The members of the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP who saw the film on January 29 recognized both the danger the film posed to the position and reputation of American blacks and its hugely seductive power. Highly conscious of their own numerical weakness and lack of local organization (their secretary confessed that they had “accomplished so little” and apologized for being unable to send a delegate to the NAACP’s annual conference), they made it clear from the first that the campaign against The Clansman should be led by the national organization. According to branch secretary E. Burton Ceruti, the film posed “a larger question [of racial friction] and concerns the whole country.” Aware that the National Board of Censorship had already approved the film, he urged the NAACP’s national headquarters in New York to devote its best efforts to persuading the board to think again and withdraw its approval—a strategy he deemed far preferable to “the waging of local fights wherever the ‘Clansman’ is introduced.”9
On the face of it, this was good advice. The United States, in early 1915, offered a crazy-quilt pattern of local film censorships. Three states had so far passed censorship laws: Pennsylvania in 1912 and Ohio and Kansas, both in 1913. But many towns and cities had also established censor boards. Progressive reformers all over the country were anxious to discourage the exhibition of films encouraging immorality, violence, or crime. In 1914, Congress held hearings to consider the establishment of a federal censor board.10 The main line of defense of the film industry against official censorships of this kind was the National Board of Censorship. Despite its grandiose title, the National Board of Censorship was neither national in character nor an effective instrument of censorship. Inaugurated in March 1909 as a private initiative of the People’s Institute of New York, a progressive body dedicated to fighting for social welfare, it had quickly been adopted by a movie industry that preferred (and would continue to prefer) informal modes of self-regulation to legal censorship. In 1914, progressive reformer Frederic C. Howe, who directed the People’s Institute and chaired the National Board of Censorship, managed to persuade the House of Representatives to let the board (whose decisions, he claimed, were respected by 80 percent of film exhibitors) continue its work in place of federal supervision of movies.11 If the NAACP nationally was going to try to suppress the film, trying to persuade the National Board to revoke its approval would be a sensible initial strategy. Apart from anything else, both the National Board of Censorship and the headquarters of the NAACP were located in the same building: 70 Fifth Avenue, New York.
But was the NAACP ready and able to launch a fight against the film? Founded, like the National Board of Censorship, in 1909, it had a total membership in January 1915 of 5,000.12 Most of its energies during early 1915 were absorbed by the struggle against discriminatory legislation. “Never has Congress … so engrossed the attention of our Association as during the last two months,” observed The Crisis, official organ of the NAACP, in March 1915. As part of what the national NAACP chairman referred to as “an orgy of Negro-baiting,” the Southern-dominated 63rd Congress had tried to include a complete ban on black immigration as part of a general immigration bill and was still considering bills for Washington, D.C., that banned racial intermarriage and introduced segregated streetcars.13 As well as combating Congressional legislation, the NAACP was also heavily involved in fighting discriminatory state laws, such as a second attempt by Michigan to prohibit miscegenation (the first had been defeated a year earlier).14 Another part of the strategy of the NAACP involved the attempt to overturn existing anti-black legislation in the courts. In May 1915, this campaign celebrated an important victory when, in the case of Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Oklahoma’s “grandfather” clause restricting blacks from voting.15 To launch a campaign against The Birth of a Nation would involve the association in a new struggle at a time when its resources were already stretched.
If, on the other hand, one of the aims of the NAACP was to try, by means of agitation and protest, to arouse the moral conscience of Northern whites, could it continue to ignore the impact of cinema?16 As early as 1910, the American Review of Reviews had hailed the motion picture as “probably the greatest single force in shaping the American character.”17 The rising tide of demands for censorship underlined this perception. Yet African Americans, confronted by a highly unfavorable and stereotypical view of themselves in many early films, had apparently only rarely complained.18 Lester Walton, the movie critic of the New York Age, had tried and failed to mobilize fellow blacks to protest at a lynching movie that claimed to be “educational” and foregrounded the experience of the victim (“Hear His Moans and Groans”). It may have been the case, as Thomas Cripps suggests, that some blacks realized that the growing number of Southern-biased films about the Civil War was making it more and more difficult to think of representing African Americans more favorably on the screen.19 Yet not until The Birth of a Nation—if then—would the relative complacency of blacks toward the cinema be shattered.
