The Usual Idiot Says Everyone Knows That The Movie "Birth of a Nation" had "zilch" To Do With The Revival Of the KKK In The 20th Century

THAT WOULD BE NEWS to the man who reignited the foremost terrorist group in United States history, William Joseph Simmons on November 25, 1915 was the leader of a group he'd called together while he was reading about the success of the movie as it was opening across the country.

“There was good reason, as I have said, for making Thanksgiving Day the occasion for burning the fiery cross. Something was going to happen in town (Atlanta) the next week that would give the new order a tremendous popular boost.”

That thing was the opening of Birth of a Nation on December 6th, ten days after he lit the blasphemous cross on Stone Mountain.  According to what I've read but have not researched to my usual satisfaction is the dead giveaway that the movie and the play it's based on was the introduction of cross burning into the KKK, as it is something that never happened in the original Reconstruction era terrorist group.  

"an incredibly foul and loathsome libel on a race of human beings"

Rabbi Stephen Wise on the movie Birth of a Nation

Apparently among those who don't know as much about this as the idiot who trolls me are a number of eminent historians and scholars all of whom he believes are "idiots". As the great Black historian, the late John Hope Franklin said in his 1977 paper "Birth of a Nation" Propaganda As History:  

In the same year, 1915, "Birth of a Nation" was showing to millions across the United States, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn. When the film opened in Atlanta that fall, William J. Simmons, who had considered a Klan revival for several years, sprang into action. He gathered together nearly two score men, including two members of the original Klan of 1866 and the speaker of the Georgia legislature. They agreed to found the order, and Simmons picked Thanksgiving eve for the formal ceremonies. As the film opened in Atlanta, a local paper carried Simmons' announcement next to the advertisement of the movie. It was an announcement of the found of "The World's greatest Secret, Patriotic, Fraternal, Beneficiary Order." With an assist from "Birth of a Nation" the new Ku Klux Klan, a "High Class order of men of Intelligence and Order" was launched. It would spread all across the South and into the North and West in the 1920's and spread terror among Jews and Catholics as well as among blacks. And in the fall and winter of 1915-1916, thousands of Southerners thrilled to the stirring scenes of Birth of a Nation. "Men who once wore gray uniforms, white sheets and red shirts wept, yelled, whooped, cheered - - and on one occasion even shot up the screen in a valiant effort to save Flora Cameron from her black pursuer." They were ripe for enlistment in the new Ku Klux Klan. Thus, "Birth of a Nation" was the midwife in the rebirth of the most vicious terrorist organization in the history of the United States. 

 

In the paper Franklin noted the exemption that was given to the movie for the effect it had due to its technical innovations and its place in the history of that most dangerous of alleged art forms, the feature length film.  Or, rather, the most dangerous before TV and the internet.  The idiots who spend their lives watching screens and get paid for saying stupid things about what they see and who don't develop into an adult sense of morality who don't care the role that the movie, for example, played in the development of the KKK in Oklahoma in the lead up to the worst terror attack before those of the 1990s and 2000s, the Tulsa Massacre in which white racists waged full war on the Black Community of a major American city.  

Maybe it's because I have lived a life doing art that I'm not willing to divorce its real life effect from the work, itself.  But, then, I've been more interested in doing it than in opining about it.  Art and even what gets called that while being nothing of the sort should never be given a benefit of the doubt that you wouldn't give to a person who got people killed, maimed, terrorized and oppressed.   If every copy of that film had been destroyed by October 1915, the world would likely have been a better place in the intervening century and six years. 

Update:  I should give you the source in which that quote from Rabbi Wise is taken,  "Fighting A Vicious Film".