NOTES

[1] The play also incorporated aspects of Dixon’s first novel about the Reconstruction period, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865-1900.

 [2] Dixon, as quoted in Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 44. Hereafter cited as SFB.

 [3] According to Bosley Crowther (in “The Birth of Birth of a Nation,” in Black Films and Film-Makers, ed. Lindsay Patterson [New York: Dodd, Mead & co., 1975], p. 77), “he believed that the white population had been abused and exploited by Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags who had incited the emancipated Negroes, and he wanted to make a film on this theme.” 

[4] As Brown explained in his memoirs: “I doubt if there was a man on that work crew who hadn’t been out with a ‘Tom’ show, as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows were called. There were Tom shows scattered all over the country by tens and dozens. It was not so much a show as an institution, a part of the American scene for the past sixty-odd years” (qtd. in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], p. 97).

[5] Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, new 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 10. Hereafter cited as TCMMB. Other critics offer slightly varying times for filming and editing.

[6] Wil Haygood, in Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), devotes a chapter to “Movie Night at Woodrow Wilson’s White House”(pp. 2-21). Numerous other critics, among them Lawrence Reddick, in “Of Motion Pictures,” in Lindsay Patterson, Black Films and Film-Makers, p. 6, also note or discuss the showing of The Birth of a Nation at the White House.

[7] Qtd. in Crowther, “Birth” 80, and elsewhere.

[8] Stoneman was modeled on Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress (Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” in Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness: Race and Emergence of U.S. Cinema [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996], p. 21).

[9] The “extreme “’better dead than raped’ implications” of Flora’s tragic suicide,” writes Jane Gaines (in Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  2001], p. 239, cited henceforth as FD), reinforce Griffith’s portrait of “the Negro as nothing more nor less than a sexual monster.” Gus’s chase of Flora is, in fact, prefigured in other Griffith films such as The Girls and Daddy (1909), in which a “lowdown Negro” burglar and sexual predator preys on two angelic white girls (Daniel Bernardi, “The Voice of Whiteness: D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Films,” in Bernardi, The Birth of Whiteness, p. 122).

[10] According to Clyde Taylor (“Re-Birth” 22), “the later sequence in which Lynch, the upstart mulatto carpetbagger politician, salaciously entraps Elsie Stoneman, serves to communalize the threat that by Gus’s action alone might be taken as individual aberration.” 

[11] Gaines (FD 242-243) comments on the symbolism of Lynch’s name. Griffith and Dixon avoid “the imagery of hanging” in The Birth of a Nation, she writes, “even trying to lay the blame for the practice of lynching on Negroes by the curious device of naming the mulatto villain Sylas [sic] Lynch.” In Playing the Race Card (107), Linda Williams cites Michael Rogin, who also remarks on Lynch’s name, which he suggests “turns Black victims of lynching into aggressors.” Williams also raises questions about the “missing scene” of Gus’s castration—that is, about whether it ever actually existed or whether it is simply a misremembering of the film’s plot by Griffith biographer Seymour Stern; see pp. 124-127.

[12] Chester L. Quarles, in The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: A History and Analysis (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), p. 54, notes that “in Atlanta, The Birth of a Nation ran for three weeks. William Simmons, a Ku Klux Klan organizer, placed a newspaper ad [for the Klan] which ran right beside the newspaper movie listing. Simmons, like Dixon, had romanticized the Klan and wanted a revival of this reconstruction movement.” Wyn Craig Wade, in The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 143, writes that “Colonel Joe ‘Doc’ Simmons’s hopes for a revived Ku-Klux Klan were realized by the Atlanta premiere of The Birth of a Nation and the Frank murder case.” In an illustration in From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 35), Daniel J. Leab reproduces two advertisements—presumably the two to which Quarles refers—that appeared on facing pages of the Atlanta Constitution (December 8, 1915). One is for Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation; the other announces the chartering, on December 6, 1915, of the “Knights of the Ku Klux Klan . . . a High Class Order for Men of Intelligence and Character . . . The World’s Greatest Secret, Social, Patriotic, Fraternal, Beneficiary Order,” and offers a contact person and local address.