To dislike a film intensely was one thing, but preventing its exhibition was quite another. Although by 1915 many films had been cut or suppressed by censorship boards, this had normally been for the ways in which they treated issues such as sexual relationships, violence, and crime. The only films banned for racial reasons (though this was not usually openly avowed) were the pictures of famous black boxer Jack Johnson defeating his “white hope” opponent, Jim Jeffries, at Reno in 1910. In 1912, Congress made this policy official when it passed the Sims Act banning the interstate transportation of fight films, a piece of legislation directed almost exclusively at Johnson himself.20 Only a tiny minority of localities in the United States had laws against racial discrimination that could be employed against the film. For the most part, attempts to stop the movie from being shown would have to focus on the danger it presented to public order through the incitement to racial violence. The most useful precedent here was not a film but Dixon’s original play, The Clansman, which had been banned in a number of places, including Philadelphia where it had caused several riots.21 There had also been vigorous black protests over the play in New York, where, according to Sylvester Russell in the Chicago Defender, “the Negro race had raved over the coming production [in 1906] and wanted it stopped.”22
Attempts to suppress The Birth of a Nation through censorship, however, inevitably confronted many hurdles. Just over a week before the film opened in New York, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its decision in the celebrated Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio case, in which it created the legal framework for the censorship of motion pictures that would hold for the next thirty-six years by refusing to extend to movies the free speech protections of the First Amendment.23 Despite this apparently promising start, however, spokesmen for Birth of a Nation, led by Griffith, fought back, making a very effective defense of the right to freedom of expression where cinema was concerned. On the afternoon before the New York première, Griffith addressed a meeting of the League for Political Education at the Cort Theater, attacking the attempt to censor any art form.24 The director also inserted a new intertitle in his film immediately after the title sequence. In words that were designed to protect Birth and at the same time critique the Mutual decision, Griffith sought to claim the same rights of free expression “for the art of the motion picture” as had traditionally been conceded to more traditional arts, especially literature.25 Over the next few months, he would effectively act as perhaps the leading publicist for the motion picture industry in its struggle against censorship, defending the right to freedom of expression on the part of filmmakers in speeches, interviews, and his 1916 pamphlet “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.”
Many white liberals would find themselves torn between their dislike of The Birth of a Nation and their dislike of censorship.26 This was true even among the national leadership of the NAACP. As one perceptive Chicago journalist commented, the organization’s demand that the film be suppressed
/> must have embarrassed those members of the association who, like Charles T. Hallinan, have always fought censorship of any kind. Liberals are torn between two desires. They hate injustice to the negro and they hate a bureaucratic control of thought.27
The struggle over Griffith’s film emphasized tensions and divisions within the board of directors of the NAACP itself. Some, as suggested above, were opposed to censorship on principle. Others felt the fight was simply not worthwhile. “Several of the members of the Board,” wrote NAACP national secretary May Childs Nerney in spring 1915, “doubt if ‘The Birth of a Nation’ is doing the harm that many of us feel it is.” And even those most publicly committed to the campaign against the film at times wondered if their efforts might be counterproductive. “One always fears,” Mary White Ovington confessed, “that publicity will only aid a show.”28
The release of The Birth of a Nation proved very revealing about the state of the NAACP generally in 1915. It threw the problems of the organization—from a divided board of directors to the limitations of some branches—into sharp relief. Many local branches maintained a tenuous existence: R. W. Stewart of Newark, New Jersey, attempting to form a committee to lobby the mayor against The Birth of a Nation, sadly admitted that he “could never get enough of us together after several attempts.”29 Other branches, as in Louisville and Pittsburgh, were threatened by factionalism.30 Some, as in Kansas City, were so divided that they collapsed.31 The distribution of branches was very uneven across the country as a whole and tended to be concentrated in major cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. (where the local members acted as the main shock troops in the fight to prevent Congress from passing discriminatory legislation). In some places, the local leadership had its own priorities: the president of the branch in Alton, Illinois, for example, was apparently totally uninterested in protesting at The Birth of a Nation. Other branches, such as in Pittsburgh, were slow to respond to requests for information from the national organization.32 Both locally and nationally, the NAACP was a sometimes uneasy coalition of whites and blacks (with whites dominating on the board of directors). Moreover, those blacks involved were normally from the relatively small educated elite. “The masses of the colored people know nothing of the association,” it was reported to the board in January 1916; “the Crisis [the NAACP journal] does not reach them; often they do not read.”33
