A RECENT article in The Economist about a historic movie’s violent influence had me thinking of North Carolina, and specifically about Chapel Hill and UNC. The article touched on research being conducted by Desmond Ang, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, on the correlations between showings of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation with local lynchings, racial violence, and Ku Klux Klan organization.
The article was titled “How a racist film helped the Ku Klux Klan grow for generations.” The Birth of a Nation was a significant piece of cinema early in the silent film era for a number of reasons. As a piece of art, it revolutionized filmmaking and was one of the first feature-length movies. It toured the country, in some places being shown over and over.
As a piece of history, it is remembered in many ways, most importantly that it is credited with inspiring the second iteration of the KKK. (The first came after emancipation, including heavy Klan activity and violence here, and then became less necessary as Reconstruction was successfully defeated.) The film tells the story of the Civil War and the period following from a decidedly white supremacist viewpoint. The white hoods and cross-burnings now synonymous with the KKK came from the movie, which depicted Klan members as saviors of a society threatened by brutish Black men suddenly free to terrorize white women. It depicts lynching as noble.
Ang’s study looks at the counties where The Birth of a Nation was screened, along with the emergence of KKK “klaverns” and occurrences of lynchings and other racial violence in those counties the months and years that followed. His work has revealed a strong relationship, as Black groups warned would exist as they protested screenings more than a century ago. As usual, their concerns were ignored. As this research is showing, when The Birth of a Nation road show came to town, lynchings increased fivefold in the county.
The study has also found that places where The Birth of a Nation was shown were more likely to have active KKK chapters in the following years. That effect could be felt as far in the future as the year 2000, when a county that had been a stop on the road show was still 18% more likely to have an active klavern than other similar counties.
OFTEN CITED in articles about The Birth of a Nation is the fact that Woodrow Wilson, an admirer who was quoted in the film, screened the movie in the White House. Wilson worked as president to undo hard earned work of racial progress and re-segregate the federal workforce. But President Wilson’s connection to the movie has a direct relationship to North Carolina and the Triangle.
D.W. Griffith’s movie was based on the 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. The author of The Clansman was Thomas Dixon Jr., from Shelby, N.C. He dedicated his book:
TO THE MEMORY OF
A SCOTCH-IRISH LEADER OF THE SOUTH
My Uncle, Colonel Leroy McAfee
GRAND TITAN OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE
KU KLUX KLAN
Dixon had become fast friends with Woodrow Wilson when they were students at Johns Hopkins. Certainly that helped land his film in the White House beyond just the common cause of the two men.
Dixon’s book and Griffith’s movie both glorify the KKK as heroes. They depict Black men as beastly figures of terror, and in the movie the most prominent offenders are played by white actors in blackface.
The movie is more than three hours long, and one drawn-out scene features a man with romantic designs stalking a white woman through the woods as she fetches a pail of water. She ends up plunging herself off a rocky cliff to her death rather than succumb to his notions.
The book and movie center on a white Southern family named the Camerons. Dixon’s inspiration for that family apparently came from the Camerons of this part of North Carolina. News accounts at the time even mistakenly reported that scenes were filmed at various Cameron properties in the Triangle.
Dixon was a close friend to Bennehan Cameron, a grandson of Thomas Ruffin, who as chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court wrote one of the more odious opinions in American history. Bennehan Cameron, Dixon’s friend, was the son of Paul Cameron, the largest enslaver in North Carolina at the time of the Civil War, and one of the largest enslavers in the entire South, with more than 1,000 enslaved people.
Paul Cameron claimed years later, as a way of bragging, that he’d enslaved 1,900 people at one time. (If you’ve never visited Stagville, the Camerons’ forced labor camp (aka plantation) in Durham, I highly recommend the tour. The first time I went, I returned shortly thereafter it was so impactful.)
By no coincidence, Paul Cameron was one of the wealthiest people in the South. He was also a state senator representing Orange County and a UNC trustee. His money built the old Memorial Hall (long ago razed on the same site as present-day Memorial Hall), and thus the university named Cameron Avenue in his honor. An interesting juxtaposition is that Cameron Avenue is the address for the University Laundry building, now named for Kennon Cheek and Rebecca Clark, who advocated for better conditions for Black workers at UNC.
