D.W. Griffith: Images of Racism Past (The Original Sermon for September 28, 2025)

*Author’s note: Due to the heaviness of current affairs — and the fact that D.W.  Griffith’s 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation is a weighty topic — Rev. Dennis McCarty has  changed his Sept. 28 service topic to something more in keeping with current events:  “Finding Hope in Choppy Waters.” For those interested in the original topic, however, here is the relevant text from the original service.

READING: from Roger Ebert’s review of The Birth of a Nation 

The late Roger Ebert was arguably America’s most beloved film critic. After admitting that he had put off watching The Birth of a Nation for years, due to his own reluctance to confront the movie’s racism, he described his discomfort with it this way:

[Legendary film director D.W.] Griffith demonstrated to every filmmaker and moviegoer who followed him what a movie was, and what a movie could be. That this achievement was made in a film marred by racism should not be surprising. As a nation once able to reconcile democracy with slavery, America has a stain on its soul; to understand our history we must begin with the contradiction that the Founding Fathers  believed all men (except Black men) were created equal.  

Griffith will probably never lose his place in the pantheon [of great filmmakers],  but there will always be the blot of the later scenes of Birth of a Nation. It is a stark history lesson to realize that this film, for many years the most popular ever made, expressed widely-held and generally acceptable white views. [Actress Lillian] Gish reveals more than she realizes when she quotes Griffith’s paternalistic reply to accusations that he was anti-Negro: “To say that is like saying I am against children, as  they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives.” 

We need to watch very old movies because they teach us where we came from.

[A  Facebook meme that is popular these days expresses the feelings they should give us. “If reading history always makes you feel good, you’re not really reading history.” ]  

SERMON: “D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, and Images of Racism Past” 

“We need to watch very old movies because they teach us where we came from,” critic  Roger Ebert wrote. That is part of the thinking behind my sermon series on movies as a lens  into our cultural history. Racism isn’t the only cultural attitude we can analyze by  looking at old films. But it’s sure one of them. And that’s what I want to look at today. Roger Ebert also quoted early film director D.W. Griffith himself: to say that he dislikes Black people “Is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives.” We can reflect, from my earlier analysis  of the novel and movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, that even in a work specifically meant to  be anti-racist, that racist assumption, that Black people were like children, was not completely dead decades after The Birth of a Nation was all but forgotten. As we also learned from To Kill A Mockingbird, one other fascinating aspect of old movies is that they show us attitudes the director and crew may not have even known they had — but which stick out like sore thumbs when we look back at them  hundred years later. The older the movie, the more likely we are to see truly cringe inducing attitudes. 

David Wark Griffith, better known as D.W. Griffith, was America’s first truly great film director. He began directing movies in 1908, was one of the founders of the Hollywood filmmaking industry, and did more than anyone else to set the standard for the Hollywood blockbuster movie.

Before Griffith, the earliest movies looked like theater plays, with the camera taking place of the theatre audience. Griffith began to move the camera, “tracking” individual characters’ actions. Silent film innovations such as camera cranes, “tracking shots,” the “dolly,” the “pan,” camera angles, intercut chase scenes, rescue scenes, a great many tropes we now take for granted all evolved by way of D.W. Griffith. 

He also developed film editing. Depending on how you splice different “shots” together, the same basic collection of film or video can tell radically different stories, to radically different effect. When someone talks about “the director’s cut” of a movie, that’s what they’re talking about. We take all that for granted now. But such techniques were revolutionary in the early 1900s.  

Yet, as film critic Roger Ebert noted, Griffith used his genius to push the worst kind  of violent racial bigotry — without ever realizing how bigoted he actually was. Southern  born, he never questioned his racial assumptions. Nor did most other White people — the whole country was nearly as prejudiced as he was. I don’t believe Griffith himself  ever fully understood the social/emotional powers with which he was so adroitly — yet  heedlessly — playing.  

Flawed though our own times are, it’s easy to neglect how far we’ve come in a  hundred years — how all-encompassing patriarchalism and racial prejudice were a hundred years ago. Griffith and most of his audiences saw non-European (or even Eastern or Southern European) “races” as inferior. Men were strong and women were dependent, silly, sometimes dangerous. People with disabilities were invariably objects of pity or ridicule, as was anyone who didn’t fit into a standard, heteronormative gender mold. 

