The Lost Chapter
Race To The Box Office
The Nigger
–film by Edgar Lewis, 1915
We were pretty explicit in the way we saw them, and we saw them as savages, ignoramuses, and slack-jawed bumblers. They ate like wild dogs, picked cotton while wearing white smiles, and performed soft shoe barefoot in caked dirt sharecropping yards. They were obtuse orators, replacing ‘s’ with ‘z’ and pluralizing verbs. What makes it even worse: how we saw them on celluloid wasn’t different from how we saw them in the flesh. Did we make the films, or did the films make us?
It’s appropriate that the subject of race in film history’s first chapter be caught only in black and white. There was little nuance to the stories being told. You were good or you were evil; you saved the plantation master or you double-crossed him. In addition, these films had more brutal, hand-over-eyes content than any other genre. Murder, rape, mob scenes, war, lynching, and cannibalism: count on at least two of the preceding to fill the pages of a race-related photoplay. And nowhere were these movies being supported, produced, screened, hailed, and protested more than in Jacksonville.
Jacksonville, in terms of race, was contradictory, dichotomous. It was a city–the biggest city in the state, in fact–with a high percentage of black residents. Conversely, it was in the deepest cavern of the Old South, a place where, ironically, hardcore racist hubs like Alabama and Mississippi were farther north. Jacksonville had a cultural reputation; it was considered a must-stop for traveling vaudeville troupes looking for eager audiences. But within that metropolis were antiquated conditions for the black community; neighborhoods like Hansontown lacked decent water and sewer systems. This made Jacksonville the ideal Petri dish for race film’s growth and maturation. Where one finds great opportunity and great strife, that is the place where art is made.
In life and in film, there were two sides, two colors, and one had to border the other to see anything clearly. Therefore, Jacksonville must be seen through the viewfinder of both the black and white community. See the city as black and white, hear their stories in black and white, and a flickering picture comes into focus.
* * * *
POV: Black.
In 1900, there were 16,236 of us among Jacksonville’s total population of 28,429; blacks comprised well more than half of the city’s residential pool. 1 We had our own neighborhoods, and even integrated into theirs. Blacks were gainfully employed across all industries. We were pharmacists, doctors, ministers, teachers, and lawyers, although most categories totaled in the single digits. Leisure time was spent at the horse races in Moncrief Park, enjoying minor league baseball in the spring, and watching the films of Oscar Micheaux in the colored theatres. But let’s not forget we were there long before the shipyards and ten-story buildings arrived. We were plantation slaves and fruit field workers. We were members of the 54th of Massachusetts, fighting in Lake City’s pine flatwoods in the Battle of Olustee.
The Great Fire of 1901 could almost have been considered a black catastrophe. Of the 10,000 displaced by the fire, more than 7,000 were African-American. Or as the Florida Metropolis biasly reported two days after the fire, “The march of this unchecked flame of destruction, having its origin in the center of Jacksonville’s colored population, known for their frugality and thrift.” 2
But the years after the fire offered new opportunity. “Over the course of fifteen years following the fire, black business growth and development was substantial. . . . Retail groceries increased from forty-three to seventy-three, meat markets from five to seventeen, restaurants from nineteen to twenty-nine, saloons from one to twelve, wood yards from one to thirteen, and undertakers from none to four.” 3 An African-American presence in the esteemed professions increased as well. According to the Jacksonville City Directory of 1915, there were four black dentists (none in 1900) and eight lawyers (three in 1900). That decade and a half also saw the establishment of black-owned real estate firms and movie theaters. 4 Social acceptance of the African-American was also seeing signs of improvement. In 1912, Booker T. Washington spoke to a crowd of 2,500 Jacksonvillians, both white and black. George Bedell, a prominent white attorney, introduced the educator and author. 5
But for every step of progress, there was a shadow of limitation. Because of health conditions in slums like Hansontown, the mortality rate for blacks was more than twice as high as it was for whites. According to the Florida Times-Union, the water quality was so poor and human waste backups in the sewage systems so common that many of the city’s typhoid cases began in the black neighborhoods. Disease and poverty were in plenty; medical care and food were in demand. 6
Socially, we were largely met with rampant paranoia and bigotry. Segregation was the status quo. It had gone by many names over the years–sometimes the names were unspeakable. By the late 20th century, the name was a mythical minstrel character from New York. The Jim Crow Laws were the result of the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson. The crime: Louisiana white man Homer Plessy was “forced” to sit in a negro railcar. The court agreed with Plessy, ruling that “separate facilities for the races were acceptable.” 7 It was just a theatrical formality–robes, gavel hammering–in allowing our social death in the white community. What followed were a series of demeaning laws for enforced separation. In Florida, those laws covered miscegenation. “Unlawful for any white person to intermarry with any Negro person. Performing such a ceremony punishable by a fine of $1,000, of which one-half shall be paid to the informer.” In 1903, the statute was updated to read, “Intermarriage with a Negro, mulatto, or any person with one-eighth Negro blood shall be punished.” Everything from schools to streetcars followed suit. There were no high schools for black students. At the minor league baseball games, the black section was the bleachers along the first base line. But Jim Crow didn’t extinguish pride. When Jack Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries to retain his heavyweight belt, the celebration spilled out into the streets.
