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Aug 17, 2017 · President Woodrow Wilson instructed it at the request of a friend Thomas Dixon Jr., author of The Clansman, a radical novel published in 1905, which skewed the Reconstruction era by heroizing the Ku Klux Klan’s efforts against an illicit uprising by former slaves in the South.
Feb 6, 2015 · The film is as confounding as ever, both brilliant and repugnant. Groundbreaking in its use of innovative cinematic techniques, it remains tainted by its brazen racism.
Nov 20, 2015 · Wilson's racism even extended to foreign affairs. While it had been customary to appoint black ambassadors to Haiti and Santa Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), Wilson didn't do that...
- Dylan Matthews
- Audiences Blown Away by Innovative Film
- Trotter and NAACP Respond to Film’S Racism
- Trotter’s Legacy
The president had agreed to host a movie night as a favor to the writer Thomas Dixon, an old college buddy, a fellow Southerner – and an unapologetic racist. Dixon’s bestselling novel The Clansman was the basis for filmmaker DW Griffith’s three-hour dramatization of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which depicted Ku Klux Klan members as heroes and...
The movie triggered mass protests across the nation, a rolling thunder that rumbled loudest in Boston. Leading the charge was a now largely forgotten civil rights leader and newspaper editor named William Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard whose father had fought for the Union as an officer in an all-black regiment from Boston. Du...
The protest story of 1915 became equal to the film’s prominence, so that one cannot consider the debut of Griffith’s film at the White House without taking on the other. Trotter’s militant refusal to accept a film – regardless of its artistic value to the medium – indicated his awareness of the damage it could cause. The film was ultimately part of...
- Dick Lehr
Jul 14, 2020 · The movie’s villains were Black Americans portrayed by white actors in blackface. Wilson agreed to screen the film—which quoted his own book in its title cards—at the White House.
- Becky Little
- 2 min
In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson watched The Birth of a Nation, a film by D. W. Griffith that falsified the reality of the post–Civil War Reconstruction period by presenting blacks as attempting to dominate southern whites and sexually force themselves on white women.
Aug 14, 2018 · In just over three hours, D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern...