[13] Among the incidents cited by the NAACP was the shooting and killing in Lafayette, Indiana, of a Black youngster by a white man who had just left a screening of The Birth of a Nation. That incident clearly raised speculation about “effects,” as did reports of white patrons leaving the film and remarking that they “wanted to kill n-----s.” W. E. B. Du Bois, in a memo to NAACP head Walter White, concluded that the campaign against The Birth of a Nation was a “special case that was justified by an unprecedented emergency situation.” He cited statistics to support his argument. Among them: “In 1914, 60 Negroes were lynched; in 1915, 99; in 1916, 65, and the number of lynchings per year kept on at the rate of at least one per week from 1915 until 1922. More Negroes were lynched in 1915 than in any other year since the beginning of the century” (Gaines, FD 227, 232-233).

[14] Ralph Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act,” in Shadow and Act, p. 275. Ellison concluded that “in subsequent years they reacted upon each other to the large profit of both. The film presented predigested dramatic experience and thrills. The society made the customers all actors in costume.”

[15] This incident is reported by Cripps (SFB 59-60). Jane Gaines records other instances of egging (FD 219-220).

[16] Charlene Regester, “The African-American Press and Race Movies, 1909-1929,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, ed. by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 36.

[17] Cited by Cripps (SFB 56-58) and Leab (33). Clyde Taylor notes that Griffith subscribed “to a traditional Southern view of African Americans as ‘Pre-moral children’ of whom moral understanding was not to be expected” (“Re-Birth” 31).

[18] Clyde Taylor reviews a number of the apologist views of The Birth of a Nation. According to Taylor, some film scholars “simply accept Griffith’s denial of racist intent. Some specify the ‘unconsciousness’ of his racism. Others argue that Griffith’s portrait of the Reconstruction era and the role of Black people in it is essentially accurate.” Still others contend “that Griffith’s posture towards Blacks, and its easy acceptance by mass audiences, attests to the conventional racist thought of his time.” For a fuller discussion of such views, see Taylor’s “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic,” especially pp. 17-20. See also Anna Everett’s Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), particularly the chapter on “The Birth of a Nation and Interventionist Criticism,” pp. 59-106.

[19] Viewer interest was further sustained by various effective stunts like “having a troop of horsemen dressed in the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan ride through towns in advance of showings of the film” (Crowther, “Birth” 82).

[20] Haygood, pp. 20-21. Other critics have placed the number a little lower. Leab (p. 34), for instance, wrote that, within the first months of its release in 1915, the film had been seen by an estimated six percent of the American population.

[21] Michele Wallace, “Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates: The Possibilities for Alternative Visions” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, p. 61.

[22] “In all Hollywood film portrayals of blacks,” according to James Snead in White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 8, “the political is never far from the sexual, for it is both as a political and as a sexual threat that the black skin appears on screen.” Snead makes this particular argument at length in his discussion of the film King Kong.

 [23] Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, “Identity and Betrayal: The Symbol of the Unconquered and Oscar Micheaux’s ‘Biographical Legend,’” in Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness.

[24] According to Michele Wallace, “Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates,” “one thing is for sure: in Dixon and Griffith’s world, blacks are neither the harmless children of Uncle Tom’s Cabin nor the shrewd survivors found in Uncle Remus; rather, they are dangerous if not kept under control.”

[25] “Only in wartime,” observed Pauline Kael in “Notes on Black Movies” (in Black Films and Film-Makers, p. 263), have Hollywood movies had such “primitive power to encourage hatred of a race or a national group.”

[26] Despite the negative sentiments he evoked, the buck was a strong on-screen presence. As Leab writes, “If Griffith had emphasized the black as wrongdoer, at least he had presented him as a prominent one. For the remainder of the silent period the black on screen was presented not as a human being but as a cliché representing the lowest form of behavior, aspiration, motivation, and performance” (Leab 39).

[27] Wallace believes that Gus may be considered “a forebear of Richard Wright’s Native Son,” but she takes exception to the notion that the buck influenced later Black characters like Sweetback, Superfly, or Shaft. In “Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates,” p. 61, she writes: “Indeed, either ‘brutal buck’ is a misnomer or the figure needs to be divided into at least two or three versions which evolved over time. Sweetback, Superfly, and Shaft are all presented as cool, fearless, daring, first-rate fighters, good-looking and sexually proficient. And they never get caught. Gus has none of these qualities. Gus is not a heroic figure, nor can he be made into one, while the protagonists of blaxploitation films are obviously intended to be heroic, whatever one may think of their antics.”

[28] Historian Patricia Morton points out that “in turn of the century literature, the mulatto woman emerged as a figure as menacing as the stereotypical black male threat to white ‘purity’” (cited in Wallace, “Within Our Gates,” p. 61).