The National Board of Censorship
At the beginning of February 1915, the national leadership of the NAACP, though far from unanimously, started to fight for the suppression of The Birth of a Nation. May Childs Nerney, the NAACP’s national secretary, visited the offices of the National Board of Censorship to ask for four things: the names of the members of the committee that had approved the picture, the addresses of all the members of the board of censorship, a list of the cities where the film had already been released, and the opportunity for a committee of the NAACP’s National Board to view the film at an advance performance. W. D. McGuire, the executive secretary of the National Board of Censorship, told her that the film had so far been released only in Los Angeles and advised her that “it would be impossible for anything to be done about it now since it had been approved by the Board of Censorship.” Temporarily balked, Nerney wrote a courteous letter to D. W. Griffith asking that a committee from the NAACP be permitted to attend an advance performance.34 Griffith, who must have known very well why the request was being made, does not seem to have replied. Instead, the NAACP turned to Frederic C. Howe, chairman of the National Board of Censorship. Howe, a well-known urban reformer, had been an ally of progressive mayor Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, Ohio, until Johnson lost power after eight years in office in 1909. Author of several books on municipal reform, Howe had first become head of the People’s Institute in New York and later, in 1914, U.S. Commissioner of Immigration. Already, by February 25, Nerney claimed that Howe and his wife were “strongly partisan in our favor.” Although Howe did not attempt to arrange a special screening of The Birth of a Nation, he did ask that the entire General Committee of the National Board of Censorship be permitted to be present at the private viewing of the film on March 1. He also requested McGuire to arrange for twelve tickets to be made available for members of the NAACP at the same screening. While Nerney was drawing up a list of those to be given tickets, the assistant secretary of the National Board of Censorship, W. A. Barrett, came to her office and told her that no colored people would be admitted. A few moments later, McGuire telephoned to say that the number of seats had been reduced from twelve to two.35 In reality, three members of the NAACP’s board seem to have been present at the March 1 showing: chairman J. E. Spingarn and directors Paul Kennaday and the Reverend John Haynes Holmes.36
Later, on March 1, with the screening over, Howe convened a meeting of the General Committee. Spingarn was invited to attend part of this meeting to present the NAACP case against the film but apparently was allowed only a few minutes to speak. Howe seems to have believed “that the picture portrayed the Negro in such a brutal and degrading way that half of it, or the second part, should be either eliminated or cut so completely that but little of it would be left.” In a triumph of wishful thinking, he and another member of the executive committee, Dr. Warbasse, seem to have convinced themselves that the General Committee as a whole shared this view. Accordingly, once the meeting was over, they informed the NAACP that the National Board of Censorship had repudiated its former view and had now disapproved the film.37
For the next few days, Nerney and the NAACP leadership basked in the apparent satisfaction of a job well done. Although by now they had clearly given up the notion of suppressing the film completely, they believed that The Birth of a Nation would not be shown until the most controversial features had been cut. “Association has scored great triumph in New York,” Nerney telegraphed the Los Angeles branch on March 2. “National Board of Censorship … unanimously voted last evening to disapprove entire second part of film and to cut out all objectionable race allusions.”38 In a flood of wishful thinking, the NAACP leadership convinced itself that not only had its campaign persuaded the National Board of Censorship to change its mind about the film but also that both organizations were now working together to make the film acceptable. Believing that the board of censorship had changed direction, the NAACP set out to publicize the board’s disapproval of the film to ministers (in the hope that they would preach against it),39 film production companies,40 and the New York Commissioner of Licenses (in the hope that he would stop the performance of The Birth of a Nation as a “public nuisance”).41 Conscious, however, that an as yet unannounced decision by the National Board of Censorship would not be enough to stop its first public exhibition, on the morning of March 3 the NAACP tried and failed in the police court to have the première at the Liberty Theater canceled because it constituted a threat to public order.42
