Blackface biography channel

History is usually written by the winners.

Blackface biography channel

But that wasn’t the case when The Birth of a Nation was released on February 8, In just over three hours, D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern carpetbaggers and immoral freed Black people.

The film was an instant blockbuster. And with innovative cinematography and a Confederate-skewed point of view, The Birth of a Nation also helped rekindle the KKK.

Until the movie’s debut, the Ku Klux Klan founded in by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, was a regional organization in the South that was all but obliterated due to government suppression.

But The Birth of a Nation’s racially charged Jim Crow narrative, coupled with America’s heightened anti-immigrant climate, led the Klan to align itself with the movie’s success and use it as a recruiting tool.

“People were primed for the message,” says Paul McEwan,