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5    WITH THE ROAR OF THUNDER The Birth of a Nation WHEN THE BIRTH OF A NATION opened in Atlanta on 6 December 1915, it caused a sensation throughout the city. Long lines at the Atlanta Theater were continuous from morning to evening, as crowds swelled to view the production, some coming back three or four times. Response was so great that the theaterextended the film’s run by twoweeks, closing it on Christmas night. Atlanta audiences received Birth’s majestic tale of the white South’s torment and redemption with a passionate degree of devotion and awe. At the film’s first showing, the Atlanta Constitution reported, “cheer after cheer burst forth,” as “never before . . . has an Atlanta audience so freely given vent to its emotions.” When the Klan begins its heroic ride to avenge the torment of the white South, “the awful restraint of the audience is thrown to the wind. Many rise from their seats. With the roar of thunder a shout goes up. Freedom is here. Justice is at hand! Retribution has arrived!” Ward Greene, reviewing the film in the Atlanta Journal, was equally effusive, declaring that the film “swept the audience at the Atlanta Theater . . . like a tidal wave.” Gushed Greene, “A youth in the gallery leaped to his feet and yelled and yelled. A little boy downstairs pounded the man’s back in front of him and shrieked. Here a young girl kept dabbing and dabbing at her eyes and there an old lady just sat and let the tears stream down her face unchecked.”1 Reviews of Birth consistently felt compelled to do more than comment on the film itself. Reviewers insisted on detailing the emotive responses of the spectators, as if these ecstatic reactions made evident the brilliance of D. W. Griffith’s “masterly genius.” White southerners saw Birth as, in many ways, a direct address to them, a spectacular vindication of their sectional pride and their sense of racial honor. In his review,Greene hailed the reader directly to prompt the most fitting response to the film: “Your heart pulses 148 WITNESSING  . . . you are wrung . . . your throat chokes . . . you are lifted by the hair and go crazy.” By the time it reached Atlanta, Birth had been in release for nearly nine months, and its reputation as a racist and incendiary film had become notorious , a reputation that undoubtedly drew more viewers to the film. Reviews and notices in the Atlanta papers, however, reassured readers that Birth was a historically accurate film that did nothing to promote racial prejudice. It, in fact, according to Greene, did “credit to the negro race.” He also, nonetheless , stressed to readers that on witnessing the film, “loathing, disgust, hate envelop you, hot blood cries for vengeance.” Objections notwithstanding, the waves of emotion that swept over Atlanta audiences as they witnessed the Klan’s retaliation for their suffering under black rule bore a remarkable resemblance to those experienced by lynch mobs and spectators. The film aroused the same impulse toward revenge and the same sense of racial triumph and offered those sensibilities force and credibility through the spectacle of cinema. Birth opened just a few months after the infamous lynching of Leo Frank just outside Atlanta in Marietta, Georgia.2 Frank, a Jewish factory manager, was lynched in August 1915 for the murder of one of his female workers, Mary Phagan, after the governorcommuted his death sentence.The murder of Phagan, Frank’s arrest and trial, and the lynching had dominated local news for months, inflaming sectional pride and defensiveness in the face of northern intrusion and criticism. Atlanta spectators could not have put that recent memory aside as they watched Birth. Frank’s case was itself rendered on film in a documentary, Leo Frank and Governor Slaton, produced by playwright Hal Reid and released in the summer of that year. What is more, a news film of the lynching, a prototype of later “newsweeklies,” was released soon after the lynching in September 1915, and apparently included photographs from the lynching. It omitted pictures of Frank’s corpse and revealed only shots of the crowd at the lynching. Nevertheless, censorship boards around the country suppressed the film. There is no evidence that it was prohibited in Atlanta, however. In fact, it is possible that just three months before Birth hit the Atlanta Theater, Atlantans witnessed the projection of a lynching crowd before them in nickelodeons around the city.3 The fiction that Birth projected on-screen further...

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