Meanwhile, the National Board of Censorship pursued a path very different from the one imagined by the NAACP. After the criticism of the film offered by several members of the General Committee at the meeting on March 1, a conference was held between the National Board of Censorship, represented by its chairman, Frederic Howe, and executive secretary, W. D. McGuire, and the film’s producers. At this conference, the producers “at once offered to modify certain scenes and re-submit the picture to the General Committee.” A further viewing of the film, followed by a meeting of the General Committee, was held on March 12. At this meeting, the committee voted by a majority of twelve to nine to pass the film, subject to two additional changes that the producers quickly agreed to make. It was reported, to the great dismay of the NAACP, that the committee had actually cheered Griffith when he appeared before them.43
Still Fighting in New York
There were many consequences for the NAACP of the National Board of Censorship’s decision. Leaders of the fight against Griffith’s film like Nerney, already exhausted by their efforts, were heartbroken. The NAACP decided to
put more efforts into the legal battle against Birth of a Nation and hired as its counsel James M. Osborne, perhaps the leading trial attorney in New York.44 It also called a special board meeting for March 23 to ratify Osborne’s appointment. The date for the hearing of the NAACP case against Aitken and Griffith was set for March 19. On March 18, however, the NAACP was informed that the case had been postponed indefinitely. On the same day as the canceled hearing, therefore, the NAACP switched tactics: nine members of the organization’s leadership wrote to John Purroy Mitchel, mayor of New York, asking him to suppress the film “as an offense against public decency and as endangering public morals.”45
Henceforth, the fight against the film would be primarily political, with New York as the starting gun in this new campaign. “Our experience in New York where we tried everything,” commented May Childs Nerney a few weeks later, “indicates that the only hope [of suppressing the film] is with the city authorities.”46 Yet having failed to prevent the film’s acceptance by the one national institution capable of either suppressing it or ensuring the removal of its more controversial features, the NAACP now became involved in a war of attrition in which it depended on local branches to discover when the film was due to open and to take the lead in the fight against it.47 In places where the local organization was numerous and determined, the battle was often fierce. In other towns and cities, however, where branches were weak or nonexistent, the film was shown with little or no protest.
With the postponement of the NAACP’s legal case in New York—something that would be repeated on several occasions48—the board meeting of the NAACP on March 23 was mainly a discussion of the tactics to be employed in preparation for the meeting with the mayor. Social worker Lillian Wald suggested that “a dignified procession” representing all the local organizations interested in helping colored people march to the mayor’s office to protest against the film; this idea was accepted and a committee set up to organize the march.49 The original plan called for as large a delegation as possible to assemble in Union Square and proceed down Broadway to the mayor’s office, but this idea was foiled by the police commissioner’s insistence that such parades could take place only on business streets “on Saturdays and holidays.” The NAACP was obliged to concentrate most attention on organizing speakers for the meeting with the mayor, finally set for March 30. These speakers included the chair of the National Board of Censorship Frederic Howe (who had refused to allow the use of his name in the board’s approval of The Birth of a Nation);50 Dr. William H. Brooks, pastor of St. Mark’s Methodist-Episcopal Church; W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, the NAACP journal; Fred R. Moore, editor of the New York Age; Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post and vice-president of the NAACP; Lillian Wald; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise; and George E. Wibecan, president of the Brooklyn Citizens’ Club.51 Altogether, about 500 people attended the hearing before the Mayor at City Hall. They were drawn from many organizations with an interest in promoting racial harmony, and—for the first and last time during the New York campaign against the film—the majority seem to have been African Americans. According to Fred Moore, the “neat personal appearance” of the black clergymen, businessmen, and professional people “was in itself a strong denial to the slurs made against the Negro in ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”52
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