D. W. Griffith's seminal 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is often approached as a paradox in that it embodies both an extreme commitment to white supremacy, on the one hand, and technical innovation and artistic vision, on the other. While its technique and aesthetics reached to the modern, revealing the promise of the still-new media of film, its celebration of racial oppression reached to the past, justifying and expressing nostalgia for a world in which white people wielded complete control over black people through a tight combination of natural superiority and unapologetic violence. As the essays in this forum underline, the film's modernism and its celebration of white supremacy not only happily cohabited, but reinforced one another. The film revived elements of nineteenth-century racism, and dressed them in the clothes of the modern.

In the penultimate scene to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the normally composed and gentlemanly mulatto Lieutenant Governor Silas Lynch can no longer contain himself. He has become the leader of a rising “black South.” “[D]runk with wine and power,” his maddening ambition for political dominion seethes over into the ultimate desire that seems to drive any black male quest for authority throughout the film: Lynch exclaims, “I want to marry a white woman!” True to the deceptive nature of the duplicitous mulatto, he does not want to marry just any white woman but Elsie, the daughter of his abolitionist mentor, Austin Stoneman. Though Elsie comes from a lineage of radical advocates for equal rights, a proposal of marriage goes too far and she jerks away, offering him only a “horsewhipping for his insolence.” Lynch is outraged. Her rejection sends him into a lecherous frenzy, determined to abduct Elsie if she will not come willingly. For a moment, he regains some composure and with a snide veneer of arrogance, saunters over to the window and pulls back the curtain to reveal white residents cowering in fear to an overwhelming and bloodthirsty reign of black terror. Lynch points outside and proclaims: “See! My people fill the streets. With them I will build a Black Empire and you as a Queen shall sit by my side.”

Most years I teach a course called “American History through Hollywood Film.” One of the movies I use for teaching is The Birth of a Nation. This year, in the exam at the end of the course, I asked my students to comment on a particular clip from the film: the scene of the fight in the saloon in which the muscular white blacksmith Jeff (Wallace Reid) battles a group of African Americans and beats them all in a brawl before he is shot in the back. What I expected from the students were some comments on the linkage between alcohol and race, together with a discussion of the wider historical resonances of the sequence, particularly those associated with black boxer Jack Johnson and the attempts to find a “great white hope” able to seize his crown as, since 1908, heavyweight champion of the world. What I got were a number of further suggestions relating to class as well as race that made me want to rethink, at least to some extent, the analysis of this sequence I gave in my 2007 book.

On September 21, 1915, shortly before 10 p.m., a brick crashed through the glass window above the entrance of Philadelphia's Forrest Theatre. Instantly, the streets erupted into a “bloody scene” of the “wildest disorder.” Police charged with batons and revolvers. The crowd, which consisted mostly of black demonstrators, scattered. A few dashed for the building's main entrance. Hundreds more fled up Broad and Walnut Streets, the police at their heels. “Those who could not run fast enough to dodge clubs received them upon their heads.” Two protesters threw milk bottles at the patrolmen pursing them. At the corner of Walnut and Broad, someone hurled a brick at Officer Wallace Striker. On Juniper Street, either a rioter or a police officer fired shots into the air. By night's end, more than a score were injured, several arrested, and the theater defaced. Nineteen-year old Arthur Lunn, a farmer from Worcester County, Maryland, was charged with inciting the riot. Dr. Wesley F. Graham, pastor of Trinity Baptist, sustained “severe injuries.” Lillian Howard, a caterer; William A. Sinclair, the financial secretary of Douglass Hospital; and a thirty-three-year-old laborer named Lee Banks received severe lacerations.

On April 9, 1915, the fiftieth anniversary of General Lee's surrender at Appomattox, The Birth of a Nation opened in Boston. Audience members were “prepared for the unusual” the moment they entered the Tremont Theatre. After “a young man in evening dress and a silk hat” took tickets, “two young women in flounced hoop skirts and with long curls … ma[d]e a sort of graceful minuet bow, and hand[ed] you a program.” While “soldiers ‘on guard’ in the Civil War uniforms of the North and South” flanked the aisles, another costumed young woman “escort[ed] you to your seat.” As the film projector flickered to life, a title card issued an important caveat to the audience: “This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction period and is not meant to reflect in any way upon any race or people of today.” D. W. Griffith did not write this title card; rather, the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures (NBC) inserted it to fend off protestors and signal its commitment to filmmakers’ First Amendment rights.