Griffith’s 1915 Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, is a study in the power of film.  As entertainment, it was decades ahead of its time. Studios in 1915 were nervous whether an audience would even watch a film for that was longer than a half hour. The Birth of a Nation and Griffith’s follow-up epic, Intolerance, ran more than three hours each.

Audiences flocked to see them and paid premium prices to get in.  

To the modern viewer, though, the most striking feature of The Birth of a Nation,  beyond epic Civil War battle scenes and dated silent film techniques, is its mind boggling racism. All Black “speaking” roles were played by white actors in ludicrous  blackface makeup. Time and again, Griffith portrayed Black men lusting after white  women. But society’s paranoia about “Black” sexuality was so great, those scenes could  only have been filmed with unmistakably white men wearing blackface makeup.  

Even as it was, the movie so angered white audiences that they would walk out of the theater just stomping. Repeatedly, white audiences went on to attack innocent Black  citizens and destroy Black-owned property. Harvard economics professor Desmond Ang surveyed old newspapers and found a five-fold increase in lynchings in towns across  America — right after The Birth of a Nation played there.  

In Griffith’s version of Reconstruction, Black Union soldiers occupy the defeated South. Freed Blacks take over Southern state legislatures and enact laws oppressing white citizens. The depictions of Black lawmakers are most remarkable for their grotesquerie.

The defeated southern menfolk are reduced to passivity — until, as Griffith  tells us: “The Ku Klux Klan [became] the organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule.” (If you think we’ve completely done away with that kind of racism, though — listen to a white supremacist talk about what they’re now calling replacement theory. Those tendrils are not dead — and in fact, may be growing stronger. The real Ku Klux Klan sprang up after the Civil War, but had faded away by about 1880. It was almost nonexistent when The Birth of a Nation came out. But with Griffith’s box office hit as a recruiting tool, Klan membership skyrocketed. Over the next ten years, more than five million men joined up across the Midwest and South, with a women’s auxiliary of nearly a hundred thousand.  

Ironically, the bigotry across American society was so huge as to render it invisible. The Birth of a Nation broke all box office records, and was the first movie specially shown at the White House. It should not be surprising that it won raves from White  House staff, as well, including Virginia-born President Woodrow Wilson. The movie’s racism may seem disgusting now. But it bothered few white people at the time.  

In our day, discrimination is often more subtle. Yet today, as in Griffith’s day, a lot of  people confronted about prejudice or insensitivity, still express the same defensiveness  Griffith did. We now have a term for that defensiveness: “white fragility.” But it’s always  been with us.

Here’s a striking example of white fragility: In response to violence generated by The Birth of a Nation, the newly formed NAACP called for its ban. Griffith responded with an angry, forty-five page, self-published pamphlet titled, “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.” He complained that his “freedom of artistic expression” was being  “censored.” Mind you, The Birth of a Nation was the most profitable film ever made. It  remained the top-grossing film in history until long after Griffith died. It was a time when Black people were not even allowed to sit with white movie audiences — and Black youths could and did suffer severe beatings just for setting foot on a white beach or drinking from a white drinking fountain. Yet D.W. Griffith felt “persecuted” and “censored” — those were the words he used — because a few people, mostly Blacks, didn’t like his movie. That’s how white fragility worked in 1915.  

His pamphlet starts out — all in capitol letters; “WHY CENSOR THE MOTION  PICTURE — THE LABORING MAN’S UNIVERSITY?” He then adds: “[T]he motion picture can carry [the truths of history] to the entire world, without cost, while at the same time bringing diversion to the masses. As the . . . cheerless existence of millions would be brightened by this new art, two of the chief causes [of war] would be removed. The motion picture is war’s greatest antidote.^” 

In addition to those accusations of “censorship,” he then concludes, “If I approach  success in what I am trying to do in my coming picture, Intolerance, I expect a  persecution even greater than that which met The Birth of a Nation.” This was — and is — patent baloney. It’s remarkable how much self pity a successful businessman can show, responding to criticism by saying that he’s the one being persecuted and censored.  

In a hundred years, the degree of racism has certainly changed in America. But — with ongoing reports on racialized police violence, ICE violence, and troops occupying inner cities — let us not be naive. We’re experiencing a resurgence. Paranoia about the  presence of dark-skinned people that may seem silly when folks talk about immigrants,  

perhaps as loudly as we’ve been called any time in the last fifty years. 

