Film Essay, Research Paper

What Is Wrong

After had read the primary source document, it was concluded that there were many falsehoods,myths, and fantasies on which the film is based. The way the carpetbaggers and scalawags conducted themselves and their motives they had used were different just as their social make-up. The era in which this film took place in was highly publicized along with it s corruption due to the biracial and bipartisan which had polluted the politics in the North and South. African-American who also had power in politics experienced many problems in comparison with their white counter-parts. The radical governments were overthrown not because they were corrupt but because the reforms they instituted threatened the supremacy of whites and the subordination of black labor. After reading this I was shocked, the extremes that white Americans went to just to make sure that black would never be seen as human beings.

The title of the film is odd in the way that it can be seen two different ways and as well be seen as a weakness. The title may refer to the birth of the reunited states, or the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. I tend to think that the film has a double meaning. In showing the KKK as good guys, it is obvious that Griffith was trying to show their birth as a positive event for the United States, which is a tremendous weakness to African-Americans. Also, he was showing that the U.S. was once again reunited after the war, leading to the strengthening of the nation. It forebodes the future, when the South and the blacks living there are kept in check by the KKK, making the U.S. that much greater. Though it would be better to ignore this notion of the birth of the KKK, it cannot be due to the film s content, although the film does show a truly united states.

The film is an incredible piece of propaganda for both the KKK and the Jim Crow system. People who knew nothing about the KKK or thought of them as white villains before Birth of a Nation probably changed their minds and thrown on hoods of their own upon seeing the film. The mainstream picture was probably the best advertisement that the KKK could have had. The vilifying of blacks also led to the Jim Crow system. When it was portrayed in this movie as acceptable, people in the South felt much better about doing horrible deeds to black citizens, denying blacks their civil rights.