The Birth of a Nation

Dick Lehr

In 1915 two menone a journalist agitator the other a technically brilliant filmmakerincited a public confrontation that roiled America pitting black against white Hollywood against Boston and free speech against civil rights.Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Almost fifty years earlier Monroe's father James was a sergeant in an all-black Union regiment that marched into Charleston South Carolina just as the Kentucky cavalryincluding Roaring Jack Griffith D. W.'s fatherfled for their lives. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation included actors in blackface heroic portraits of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a depiction of Lincoln's assassination. Freed slaves were portrayed as villainous vengeful slovenly and dangerous to the sanctity of American values. It was tremendously successful eventually seen by 25 million Americans. But violent protestsagainst the film flared up across the country.Monroe Trotter's titanic crusade to have the film censored became a blueprint for dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the fiery story of a revolutionary moment for mass media and the nascent civil rights movement and the men clashing over the cultural and political soul of a still-young America standing at the cusp of its greatest days.>