D. W. Griffith's Film Birth Of A Nation

The revival of the Ku Klux Klan began in 1910’s, which striked great controversy all over the nation. Conveniently D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation based on Thomas Dixon’s novel the Clansman was released stirring great controversy all over the nation as well. Many people have believed that there is a connection between the release of Birth of a Nation and The Clansman due to the fact that the Klan first successfully revived after the release of Birth of a Nation. "The Ku Klux Klan grew rapidly from there and had more than two million members throughout the country by the mid-1920s. D.W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan and denigrated blacks, was used as a recruiting tool” (PBS Rise and Fall of Jim Crow; Ku Klux

Birth of a Nation lacked any African American actors in the film itself. They were portrayed using “blackface”, which is when an actor paints their face black, and pretends to play an African American. “This film actually depicts lynching as a positive thing,” she says. “The politics of the film was essentially to say certain black people are worthy of being lynched. In that sense it’s extremely racist” (Brooks, Tom). Birth of a Nation’s portrayal of lynching, though not shown on screen, was still a big deal. Lynching was synonomous with the Klan who would lynch “carpetbaggers” and African

Simmons. In addition to being anti-black, the new Klan was anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant, and by the early 1920s it had spread throughout the North as well as the South. At the peak of its strength in 1924, membership in the KKK is estimated to have been as high as three million” (History.com Staff).

The great success of the Klan was strengthened by the fact that the Klan was also prominent in the North. Because of this prominence the message of the Klan reached a wider audience, and was able to gain more supporters than it originally had. The Klan originated and stayed in the South, while the revived