D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
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While the struggle against Birth of a Nation in Ohio was successful (the ban on the film by the board of censors was upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court in October, renewed by a majority vote of the censorship board in January 1916, and once again upheld by the Supreme Court a few months later),156 Nerney’s visit to the state during the course of the fight shed a good deal of light on the local problems that at times hampered the NAACP campaign. Local leaders were sometimes unreliable: Robert B. Barcus apparently wanted to take all the credit for the struggle against the film, and until he was stopped by Nerney, was attempting to raise his own personal “defense fund” from the various NAACP branches in Ohio. Moreover, the producers of the film adopted a “divide and rule” strategy toward the black community. They had paid for Wilbur King (according to Nerney “probably the brightest and most unscrupulous colored man in Columbus”) to go to Pittsburgh to see Birth with the expectation that he would find the film acceptable if a few minor cuts were made. Nerney, while in Ohio, held a number of mass meetings, one of which King attended. This gave her the opportunity to ask him point-blank if he thought “the play should be shown with eliminations.” Put on the spot like this, King had little option but to answer negatively. At this and other meetings, Nerney also underlined the danger of blacks being offered financial inducements by Birth’s agents to support the film. Her exposure of this strategy was deliberately intended to undercut its effectiveness since, as Nerney observed, “anyone now standing for the play in any form here will practically be saying he has been bought.”157
Although there was at least one attempt to exhibit Birth of a Nation in Ohio in early 1916—attempting to get round the prohibition on public performance, Shriners in Cincinnati tried to arrange a private showing158—the ban on the film issued by the state board of censors seems to have been effective. Two months after Birth was refused a permit in Ohio, it was also suppressed in Kansas. In both states, given the growing size of the black vote as the black population generally was inflated by migration from the South, it made good politics for Republican governors to oppose the film.159 Kansas seemed particularly fertile ground for opponents of the film since the new governor, Arthur Capper, was both a member of the state board of censors and president of the Topeka branch of the NAACP. Requested by Nerney to help keep Birth of a Nation out of his state, Capper assured her that the film “with its objectionable features” would get into Kansas only “over my strongest protests.” Yet he also observed that if the producers eliminated “the features which tend to intensify race prejudice,” this would throw “a very different light” on the movie. When Nerney appealed to him, however, as “President of Our Branch as well as Governor … to protect colored people against this play,” Capper finally acted more decisively. The Birth of a Nation, he assured her, would not be shown in Kansas during his governorship: “I informed those interested in it that I would not stand for it in this state and the company has announced that they will not come here.”160
Local Campaigns
Attempts were made to have other state governors take a position against Griffith’s film, but these proved unsuccessful.161 The fight against The Birth of a Nation therefore became very much a local one, fought out in cities of varying size across the United States. It was banned, after protests, by the city authorities in places such as Gary (Indiana), St. Louis (Missouri), Oakland (California), Atlantic City (New Jersey), New Haven (Connecticut), Providence (Rhode Island), Springfield (Massachusetts), Boise (Idaho), and Minneapolis (Minnesota).162 Normally, bans of this type did not survive for very long: the film’s producers were quick to appeal to the courts for injunctions preventing such interference. In Oakland, the attempt of Mayor J. L. Davie to suppress the film lasted for one night only; the suppression was overturned by the Superior Court the next day.163 As the NAACP quickly realized, it was easier to keep Birth of a Nation out of a city if there was already an ordinance prohibiting entertainments that stimulated racial prejudice. Des Moines, Iowa, had led the way here: attorney S. Joe Brown, president of the local Afro-American Council, had drawn up such an ordinance and secured its adoption by the city council in 1907. “It may be,” May Childs Nerney informed Brown, “that we can get ordinances of this character introduced in cities where we have branches and thus keep ahead of this moving picture.” Nerney circulated copies of the Des Moines ordinances to many of the local NAACP branches that were fighting the film.164 As a tactic, it had decidedly mixed results: adopting such an ordinance helped keep Birth out of Tacoma (Washington) and Wilmington (Delaware), but in Lansing (Michigan), the censorship board ignored the new ordinance and allowed the film to run uncut. Moreover, the unsuccessful struggle to pass such an ordinance in Detroit may actually have weakened the fight against the film by helping unite the theatrical opponents of censorship and by dissipating campaigning energies that needed concentration for their success.165
Across the United States as a whole, the NAACP and its allies suffered a considerable number of defeats. In Washington, D.C., Congressman Emerson tried and failed to have a joint resolution passed by the House and Senate instructing the commissioners of the district to prevent exhibition of Birth of a Nation on the grounds that the film “has a tendency to, and does engender prejudice against colored people.”166 The city authorities in Terre Haute (Indiana), Louisville (Kentucky), and Spokane (Washington) decided to allow the film to be exhibited in spite of the protests made because they saw nothing objectionable in it.167 In many other places, including Sacramento (California), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), and St. Paul (Minnesota), Birth of a Nation was shown after only minor cuts were made.168 There were at least two attempts—almost certainly born of frustration, rather than hope—to prosecute the managers of the theaters where the film was playing. Walter Sanford, manager of the Olympic Theater in St. Louis, was found not guilty by a jury of showing a “lewd, indecent and immoral” picture, and attorney William A. Heck’s ingenious attempt to arrest Anson O. Bigelow, manager of Macauley’s Theater in Louisville, under an old “master and slave” law that forbade the performance of any play that excited racial prejudice, was thrown out by a judge on procedural grounds.169
