The documentary “Birth of a Movement,” which airs on PBS at 10 P.M. on Monday, February 6th, doesn’t offer much in the way of original artistry; its form is as conventional as an on-air encyclopedia article. But its substance is so rich and its subject so significant that the bland and unconsidered format can be overlooked. The film sheds new light on the depressing history of the release of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”—both a repellent display of racism and the most original work of the early cinema—by unfolding the relatively unfamiliar perspective of the opposition that mobilized against it, led by the Boston-based journalist and civil-rights activist William Monroe Trotter.
The documentary, directed by Susan Gray and Bestor Cram, and based on a nonfiction book by Dick Lehr, offers parallel biographies of Trotter and Griffith. Trotter, a black man who was raised in Boston, was a brilliant student; he was a Harvard classmate of W. E. B. Du Bois and the university’s first black member of Phi Beta Kappa. After his graduation, with a master’s degree, in 1895, he made the fight for civil rights his life’s work.
As the filmmakers show, long before the 1915 première of Griffith’s film, racism in America had been officially canonized, both in the Jim Crow laws of the South and in a Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, from 1896, that deemed such laws constitutional under the doctrine of “separate but equal” accommodations. Trotter took a stronger position on the subject than did the leading African-American activist of the time, Booker T. Washington, who was ready to accept segregation if it also allowed black people to be educated and to found their own businesses and institutions. Trotter, the founder of a Boston newspaper, the Guardian, publicly opposed Washington and organized a group of black intellectuals to work for integration, and for the full civil rights of black Americans—a group that would form the basis of the N.A.A.C.P.
Griffith was both a boldly inventive filmmaker and a reactionary who looked with horror at modernity in all its varieties. Among his early short films were revolted depictions of city life—and its ethnic diversity—as in “The Musketeers of Pig Alley” and “A Child of the Ghetto.” He was a poet of nature whose cinematic impressionism was rooted in agrarian nostalgia. His idyllic visions depended upon romantic fantasies of family, tradition, innocence—and white Christian supremacy.
But “The Birth of a Nation” was different; the historian Vincent Brown, interviewed in “Birth of a Movement,” rightly calls it “racial pornography.” Adapted from the novel “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, Jr., published in 1905, the movie offers an idyllic picture of antebellum life in the South. The film (which also originally bore the novel’s title) shows the age of Reconstruction as a time when freed blacks terrified Southern whites, denying them the right to vote and demanding their public deference. It shows freed slaves as slovenly, frivolous, and lazy, and it twists history allusively by naming a mixed-race man “Lynch.” It depicts the Ku Klux Klan as the sole defense of white women against the depraved lust of black men. Its incendiary lies were matched by the originality and vigor of their depiction. At the time, the First Amendment applied only weakly to public spectacles such as theatre and movies; censorship was a commonplace, and Trotter, the N.A.A.C.P., and other black leaders sought to ban the film on the grounds that it was an open call to hatred and violence.
Griffith fought hard on behalf of his film. Dixon and President Woodrow Wilson were longtime friends, and he persuaded Wilson to screen the film, retitled “The Birth of a Nation,” at the White House—the first screening of a movie there. The event was a signal moment in the film’s normalization.
Wilson hardly needed persuading. He was a Southerner, and, as a historian, he had written in support of the Ku Klux Klan. As President, he resegregated federal offices that had formerly been integrated. The documentary sketches a dismaying course of events: Before the release of Griffith’s film, Trotter and Ida B. Wells met with Wilson and challenged the movie. Wilson promised action, but failed to deliver. Trotter met with Wilson again, in late 1914, shortly before the film’s première—and, this time, was unceremoniously shown the door. After the screening of the film, Wilson reputedly said, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
What Gray and Cram show in the documentary is that Griffith’s film, though it clearly spurred racist violence and even the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, landed in fertile soil. American racism was endemic, from the bottom up and the top down. When Trotter and other black activists wanted to buy tickets to see “The Birth of a Nation,” they were banned from doing so—it was openly stated that tickets would be sold to whites only.
Trotter and the N.A.A.C.P. sought to ban the film in Boston; the Puritan-founded city was famously censorious (the phrase “banned in Boston” was a popular catchphrase), and Trotter hoped that the city’s mayor would accept his contention that the movie was a threat to public order. (Jelani Cobb has explained on this site—and says so in the documentary as well—that Griffith responded with “inverted victimhood,” issuing a pamphlet called “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.”) The result was an unprecedented series of peaceful protests by black Americans—marches and rallies to call for a ban on the film. Though they were unsuccessful, Gray and Cram say, they were the forerunners of the direct action that formed the basis for the civil-rights movement forty years later.
The documentarists add an important, movie-specific detail: the N.A.A.C.P. itself didn’t respond to Griffith’s film with another film, but a black filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux, did—with the 1920 movie “Within Our Gates.” It’s a great film, too—one that, unlike Griffith’s super-production, was made on an extremely low budget. Micheaux unsparingly depicts the violence of Jim Crow—lynchings and rape—and, as the historian Charlene Regester says in the documentary, it’s Micheaux’s movie that was subjected to bans for fear of riot. (The story suggests the danger of bans on so-called hate speech; as seen in the state of current debate—or, rather, in the crocodile tears of a demagogue and his radical-right-wing advocates—the definition of “hate speech” is whatever a court deems hate speech, and such bans can easily be turned around to ban criticism of racists and racist officials.)
“Within Our Gates,” like “The Birth of a Nation,” is a silent movie. It’s one of the enduring bafflements of cinema history that, when talking pictures took over, in the late nineteen-twenties, no filmmaker sought to record interviews with black Americans, whether elderly people who were former slaves or others, of any age, who experienced discrimination under Jim Crow laws and through unchallenged Northern habits.
The immediate and horrific effect of “The Birth of a Nation” is inseparable from its artistic power. Its success perpetuated the very system of discrimination that kept black filmmakers, and filmmakers sympathetic to the cause of equality, from having access to the tools and the capital that the medium required, or to the public venues where their films could be shown. At the very least, there are black filmmakers working today, within the system and as independents (not nearly enough of them have institutional support, however). Films (albeit, again, not enough of them) are being made about the experiences of black Americans, and “Birth of a Movement” is a useful one. But to mention the merely functional format of “Birth of a Movement” is to highlight its limits, its narrow impact, in advance. The history of cinema is as much a history of aesthetics as of substance, and the power of a movie to leap beyond the screen into life—for better or worse—is a reflection of artistic inspiration. A nineteen-thirties film in which black Americans speak about their lives, about their experiences of racism and discrimination, could have served as an American “Shoah,” a transformation of consciousness in accordance with the truth that might well have gone far to counteract Griffith’s lies.