Going back to D.W. Griffith, some film critics and historians, Roger Ebert included, have suggested that Griffith made his next epic, Intolerance, as a kind of apology for The Birth of a Nation. If Griffith’s pamphlet isn’t enough to prove otherwise, the opening scenes of Intolerance do. Griffith’s message right from the beginning is that society’s problems do not rise from, say, racial intolerance, jim crow, or even slavery. The real troublemakers were the “uplifters,” as he called them: self-satisfied, power-hungry do gooders, triggering injustice, death, and destruction in a but-for-them happy world.  Again, the language isn’t exactly the same. But when reactionaries today sound the alarm about Antifa and run-away “wokism,” it’s the same old, racist song, just sung in a slightly different key.

For the record, Griffith’s disdain for “uplifters” was racist on its face. Black intellectuals from George Washington Carver to W.E.B. DuBois advocated what they often termed “racial uplift”: that Blacks who gained some position in society should use their relative advantage to “uplift” their struggling siblings of color. They had different  opinions how Black people might gain more equality. Carver and DuBois (and those Black intellectuals who ranged between them) disagreed on many points. That the word, “uplift,” had meaning to both made it worth remembering a hundred years later.

It is inconceivable that Griffith could have been unaware of that term in racial  discussions of his day. Just as reactionaries using such terms as “DEI,” “liberal,” “woke,”  and so on have a definite agenda today, he had an agenda a hundred years ago. What’s most concerning today, is that so many people find that agenda acceptable.

Then in 1917, President Wilson commissioned Griffith to make a propaganda film  supporting the United States’ entry into the First World War. Griffith traveled to Europe  and basically re-shot The Birth of a Nation, set this time on the Belgian-French border.  Germans became the bloody villains instead of Yankees and Black soldiers. The French 

were the heroes. In the end, instead of the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue, it was  French cavalry.

All movies were, by this time, subject to cuts by wartime censors. Griffith didn’t  complain about that. He did, however, get his film registered, not in his own name or  that of his production company, but as a product of the War Office: the Defense  Department of that day. As such, any criticism of his movie could be prosecuted under  federal anti-sedition statutes. So much for Griffith’s championship of free speech!  

I include these details because, in our own time, people criticized for insensitivity  toward marginalized identities still go, you might say, full Griffith, accusing their  detractors of “political correctness run amok,” “safetyism,” “cancel culture,” “censorship,”  and “persecution.”  

The Birth of a Nation and, arguably, Hearts of the World, Griffith’s propaganda movie about the First World War, inspired real violence toward real people. It’s also worth noting that, only a year or so after proclaiming film “war’s greatest antidote,” Griffith had turned around and made a movie that forcefully promoted war.  

To Griffith’s chagrin, however, President Wilson rejected Hearts of the World.  Because it portrayed Germans as such monsters, it was bad for the “peaceful and just settlement” Wilson sought in postwar negotiations. Portraying American Blacks as oversexed animals was one thing. Doing the same with Germans, while the President was trying to lead international diplomacy, was quite another.  

Yet — and this is important — white actors and set crews who worked with Griffith  insist that he was not unkind, nor intentionally racist. He was, they said, sympathetic to 

“good” Blacks — failing to understand that, to him, Black “goodness” could only come  through Black servility.  

The profound evil of Griffith’s bigotry, and that of his society, lay not in his intent,  but in its effect on those he harmed. Good intentions did not reduce the death toll, as  Professor Ang’s work affirms. Marginalization still plays out in real world violence and  economic disadvantage, even to our own day. The evil, therefore, lies not in the intent,  

but in the effect on those who are belittled and degraded, however “innocently.”  This calls us to confront what we haven’t learned since Griffith’s day, and the necessary discomfort of having our own acceptance of — or heedless participation in — today’s injustices challenged. It’s always more comfortable to look away. Which might explain why film historians so often detail The Birth of a Nation’s innovations while glossing over its jaw-dropping racism to this day.

If we summon the courage to face the multi-layered ugliness of homophobia,  transphobia, patriarchalism, and white supremacy culture, and how we, ourselves,  participate in them — if I face my own discomfort and you face yours — I truly believe we do begin to remake that discomfort into something sacred. We do not make the world a  better place, or become better people ourselves, by staying in our comfort zones.  

A hundred years after The Birth of a Nation was setting box office records, we can look back and see its evil in full view. If we’re honest, we can also see that tendrils from  that same evil is still with us, evolved and adapted over time. We should also bear in  mind that a hundred years from now, people will be looking back at us. It’s up to us what  they will see.