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The Birth of a Nation and the Making of the NAACP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2010

STEPHEN WEINBERGER
STEPHEN WEINBERGER
Affiliation:
Professor of History, Dickinson College. Email: weinberg@dickinson.edu
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Abstract

With the appearance of D. W. Griffith's 1915 racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, the six-year-old NAACP reluctantly organized a campaign to ban the film entirely or at least to censor its most offensive elements. Although this struggle was a failure, it helped transform the association in ways no one could have imagined at the outset. Up to this point, the issues the NAACP had taken up, such as housing segregation and lynching, focussed primarily on southern or border states. The Birth of a Nation, however, was a national event. As the film moved from major population centers to smaller ones throughout the country, so too did the protests and countless meetings between local NAACP leaders and mayors, city councils, censors, and governors. In the end, this failed campaign had the effect of providing local association members with invaluable political experience and of elevating the NAACP to a position of national stature and indeed prominence in the struggle for civil rights in America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 77 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 B. Crowther, “The Birth of ‘The Birth of a Nation’,” The New York Times, Feb. 1965, 24.

2 R. Wilkins, “Distorted Image,” New York Post, 14 Feb. 1965, 64.

3 The Crisis, Feb., 1965, 96–97, 102.

4 J. Staiger, “The Birth of a Nation: Reconsidering Its Reception,” in R. Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 199.

5 Not only did such protests often have the opposite effect, drawing the curious to see just what was so controversial, but in some instances theater owners actually hired blacks to protest the film. N. Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: Controversy, Suppression, and the First Amendment as It Applies to Filmic Expression, 1915–1973 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 49, n. 103.

6 T. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 67.

7 J. Lewis, Hollywood vs. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 507.

8 R. Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 300.

9 M. Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 169.

10 NAACP, Fifth Annual Report, 1914, 15.

11 Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors, 5 Jan. 1915.

12 Ibid., 10 Jan. 1916.

13 Ibid., 13 March 1916. “The membership of the Association was reported to include 4,000 names of members delinquent previous to February 1, 1916, some of them dating two years back.”

14 Ibid.

15 NAACP, Seventh Annual Report, 1916, 13.

16 C. F. Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Volume I: 1909–1920 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 135–36.

17 L. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 13 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 401–2.

18 The Crisis, Jan. 1914, 140.

19 Ibid., April 1914, 291.

20 B. J. Ross, J. E. Springarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911–1939 (New York: Atheneum Press, 1972), 22–23.

21 The Crisis, April 1914, 8.

22 Ibid., 292.

23 Ibid., Aug. 1914, 168.

24 Ibid., Nov. 1914, p. 11.

25 Ibid., Jan. 1915, 119.

26 Setting up an effective chapter to direct opposition in Louisville was no easy matter. When Mary Childs Nerny, the association's secretary, visited there, she found the chapter “utterly disorganized by factions, the treasury empty, the churches antagonistic, the present executive committee in bitter disagreement with the former executive committee … While Miss Nerny was in Louisville, the branch was reorganized and local differences adjusted.” Minutes of the meeting of the Board of Directors, July 1915.

27 The Crisis, Sept. 1914, 236. In Nov. 1917, the Supreme Court ruled that the Louisville ordinance violated the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Kellogg, 186–87.

28 NAACP, Fifth Annual Report, 1914, 8.

29 Quoted in Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 53.

30 “Birth of a Nation Wins in Court,” The Herald (Chicago), 6 June 1915, in D. W. Griffith Papers, 1897–1954 (Frederick, MD, 1982). See below, footnote 48.

31 The Crisis, Dec. 1915, 85–86. “Boston has furnished us with invaluable literature. It's three pamphlets, ‘Fighting a Vicious Film,’ ‘Why the Negro was Enfranchised,’ and ‘The English Leaflet’ were sent to sixty-three branches.”

32 Minutes of the Board of Directors, May 1915 and June 1915.

33 The Crisis, Oct. 1915, 293.

34 Ibid., Nov. 1915, 8–9.

35 The play was never published, but can be found in Griffith's collected papers at the Museum of Modern Art. There are also copies at the Harvard Theater Collection and at the Library of Congress.

36 T. Dixon, Southern Horizons (Alexandria, VA: IWV Publishing, 1984), xxx.

37 NAACP, Sixth Annual Report, 1915, 11.

38 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 240.

39 For good treatments of film censorship in the silent era, see A. Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (New York: Kuhn, 1998); L. Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century America (Berkeley, CA, 2004).

40 Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, 110–12.

41 Kellogg, NAACP, 142–43; T. Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth of a Nation,” in F. Silva, ed., Focus on The Birth of a Nation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 114–17.

42 “To Our Branches,” 7 April 1915. NAACP Archives. Box C300, Folder 1. Library of Congress Manuscript Collection, Washington, DC.

43 Ibid., 15 June 1915. Folder 7.

44 The Crisis, July 1915, 147–48.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., July 1915, 146.

47 Ibid., 148.

48 “Birth of a Nation Wins in Court”

49 Fleener-Marzec, chapter 5.

50 The Crisis, June 1916, 87.

51 Letter to Mr. T. Edward Kennedy. 11 Sept. 1915, NAACP Archives, Box C300, Folder 10.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., Dec. 1915, 76.

54 Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors, 10 Jan. 16.

55 R. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 6. There were 51 lynchings in 1914, 56 in 1915, and 50 in 1916. Du Bois mistakenly claimed that almost a hundred Blacks were lynched in 1915 and blamed Birth for the dramatic increase. Du Bois, 240.

56 Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 297.

57 Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors, 13 Sept. 15.

58 For a detailed discussion of many of incidents, see Fleener-Marzec, 216–24.