The Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights

At the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, Monroe Trotter, a journalist agitator, and D.W. Griffith, a technically brilliant filmmaker, incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against the fight for equality.Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a postConfederate South. Griffiths film, The Birth of a Nation, included actors in blackface, heroic portraits of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and a depiction of Lincolns assassination. Freed slaves were portrayed as villainous, vengeful, slovenly, and dangerous to the sanctity of American values. It was tremendously successful, eventually seen by 25 million Americans. But violent protests against the film flared up across the country.Almost fifty years earlier, Monroes father, James, was a sergeant in an allblack Union regiment that marched into Charleston, South Carolina, just as the Kentucky cavalryincluding Roaring Jack Griffith, D. W.s fatherfled for their lives. Monroe Trotters titanic crusade to have the film censored became a blueprint for dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the fiery story of a revolutionary moment for mass media and the nascent civil rights movement, and the men clashing over the cultural and political soul of a stillyoung America standing at the cusp of its greatest days.