Stone Mountain, a Confederate monument in GA. In a ceremony, they burned a cross and built an altar with a Bible and an American flag on top.
“Birth of a Nation” was widely protested by Black activists and organizations such as the NAACP. Even Booker T. Washington went on record to say the film’s “ultimate result will be to intensify race prejudice.”
“Birth of a Nation” promoted the “Lost Cause” a gauzy depiction of the antebellum South and white supremacy that has clouded the American psyche for generations and led to lynching, voter suppression and glorification of the Confederacy even to this day.