The movies offered nothing different. Black audiences were forced to sit in segregated balconies at the back of the theater. As a result, our community established its own theaters, oftentimes named after a black leader or white emancipator. The Lincoln Theater opened in 1912. The Globe, originally known as the Bijou, was a 1,000-seat picture and vaudeville house considered the Southern anchor for traveling black vaudeville shows. The 900-seat Strand Theater located on West Ashley Street was part of the Southern Consolidated Vaudeville Circuit before converting to a movie house. There was the Airdome, the Pix, and the Roosevelt. Temporary tent theaters were also used. The Ritz Theater, on Davis Street in LaVilla, opened in 1929 and still stands today. There is little or no information about the opening of the Ritz; local historians believe it’s because the white press had no interest in reporting on a black theater. 8
But even separated, removed, and isolated wasn’t enough for them. Violence against black theaters was as common as it was against individuals. “On December 2, 1921, the Dream Theater in St. Petersburg was bombed, ostensibly because the owner ‘took trade away from the Jim Crow section in white theaters.’”
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POV: White.
Reconstruction was a disaster for us. The Freedmen’s Bureau Act was signed on March 3, 1865, a month before Appomattox, establishing a bureau of relief for freedmen and refugees. They told the slaves to stop in for forty acres and mule. How about that. The next year, Jacksonville opened one of Florida’s two Freedmen’s Banks (the other was in Tallahassee). It closed eight years later, claiming $39,400 in deposits and 1,608 depositors. As it turned out, our cashiers and bank managers were swindling the negro deposits. 10
The Reconstruction Act was introduced in 1876, or as it was officially known, “an act to provide for the more efficient government of rebel states.” As a “rebel state,” Florida became a subset of the Third Military District, one of five such districts containing the Confederate states. The Third, like every other district, was ruled by Union officers given carte blanche by President Andrew Johnson. We were forced to hand over control of our neighborhoods, businesses, income, legal agreements, all of it. “[The commanders] could abolish charters. . . levy taxes, impose fines and inflict penalties. . . set aside the decisions of the courts, remove all officers and fill all vacancies without the form of an election, and try persons by commissions selected by themselves.” 11
When it came time to vote for new elected officials, Confederates were blackballed. So much for Lincoln’s promise: “with malice towards none; with charity for all.” Before registering to vote, the applicant had to swear “that he had not participated, either directly or indirectly, in any rebellion against the United States, nor given any aid or comfort to its enemies.” This, of course, debarred most Southern white men, and at the same time admitted the freedmen to registration. You can guess how the turnout faired. Florida registrants reflected 11,148 white voters and 15,434 black voters. At the convention in Tallahassee in 1868, there were 46 delegates, and 18 were black. “As might be expected, the delegates soon split into factions, where there came about a ‘serio-comic presentation of politics’ the record of which makes history ludicrous.” 12
But Jim Crow gave us some dignity back. The movie houses were segregated; they all sat up in the “colored only” balconies. They could go to their own theaters if so inclined. None of our high schools allowed black students. At the minor league baseball games, the black sections were the bleachers along the first base line. When Jack Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries to retain his heavyweight belt, they took over the streets like a damned Zulu tribe.
