venerates the Ku Klux Klan in a post-Civil
War Armageddon where beastly black men, with the support of Yankee plunderers, preyed upon Southern white women and where ignorant black men elected to office made a mockery of governance. Some white moviegoers, taking the film as a call to arms to avenge their forebears, lashed out at any blacks they came upon. KKK membership flourished, no doubt aided by stories that a sympathetic President Woodrow Wilson had shown Birth of a Nation at the White House. A college classmate of Dixon at Johns Hopkins University, Wilson had authored a five-volume tome, A History of the American People (1902), which described the KKK in heroic terms. Amid widespread reports of the president’s endorsement of the film’s historicity, however, his private secretary quietly sought to distance him from it.2
By early 1915, alerted by Bass’s ultimately unsuccessful crusade in California, national NAACP leaders lobbied the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, sued in court and appealed to key state and local politicians to ban the film or have its most offensive scenes removed. In Boston, William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, was arrested during protests. In New York, Fred R. Moore, editor of the New York Age and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis magazine, testified before reformist Mayor John Mitchel and the New York City Council. Throughout the country race leaders challenged the film as a public nuisance, a disturber of the peace, an offense against public decency and a danger to public morals. In some cities the film was banned; in others, scenes were removed; but ultimately the ruckus helped the box office rather than hurt it and certainly did not disqualify it from the cinematic pantheon.3
Still, Bass would later recall: "We of the Eagle pioneered in an important field of social struggle, the struggle to make the film industry responsible morally for the content of its products, the struggle to lift higher artistic standards in the entertainment world, standards reflecting a sense of social duty and propriety, rather than prejudice and vain glory."4
As The Birth of a Nation was being “drummed out of most of the large Northern cities,” in the words of the Chicago Defender, the black press kept up its drumbeat for federal anti-lynching laws by constantly reminding readers of the mounting death toll. Even as the film made its rounds, the Chicago Defender of July 10, 1915, reported: “Lynch Two in Georgia: Mob Spirit Again Rampant” and two days later a New York Age headline blared: “Extra! Five Burnings in South in Five Months.”
In her study of black film criticism, Anna Everett writes: “Because lynching was a real threat to black men, women, and children, and because Birth legitimated and glorified the barbaric practice, the black press was compelled to remind the nation’s cinephiles that this film more than any other demonstrated beyond a doubt that the
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The black press feared the epic Gone With the Wind would incite unrest like that which followed the release of the infamous Birth of a Nation.