Archival Spotlight

On November 12 and 13, 2015, the Black Film Center/Archive presented “From Cinematic Past to Fast Forward Present: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—A Centennial Symposium.” The two days of programming featured panels with some of the leading scholars in African American and cinema studies. A common thread throughout the panels was the question of whether or not The Birth of a Nation (BOAN) should be shown in the year 2015.

James Baldwin’s 1976 description of BOAN as both “one of the great classics of the American cinema” and “an elaborate justification of mass murder” succinctly captures the challenges of screening D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster film.¹ There is no denying the seminal role of BOAN in American film history. There is also no denying the seminal role of BOAN in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the popular rewriting of the history of the Reconstruction South.

Panelists at the symposium discussed the historical reception of BOAN in depth, from Peter Davis and Jonathan Wright’s presentations on international receptions, to Andy Uhrich’s discussion of BOAN’s place in independent film collections, to Cara Cadoo’s history of contemporary African American responses, it was made clear over the course of the symposium that BOAN has had been an incendiary film since its first screening. Controversies surrounding the screening of BOAN at the university level have often emerged from the intersection of those two truths. “Why shouldn’t we screen the runaway hit of 1915 that entertained hundreds of thousands?” “Why should we screen a film that has been actively used as recruitment propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan?” These questions were raised and argued on the Indiana University campus in the beginning of the 1979 spring semester when over nine hundred people came to see BOAN at two very different screenings.

BOAN has long been prized for its cinematic innovations and its role in the rise of film as popular entertainment. Many fans of classic film have screened BOAN simply as that—an entertaining film from the early days of the movie industry. This sort of screening was what the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists (AGO) had in mind when they sponsored a screening of BOAN at the IU Auditorium with live accompaniment from famed silent film organist Dennis James, with a two-dollar ticket fee, as a fund-raiser for the chapter. The screening was scheduled for Saturday, February 3, 1979, and was part of an ongoing silent film series.

The AGO screening was immediately met by pushback from IU students and faculty. The first complaint dealt with the issue of timing—screening BOAN in the first week of Black History Month, an observance that had only been federally recognized for three years at that point. AGO conceded this point in the face of protests and moved the screening to March 19th. The second complaint was more complex. An argument was made from faculty, students and members of the local community that BOAN should not be shown as a decontextualized entertainment. AGO withdrew their sponsorship, but then amidst new counter-protests, decided to continue, asserting that the film had historic, artistic, and educational merit.

What makes this case study in the history of BOAN screenings so interesting, however, is that the original protestors never called for the film’s banning. The major concern dealt entirely with framing the screening. “We don’t advocate complete censorship of the film,” IU student and Black Student Union member Deborah Bailey told the Herald-Times. “What we advocate is a proper time for debate and discussion before and after the film.”

Framing concerns came to a head on March 19, 1979, when the IU campus offered two concurrent screenings of BOAN. The AGO screening with live accompaniment moved on in the auditorium, while across the campus in Woodburn Hall, a counter-screening and teach-in was scheduled to begin a half an hour later. Guided by professor of Afro-American Studies Phyllis Klotman (who founded the Black Film Center/Archive at IU two years later) and film studies graduate student, Andetrie Smith, the...