(The McCauley neighborhood that adjoins Cameron Avenue as part of the Cameron-McCauley Historic District is also comprised of street names with racist origins. Charlotte just renamed its Zebulon (Vance) Avenue and Vance High School. Ransom Street is named for Edward Ransom, who was a surgeon for the Confederate Army and a politician who helped bury Republican power in the state toward the end of Reconstruction. And then, McCauley.)
Dixon, the book’s author from Cleveland County west of Charlotte, has been called “a professional racist.” He also wrote the screenplay for The Birth of a Nation and said that he depicted Black men as savage sex predators to cause audiences “a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored men.” One of the characters in the movie is Gus, “a renegade negro.” He believed that “ninety-nine Negroes out of a hundred” were determined to marry and procreate with white women, something Dixon said would be “the greatest calamity which could possibly befall this Republic.” Dixon dedicated his public life to these beliefs despite the fact that his father, also a member of the original version of the KKK, was rumored to have fathered Dixon’s brother by raping the family’s enslaved cook.
As these things tend to go, Dixon’s close connections to powerful people didn’t stop with the Camerons. He went on to make a career of political advocacy and speaking as a white supremacist, and shared that close friendship with the President of the United States.
THE STUDY about correlations between The Birth of a Nation screenings and violence and Klan activity got me wondering if the movie was shown in Chapel Hill. I conducted a quick, non-exhaustive search of the Daily Tar Heel archives. We know that there was heavy Klan activity here in the years following the Civil War, as well as a hundred years later amid the local civil rights movement, not to mention recent white supremacist activity here.
The first showing of The Birth of a Nation in Chapel Hill that shows up in the DTH is from 1921. The front-page article calls the film a “masterpiece” and “superb.” The silent film was set to an orchestra score by the Pickwick that, according to a DTH review, added to the propagandizing effect on behalf of the KKK.
I found evidence of it being screened for broad audiences several times from 1921 to 1969 that didn’t appear to be in ways that were purely educational. (The film is still studied today as an important relic.) It was shown by commercial theaters, the Student Union, and Playmakers. One showing, in 1960, came just two weeks after the Chapel Hill Nine began the sit-in movement here. In 1969, The Birth of a Nation was shown at Chapel Hill High School’s Humanities Festival. The festival’s director said of the four-hour version screened in just the third year of the school being fully integrated: “Students were just clamoring to get in to see this movie.”
Thomas Dixon also spoke at UNC as a guest of the Carolina Political Union. The topic? Advocating against an anti-lynching law then before Congress. As of April 2021, a law establishing lynching as a federal hate crime has yet to pass both houses of Congress.
ONE GOOD THING: Nearly half of Orange County has gotten at least one dose of a Covid vaccine so far.
SOURCES & CREDITS:
“How a racist film helped the Ku Klux Klan grow for generations”: The Economist, March 27, 2021
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon Jr.: Google Books
Thomas Dixon: His Books and His Career by Raymond A. Cook: Internet Archive
Paul Carrington Cameron: NCpedia
Bennehan Cameron: NCpedia
Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America by Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall: Google Books
A Backward Glance: Facts of Life in Chapel Hill by the Chapel Hill Bicentennial Committee (1994)
Courage in the Moment: The Civil Rights Struggle, 1961-1964 by Jim Wallace and Paul Dickson
Daily Tar Heel: “Birth Of A Nation To Be Shown Here” (Oct. 25, 1921), “Sketches” (Nov. 1, 1921), Carolina Theatre ad (March 1, 1931), “Political Issue To Be Subject Of Dixon’s Talk” (Oct. 13, 1936), “Dixon Enlivens CPU’s Initial Birthday Party” (May 12, 1937), “Club To Conduct Sunday Afternoon Movie Program” (Dec. 6, 1939), “Playmakers To Show ‘Birth Of A Nation’” (Jan. 9, 1940), “SUAB Offers Extra Movie; First Tonight” (March 31, 1953), “Preview: Flick, Jose Limon” (April 11, 1957), “Your GMAB: Pick A Flick Days Slated Next Week” (Nov. 8, 1959), “‘Nation’ Set As Tonight’s Free Flick” (March 17, 1960), “CHHS ‘Festival’ Continues Today” (May 1, 1969)