Because of this back and forth, victories and defeats coming one after the other, the racial unrest in Jacksonville was visceral, like thick mist off the St. Johns. It came to a head with the Riot of 1892. It began with a fight between Frank Burrows and Ben Reed, a white and a black respectively. “Reed struck Burrows on the head with an oak standard, crushing his skull.” As Reed was captured and taken to jail on Liberty Street, a lynch mob was forming–vigilante justice by torchlight. Meanwhile, a negro congregation, 500 or more, encircled the prison to protect their own. When a white man approached the prison, or even glanced down the street, whistled signals ordered the lookouts to question him under the supervision of a Winchester. The governor was alerted and three local militias were sent to keep the peace. The mobs, both black and white, “broke up somewhat in front of the troops and shifted its relation to the business end of a Gatling gun.” But they only found better hiding spots. “The marshes, shanties, yards, and trees within three blocks of the jail were full of armed negroes apparently waiting for war to begin.” 13
By the third day, the city was steeped in teeth-chattering anxiety. Eight armed military companies were now present. “The most incendiary talk by crowds of negroe women was one of the most disturbing elements throughout the trouble.” Rumors floated that the black contingency, if forced to bury its anger in the marshes and shanties, would burn down the city, karmic considering the black residents’ fate some eight years later. The respective groups eventually disbanded. Later that year, Ben Reed was tried for murder. After initially being set free, a second trial was held where he was tried, convicted and sentenced to four years imprisonment. 14
The Black Codes, under which a black man was hung for attempting to rape a white woman and misdemeanors carried 39 lashes and an hour in the pillory, they helped numb the anger. But we needed to be making our own laws and codes. We needed to be our own nation. If we were smart, we’d do it hooded to avoid being made by soldiers or those carpetbagger snitches. We should be anonymous, yet somehow trademarked to warn them that the devil’s coming.
* * * *
Kuklos is a Greek work meaning “circle.” It was as good a word as any to tag this commiserating gaggle of young Confederate veterans looking to play pranks on all the freedmen. Klan was then suffixed, the ‘k’ changed to ‘c’ for continuity. Their garb gave the impression that “these white-robed night prowlers were the ghosts of the Confederate dead, who had arisen from their graves in order to wreak vengeance on an undesirable class of people.” 15 The donning of the white sheets allowed them to leave this world and enter one much more imaginary. Rankings carried none of the arched-back rigidity of the army these men had just left. These were sinister titles nicked from dime store horror tales and the Knights of the Round Table. States became “realms,” congressional districts “dominions,” and counties “provinces.” At the top of the order were the grand dragon and his eight hydra. From there, rankings included goblins, giants, genii, furies, nighthawks and cyclops. In 1867, the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand dragon was named. It was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a sunken-cheeked slave trader with a bosky thatch of chin hair. He was also a Civil War lieutenant well known for his ordered slaughter of 200 unarmed, and mostly black, prisoners at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. 16
The KKK arrived in Florida shortly after its founding, establishing initial chapters in Palatka and Jacksonville. They made their mark by attending political rallies, raiding the homes of black families, leaving threats on the doors of black businesses, making good on those threats, burning the obligatory crosses, killing political candidates with the wrong set of values, and hanging freedmen from pine branches. Eventually, the law cracked down on the KKK; their virtual extermination followed. A brief revival took place in 1920 when the state’s first chartered “klavern,” a locally organized unit of the Ku Klux Klan, was formed in Jacksonville (the unit’s nickname: “Stonewall Jackson Number 1”). Five hundred marchers marked with event with a parade. Like the ghosts and goblins they were, it took place after dark. 17
These racists and others were no longer allowed by law to unleash their id. But there was a huge market for entertaining it.
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“Coon” was on the marquee of the Arcade Theater. As was “nigger,” “Zulu,” “darky.” In 1915, well-known western and action-adventure director Edgar Lewis brought The Nigger to theaters nationwide. The great irony is that the white audiences sniggering at the Zulus onscreen were often laughing at whites in blackface.
