The Birth of a Nation | Overview & Summary

In many ways, The Birth of a Nation captured what was becoming the dominant narrative of the Reconstruction era in the South that was championed by Columbia University historian William A. Dunning and today referred to as ''the Dunning School.'' This thinking portrayed the white southerners during the Reconstruction period as the victims of an overzealous federal government that fundamentally misunderstood that white supremacy was necessary because formerly enslaved people were not capable of citizenship. The portrayal of the South Carolina legislature in the movie is no coincidence; of the 124 delegates elected to write a new constitution for South Carolina in 1868, 73 were, in fact, Black or of mixed ancestry. The Dunning School has been thoroughly discredited but was dominant in academic and other circles for decades.

Among the future Hollywood stars in The Birth of a Nation were Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, and Mary Pickford. In 1919, D. W. Griffith joined Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks as founders of United Artists.

Reaction to the Film

When it was released in early 1915, The Birth of a Nation quickly became a box-office sensation. In addition to introducing cinematic innovations such as close-ups and fade-outs, the three-hour film told a grand story that President Woodrow Wilson described as ''history written as lightning''. The Birth of a Nation became the highest-grossing film of the silent era and was the first movie ever screened at the White House. Within 30 years, an estimated 200 million Americans had seen the movie.

Even in its day, however, the film's astonishingly racist portrayals and white supremacist narrative were condemned. Writer James Weldon Johnson, today best remembered for writing the lyrics to Lift Every Voice and Sing, warned it would do ''incalculable harm.'' The NAACP led protests outside a theater in Boston and other cities and demanded the film be banned. While its calls were largely unsuccessful, those protests helped the NAACP, founded just six years earlier in 1909, raise its profile and find its national voice.

While it did not sweep the country for another several years, the re-establishment of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 was directly tied to the film's premier in Atlanta that fall. William J. Simmons seized the moment and lit a cross on Stone Mountain, Georgia, declaring the rebirth of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By 1921, the once-defunct white supremacist organization had a million members across the United States. By 1925, membership in what historians call the Second Klan had at least doubled, and some estimates are as high as 5 million. In August 1925, more than 50,000 Klan members paraded through Washington, DC.

Bolstered by its positive portrayal in the film, the Klan re-emerged as a significant political force in the years following The Birth of a Nation.

Today, historians struggle with how and whether to share the film with their students. While there is a general consensus that The Birth of a Nation marked a turning point in the history of film because of various innovations used in making it, even some film historians will not show it to their classes because its foundational premise is so vile. While there have been calls for it to be banned since the NAACP first called for that in 1915, the film is still readily available today.

In 2016, filmmaker Nate Parker wrote and directed a movie about the 1831 uprising of enslaved people in Virginia led by Nat Turner. The film's title: The Birth of a Nation.