The Mistake the Berkeley Protesters Made about Milo Yiannopoulos

Last week, PBS broadcast “Birth of a Movement,” a film about the battle between William Monroe Trotter, a firebrand African-American publisher born a few years after the end of the Civil War, and D. W. Griffith, the filmmaker responsible for the racist classic “Birth of a Nation.” Trotter, a contemporary of W. E. B. Du Bois, was a Boston native and graduate of Harvard University, and an uncompromising advocate for racial equality, if a bit of a loose cannon. Trotter’s contempt for the accommodationist response to Southern racism championed by, among others, Booker T. Washington culminated in his incitement of a riot when Washington attempted to give an address in Boston. The pivotal conflict of his career, however, was his attempt to prevent Griffith’s ode to the Ku Klux Klan from being shown in the city. “Birth of a Nation” was not simply the first blockbuster in American cinematic history; its racialist propaganda inspired a rebirth of the K.K.K., which had all but died out prior to the film’s release. It was screened in the White House, reportedly to accolades from Woodrow Wilson himself. Trotter found himself caught between the First Amendment ideals that allowed him to publish his newspaper, the Guardian, and fighting against the distribution of Griffith’s film and, by extension, the racial terrorism that it facilitated. He chose the latter approach, appealing unsuccessfully to Boston’s political leadership to have the film banned as obscene. Griffith found the protests against his film to be a form of intolerance.

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