Jacksonville was a great place to shoot hate. It had the jungle groves of Atlantic Beach, the perfect location for a white woman to be chased by bone-nosed savages. The city’s considerable black population meant there was a large well of extras for the slave scenes in Civil War photoplays. Add to that the talent pool that regularly visited the city; in 1913, Jacksonville has five vaudeville and motion picture houses exclusively for those not interested in parading past the “Colored Section To The Rear” sign. 18
But the colored picture house was about the only place to escape what film was doing to them. The depiction of the African American during the Civil War, in Africa, on the plantation, was that of brainwashed loyal, sinister disloyal, island savage, or childlike imbecile. Sigmund Lubin regularly mined the tribal storyline. The first of the litter was Rastus in Zululand, a 1910 comedy about a black man who sets sail and wakes up on the African coast. Before the reel splits he becomes the amorous target of the tribal chief’s daughter. That was followed in 1913 by The Zulu King, a comedy short about black natives who “choose a hen-pecked white man. . . fleeing from his wife, to become king of the Zulus.” 19 That same year the studio released Zeb, Zack And The Zulus. In 1914, Lubin produced Coontown Sufragettes. The plot: “Southern ‘mammies’ try to keep their no good husbands out of saloons in this variant of Lysistrata.” 20 Referring to the 5th century Greek play by Aristophanes, Lysistrada is about Athenian women who are fed up with the Peloponnesian War. In order to get their way, they barricade themselves in the Acropolis and go on a sex strike to force their husbands to vote for peace with Sparta. Coontown Sufragettes was directed by Arthur Hotaling. His idea of a good time was hiring black men to rob graves and pack the car full of corpses. Those brave or frightened enough to made it through the stunt were rewarded with a coin. 21
Other local studios milked the jungle genre, including Thanhouser and its 1916 picture The Hidden Valley. In one scene five whites including the severely white Valkyrien, the studio’s buxom femme from Reykjavik, Iceland, are chased by 500 natives. Meanwhile, Pathé was producing stories about loyal slaves. In the 1911 dramatic short For Massa’s Sake, a “devoted former slave tries to sell himself to pay his ex-master’s gambling debts.” 22
The Civil War film was Kalem’s most popular genre, and in its versions, the South always won. In 1910’s The Confederate Spy, produced during Kalem’s second season in Jacksonville, a man returns to his Southern home with a new wife, and the slaves cheer and scream like red carpet voyeurs. This was one of the films scribed by Gene Gauntier. In her autobiography, she describes those joyful early days in Jacksonville that included run-ins with “the crowds of manageable, friendly darkies.” 23 Kalem also went the savage route. In the 1912 drama Missionaries Of Darkest Africa, a missionary’s daughter is kidnapped, impregnated and driven to suicide. The following year saw Kalem’s release of Mystery Of The Pine Tree Camp, shot on the outskirts of Jacksonville. The much buzzed about rumor was that for one scene, a black convict was employed to run into the woods with a fifteen-minute head start on the bloodhounds. 24
The documentaries of the era carried both white pride and black distain. In 1914, Jacksonville hosted the United Confederate Veterans Reunion, and the Mackey & Coutant Film Company recorded the event as a “news-gram.” The film opens with a shot of an unnamed park, where hundreds of white pop tents nestle next to one other like powdered pastries in a baker’s dish. The event is packed; everyone from grizzled crackers to suited young men (“meet F.M. Ironmonger, the youngest living veteran”) star in this documentary. The film’s most iconic image is of nine elderly veterans being “directed” by a canotier-wearing gentleman. He wants them to shake their fingers at the camera like disapproving fathers of unruly children, like disapproving secessionists from an unruly union. Mystified by the motion picture camera, they look at each other blankly–what are we doing? Their arms and fingers move awkwardly, like children trying to follow the bouncing ball. Perhaps encouraged by Mackey & Courant’s footage of revelry, the City of Jacksonville produced its official documentary in 1916. It is titled, simply enough, The City Of Jacksonville. Among its snapshots of city life is a black pie-eating contest.
Setting aside their ideological flaws, the real problem with these motion pictures was that they were terrible. They were shortsighted and shallow in story, with no narrative arc save for a denouement where all things alabaster prevail (unless, of course, you’re the protagonists in the 1916 short Brothers Equal, who discover they have a “tainted” racial history). A medium shot with mangroves in the background became the standard visual for signaling a new continent. These race films used the basics of storytelling. They had the visual vernacular of a children’s book: close-ups, two shots, three shots, establishing shots. There were no wide shots, pans, dollies, match shots, or anything remotely similar. That would change in 1915 when D.W. Griffith turned a Ku Klux Klansman into a superhero.