The fight against The Birth of a Nation shed considerable light on the social changes taking place in the North and West in the early years of the twentieth century. Beginning in the years after the Civil War, African Americans had begun to leave the South in search of job opportunities in Northern cities. By 1910, many Northern and Western cities had sizable black communities: New York, for example, had over 90,000 black residents, Philadelphia 84,000, Chicago 44,000, Pittsburgh 25,000, Cleveland 8,000, and Detroit 5,000. In the decade between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of some of these cities increased dramatically: New York by 66 percent, Philadelphia by 59 percent, Pittsburgh by 47 percent, Chicago by 148 percent, Cleveland by 308 percent, and Detroit by 611 percent.170 More and more, as black competition for jobs and housing grew, whites adopted discriminatory practices that encouraged the growth of urban African American ghettoes. The appearance of African American communities in Northern and Western cities had political effects. The black vote, small but growing, came to be seen as an important element in urban elections. The emergence of ghettoes also prompted white fears of the potential threat they posed to social peace and stability. The campaign against The Birth of a Nation intersected with these trends. Some supporters of the film suggested that the struggle against it was essentially a means of organizing and controlling the colored vote.171 Fears of social disorder lay behind the actions against the film taken by some city authorities. For example, the film was banned in Atlantic City after police found that in “the black belt” of the city, where 10,000 African Americans had their homes,
men, women and children [were] congregating in the streets to talk about the film and the attack upon their race they claim it carries. Threats of violence were made freely in the saloons patronized by colored men. The detectives heard proposals to attack the Boardwalk playhouse.172
In many places, the arrival of Birth of a Nation forced local leaders to address—perhaps for the first time—the state of race relations in their community. In some places (such as St. Joseph, Missouri), there were fears that the film would undermine the good relations that currently existed.173 In other cities there were real anxieties that the film might make a bad situation worse. In Evansville, Kentucky, for example, critics of the film argued that it would encourage the kind of racial hatred and violence that had recently led to the lynching of a black man in the neighboring town of Henderson.174
The Campaign in the South
Concern on the part of the NAACP that showing The Birth of a Nation would provoke violent racial incidents intensified from August 1915 onward, as the producers of the film revealed their plans for showing it in the South. The racial situation in many states was already tense—May Nerney observed in mid-September that there had been “a record of forty lynchings already … this year”—and the inflammatory potential of the film was very plain (Nerney wrote in the same letter of a young Southern man who remarked, after viewing Birth, that “I should like to kill every nigger I know”).175 One of the reasons the original chairman of the National Board of Censorship, Frederic C. Howe, had opposed the film was that he feared it “might lead to serious race riots and assaults” and that this was “particularly true” in the South. For several months, the NAACP forces had allowed themselves to believe an assurance given by one of the film’s producers that “they would not think of taking it South for fear of race riots.” By September, with the film already booked for West Virginia, Virginia, and Texas, that assurance had been shown to be false and the NAACP began gearing up to fight the film across the South.176
The campaign against The Birth of a Nation in the Southern states would obviously be very different from elsewhere in the nation. With no network of branches to rely on, the NAACP had to depend on the initiative of local people. The national NAACP organization first learned that the film was to be shown in Bluefield, West Virginia, from P. A. Goines of the North and West Railway YMCA Colored Department. Goines had organized a meeting of black physicians, ministers, and schoolteachers to protest plans to show Birth. He wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of the NAACP journal The Crisis to ask for information and advice on how to carry the campaign further (he also confessed that he hoped “to use this occasion to influence the organizing of a Branch of the N.A.A.C.P.”). Learning that Griffith’s film was to be shown in Bluefield clearly disturbed the national NAACP: the lynching of “an absolutely innocent colored man” named Robert Johnson there three years earlier had become something of a cause célèbre in the North.177 In reply to Goines, May Nerney informed him that anti-Birth literature was being sent to him by the Boston branch and described the NAACP fight against the film in other places. She offered to write to anybody Goines thought might be able to help, but at the same time she showed her awareness of Southern regional susceptibilities by questioning “the advisability of outside interference.” Nerney insisted that the “best Southern sentiment” was against the picture but it is noticeable that with one exception, all the Southerners she cited in support of this proposition now lived outside the South. She finished by informing Goines that the “whole hope” for local protestors lay “in fighting the matter on the ground that it may lead to race riots.”178