* * * *
“They say that we picture directors do not know the ‘rules,’ the technique of drama. We know enough of the rules and the technique to avoid them, for real life is not run by ‘rules.’ The motion picture technique is what technique really means, a faithful picture of life. . . . The motion picture, properly presented, should be a picture of real life.” 25
This is D.W. Griffith speaking to the New York Dramatic Mirror, six months before directing the film that would send his career into the thermosphere and permanently alter the aesthetic course of filmmaking. He had in his possession the rights to The Clansman, the bestselling novel by Thomas Dixon. Griffith has connected with the book because “he sensed in The Clansman the raw material of a great American epic, story and characters with which both he and his audience could identify as they could not with material taken from Biblical and European history.” 26 The book, about the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, was a racial powder keg, but its prose was electric and compelling, a mix of pulpit brimstone and arabesque decoration. “In the darkest hour of the life of the South, when her wounded people lay helpless amid rags and ashes under the beak and talon of the Vulture, suddenly from the mists of the mountains appeared a white cloud the size of a man’s hand,” writes Dixon. “It grew until its mantle of mystery enfolded the stricken earth and sky. An ‘Invisible Empire’ had risen from the field of Death and challenged the Visible to mortal combat.” 27
Dixon believed, as the book suggests, that post-war blacks were not prepared to participate in the American process. Griffith agreed, but did so from a completely different soapbox. As Griffith biographer Richard Schickel puts it, thus concurring with the director’s own words, “Griffith naively supposed that [The Clansman] was uncontroversial and incontrovertible, an exercise in historical truth-telling–and not merely a truth, but the truth.” 28
David Wark Griffith was already about 500 films into his oeuvre when he discovered Dixon’s book about two families split by their allegiances to the Union and Confederacy. Beyond its epic pretensions, the story hit something of a nerve with the Kentucky-born director. Griffith’s father was Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith, a Confederate army colonel and Civil War hero–he is believed to have been wounded five times during his service. Jacob’s grand yarns about the War Between the States were infamous, his children often the rapt audience. David lost his father at age 10, leaving the grand yarns to spin dramatically in his head.
Griffith began his creative career as a playwright, poet and actor. He shifted to film shortly after moving to New York in 1906. The ensuing filmography is no stranger to racy race material. In 1908, Griffith caught the industry’s jungle fever and shot his own native picture, The Zulu’s Heart. “The Zulu Chief, whose four-year-old daughter dies of fever, displays sensitivity and compassion for the wife and child of a Boer, risking his life to save mother and child from his own South African tribesmen.” Biograph used the following tagline in its promotional materials: “The savage beast becomes compassionate through grief.” 29
After stints with Edison (under Edwin S. Porter) and Biograph, Griffith broke out on his own to make of The Clansman, which he envisioned as a 10- to 12-reel picture, which by comparison made the standard picture length of the day look like Fred Ott’s Sneeze. He chose California as his location (Griffith shot the first film ever made in Hollywood proper, 1910’s An Old California), and got to work casting and building sets.
The film’s plot is quite lengthy, and isn’t a note-for-note adaptation of The Clansman. In fact, the film was redubbed The Birth Of A Nation because Griffith hopscotched all over Dixon’s book. That said, it is a long, winding and warped portrait of America during the Civil War and Reconstruction, framed against the trials and tribulations of two closely knit families: one North, one South. However, the electric undercurrent is the post-war savaging of the South by freedmen and carpetbaggers. The chaos fueled by the former slaves–or as a title card reads, “The charity of the North misused to deluge the ignorant”–finally leads protagonist Ben Cameron to form the Ku Klux Klan, a vigilante force to combat the evil occupiers, thus returning balance to the universe. Henry Walthall was cast as Ben Cameron, part of the pure-hearted Cameron family of Piedmont, South Carolina. Walthall had worked with Griffith before, most recently on Home, Sweet Home. Lillian Gish, Griffith’s muse and the one of most popular silent ingénues, took the role of Elsie Stoneman, daughter of radical Republican leader Austin Stoneman, who orchestrates of the South’s corrupt reconstruction.
The jingoistic film began shooting on July 4th, 1914 and was released in theaters in 1915, the 50th anniversary of the Civil War’s denouement. What audiences saw was a behemoth, a motion picture finally big enough to fill the dimensions of their dreams. Made for a whopping $100,000, it was cut from 150,000 feet of stock into 10 reels, roughly 12,500 feet. Griffith’s publicity department leaked that 18,000 extras were used during filming. 30
The film’s first frame is a telling and conspicuous disclaimer, without question the words of the man previously quoted in the New York Dramatic Mirror: “We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of right.” Over the course of the next three hours, black men attempt rape, try to force women into interracial marriage and drive them to suicide. At the onset of Reconstruction, freedmen are seen rigging elections and electing black officials, whom take Congress like it was the spoils of a sunken city. They eat with abandon, pick their feet on their desks, hide hooch between the pages on their law books, and vote in favor of having “all whites salute negro officials in the street.”
Fearing his great big white world is collapsing, Ben Cameron retreats to the seaside where he sees a group of children playing. They hide under white bed sheets and scare each other. The whites of his eyes get whiter–the seed of the Invisible Empire has been planted. He summons a new army, and employs his mother to sew their uniforms–a Betsy Ross with Aryan taste. In the final act, as the Camerons’ South seems on the brink of extinction, the army of men and steed under white sheets gallops across the countryside–shot in the town of Clifton in Los Angeles County and Whittier in Orange County–and to the rescue. The Klansmen corral the wayward negros, and Ben Cameron saves Elsie Stoneman from Silas Lynch, the mulatto rapist. It is indeed a strange sight to see Lillian Gish wrapped up in the arms of her savior, a superhero in a white hood and cape. It is a moment that John Wayne and Christopher Reeve and Harrison Ford and Johnny Weissmuller would inherit over and over again, just without the lynch garb.
While the film is suffocated in a bigoted philosophy, its technical and visual achievements were without peer. Where movies had been confined to the visual vernacular of theater–stage, spotlights, faux milieu–Griffith became Samson, obliterating limitations and imploding the old Philistine temple. Civil War battles scenes were shot from the tops of mountains; it’s now believed that all battle scenes were shot in the San Fernando Valley, the present day location of Burbank and Universal City. 31 The shots are wide and enveloping; they capture long, sinewy cannon smoke trails as they snake through the frames like genies. The original score borrows from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for the film’s climax: the Ku Klux Klan’s famous ride to the rescue, a hundred or more huffing past cinematographer Billy Bitzer’s camera and kicking up a torrent of dust. The shot arsenal is prolific: three-quarters, iris in, long, fade in, and semi-close up; red filters were used to break up the chiaroscuro. Most damning to the critics, Griffith’s KKK were not sloppy and caitiff, but august and poetic. At one point during the famous Klan ride, Griffith beautifully captures a line of men on horseback as they trot one by one across the horizon, silhouetted by the sun. That shot would invite countless imitators over the next century, including Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where Death leads his merry band of newlydeads across the Swedish hillside.
Because of its sweeping American story and dramatic visuals seemingly lifted from a Thomas Moran painting, the public fell in love. Opening night was especially telling. “Some recall a moment of silence when the last, peaceful frames of the film. . . had passed through the projector. Some do not. But all recall the audience leaping up, cheering and applauding and stamping their feet, not to be stilled until Griffith made an appearance.” Even the NAACP, which fought to boycott the film it believed would stir a hornet’s nest of racial strain, could not deny the brilliance of the picture. “There are even, on record, statements by members of the NAACP in which they concede that, at least while watching the film, they were swept up and away by it along with everyone else in the audience.” 32 Tickets for the film were at a premium–$2 a head. 33 In Jacksonville, it premiered to much acclaim at the Duval Theater. Jacksonville moviegoers “flocked to see D.W. Griffith’s epic of white supremacy.” 34 In its first run, the film made $10 million. It was the first movie screened for a president at the White House. Woodrow Wilson loved it. As it happens, Wilson, who graduated from Johns Hopkins University the same year as Thomas Dixon, is quoted in the film. The president’s words are pulled from his book History of the American People: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self preservation . . . until at last there had sprang into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
* * * *
Don’t think this was something the black community took sitting down. Their participation in the films–as slaves for Griffith, as Zulus for Lubin–was sheer economics. Black actors, looking for work when the vaudeville troupes were on hiatus, took those subservient roles because it was the only acting work to be found. The NAACP, in spite of admiring its technical brilliance, did what it could to stop The Birth of a Nation from hitting theaters. The fruit of their labor blossomed into small, insignificant footnotes. In Los Angeles, the NAACP got an injunction against a January 8th, 1915 afternoon screening of the film. However, the injunction did not include the evening show or any screening thereafter. 35
What the black community did do is fight fire with fire. They could not win a case with the country as jury. But they could bait them with entertainment. In much the same was as NAACP officials enjoyed The Birth Of A Nation in spite of its message, so too could black-made films charm whites right out of their bigotry. Some were more successful than others.