The campaign against The Birth of a Nation in the South suffered from many weaknesses and disadvantages. Although the black population in many Southern cities was far higher than in centers of the North and West, it was almost completely disfranchised and could consequently cause little difficulty for politicians. Mayor George Ainslie of Richmond, Virginia, while aware that blacks made up “about thirty-eight per centum” of the population of his city, had no difficulty in brushing aside the protest of a delegation of African Americans against exhibiting the film there. Ainslie also refused to order cuts in the film, assuring the manager of the theater that “I have not heard the slightest unfavorable comment on ‘The Birth of a Nation.’ … [O]n the contrary, those who have been fortunate enough to have seen it, and who have related their impressions to me, have given it unstinted praise.”179 As Ainslie’s remark indicates, the popular reception of Griffith’s film in the South was even more ecstatic than that in the North: the movie treated the history of the South of the Civil War era in a deeply sympathetic way. For white Southerners, it mythologized and justified their past. As the Baltimore Afro-American sadly but accurately noted a few months later, “there is hardly a theater audience from Maine to Florida that does not applaud the orchestra when it plays ‘Dixie,’ and the intensity of the applause increases to an uproar as you pass the Mason and Dixon’s line going South.”180 It was harder for individuals and groups to protest against the film in the South than in the North because Southern whites liked the movie even more than their Northern compatriots. Opponents of the film were also hampered by the constraints of segregation. In much of the South, there was no possibility, as had been the case in Boston and other Northern cities, of blacks and whites joining together publicly against the film. When a correspondent in Dallas, Texas, wrote to the NAACP asking it to try to influence the City Welfare Board (which supervised the film censors), he requested that it write separately to the white and colored departments of the Board. Moreover, May Nerney, in a letter to the African American head of the colored department, clearly recognized the realities of the racial situation in the South when she advised him “that the only way to accomplish anything is to work through influential white people.”181
For the opponents of Griffith’s film, efforts to prevent its exhibition in the South were even more difficult and frustrating than they were in other parts of the country. There was a “hard fight” against it in Norfolk, Virginia, the first Southern city in which it was shown, but in the end the city authorities took no action to prevent its exhibition.182 During subsequent weeks, similar unsuccessful protests occurred in Bluefield (West Virginia), Dallas (Texas), Asheville (North Carolina), Columbia (South Carolina), Birmingham (Alabama), and Richmond (Virginia).183 Only in December did the forces opposed to Birth finally score a success, when the film was banned in Charleston, West Virginia. But hopes of repeating this victory two weeks later in Hot Springs, Arkansas, were dashed when the city council—which had initially seemed critical of the film—reversed itself.184 The defeat of those opposing the film was especially galling in Birmingham, since Dixon’s play The Clansman had been “about frozen out” of the city the year before. But the producers of Birth of a Nation had taken their own precautions, arranging for the city engineer and a “popular lady writer” to view the film in New York. When the city commissioners held a hearing, they ignored protests against the movie and accepted the assurance of these two “that the pictures were O.K.”185
The advance agents of Griffith’s film were clearly skillful in helping deflect criticism of it. Yet the differences in many areas of the South between the reception of Dixon’s play and Griffith’s film are very striking. Dixon’s stage-play had been booed and hissed when it opened in Columbia, state capital of South Carolina. There does not seem to have been any such response to Birth. Indeed, studying the reception of Birth of a Nation in South Carolina as a whole, John Hammond Moore found “almost unanimous approval” instead of the controversy and criticism that had accompanied Dixon’s play.186 Much the same change, John C. Inscoe observes, had taken place in Dixon’s native North Carolina. Reviewers tended to emphasize that the events recounted in the film had occurred a long time in the past and that African Americans were now playing a full part in the progress of the nation. Fearing a racial crisis provoked by the rapid retrogression of blacks seemed, by 1915, absurd. The racial radicalism advocated by Dixon in the early twentieth century now appeared deeply anachronistic. It had begun to recede in 1907, partly because of the embarrassment of many Southern whites over the Atlanta race riot. The very success of black disfranchisement and segregation in North Carolina, Ins
coe points out, had brought with it a liberalization of white attitudes. White fear of blacks had diminished sharply. By 1915, not only were there far fewer lynchings in the state than in the opening years of the century, but Confederate memorials were beginning to appear commemorating the faithfulness of slaves during the Civil War.187 While part of the reason for the lack of controversy associated with Birth of a Nation’s reception in the South may have stemmed from the entertaining qualities and high production values of the film itself, it is probable—based on the experience of North and South Carolina—that a major part also had to do with the more stable race relations that followed the attainment of complete white supremacy.
Fighting Film with Film
While most of the NAACP’s energy went into fighting the film at a political level (trying to have it suppressed or cut), some of its leaders saw clearly that they would have to engage in a cultural battle as well. The Birth of a Nation encouraged—and considerably worsened—stereotypes of American blacks that were already deeply ingrained in American popular culture. During the earliest years of cinema, motion pictures offered unflattering and highly clichéd representations of blacks. “Black women,” comments Dan Leab, “were either fat, asexual, servile, and dark, or promiscuously attractive and lightskinned. Black men were … supposedly born ‘hoofing on the levee to the strumming of the old banjo.’” To this complement of often-ludicrous “toms,” “coons,” “mulattoes,” and “mammies [sic],” as Donald Bogle points out, The Birth of a Nation added a new and more sinister figure: the ambitious and sexually rapacious “black buck.”188