The most recognized film of this genre is also its biggest dud. First known as Lincoln’s Dream, then The Birth Of A Race, it was a direct counter-offensive against Griffith’s highly entertaining propaganda film. Its genesis traces back to the New York branch of the NAACP, where prominent African Americans including W.E.B. Du Bois and NAACP secretary Mary Childs Nerney met under the guide of a “scenario committee,” hoping to explore the possibility of filming a rebuttal to The Birth Of A Nation. The initial war chest came from Trust rogue Carl Laemmle. The deal: Laemmle would put up $150,000 if the black community would come up with the other $50,000. It was a budget twice what Griffith had to work with. The NAACP refused, worried about losing money and, more importantly, anonymity–the organization didn’t want the ignited wick of this propaganda film to snake back to headquarters. 36 As an alternative, public stock was offered. Postcards and mailings talked up its record-breaking potential, and name-dropped Booker T. Washington as an advisor on the project. The Birth Of A Race News was published, never without a rosy headline like “Another Big Step Forward.” The plan worked. Within the first 18 months, 50,000 shares of stock were sold at $10 a pop. 37
Then there was the issue of the screenplay. Originally, it was to be a sweeping history of the black race, from Moses to the pharaohs of Egypt to slave traders to modern times. But the story kept evolving, morphing, swelling. Adam and Eve were added, as were Jesus and Christopher Columbus. With much of it set in the blazing Middle Eastern deserts and American South, Tampa was chosen as the location.
Aside from its script troubles, the film was plagued with bad weather. The Sunshine State provided nothing of the sort; most shooting days were overcast and rainy. On January 18, 1918, a violent storm with gusts upwards of 46 miles per hour swept across Tampa. The torrent shut down the city’s electric plant and flooded the Hillsborough River. Translated to the production schedule, it canceled the night shoots and wrecked the Nile. 38
When the film finally hit theaters in 1918, it was a bloated patchwork of our past, a story told by a long-winded, schizophrenic historian. It began with “Adam and Eve, continuing through the Florida Biblical footage to the crucifixion of Jesus, picking up the thread of hope with the discovery of America by Columbus, detailing racial intolerance in the days of slavery and Lincoln’s role as emancipator, and updating the conflict between good and evil with a melodramatic treatment of the tragedy facing a family of German-Americans torn between divided loyalties.” 39 The film was panned across the board, discouraging future investors from support black films on a large scale. It eventually took its place as one of the first great flops. Sadly, it was one with a purpose much higher than Ishtar, Howard the Duck and Cleopatra.
Other black films and filmmakers made it to the highlight reel. One of the best known is Oscar Micheaux, the black writer and director who while not as gifted as Griffith, made thoughtful films for black audiences.
Micheaux was born in 1884 to freed slaves in Metropolis, Illinois, and lived for some time in the white-capped white suburbs of South Dakota. His film career began in 1918–the same year The Birth Of A Race hit theaters–with the release of The Homesteader. His films’ sociopolitical DNA, and his stand against Griffith, were made apparent in 1919’s Within Our Gates, about a woman working to save a bankrupt school for black youth. In the film’s most famous moment, Micheaux creates a negative of Griffith’s rape scene in The Birth Of A Nation, the one where Silas Lynch, the mulatto grunt with a head like an anvil, tries to rape Elsie Stoneman. Lighting and blocking the scene exactly like Griffith, Micheaux’s rape scene presents Sylvia Landry, played by black actress Evelyn Preer, as she tries to escape the animalistic pursuit of a white-haired male suitor. As an added bonus, an oval-framed portrait of Abraham Lincoln hangs on the facing wall.
Black filmmakers would continue to offer their answer to the prejudice. But in spite of their determined efforts, Jacksonville moviegoers decades in the future would be paying to see Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs, a 1942 wartime comedy from Warner Brothers that “parodies Snow White by making her a ‘luscious chocolate cutie’ who is threatened by the Queen, who appears to be African. The dwarfs protect her until the arrival of ‘Prince Chaw-min’.” 40