D. W. Griffith transformed Dixon’s novels into that cinematic masterpiece of racist propaganda The Birth of a Nation (1915), first seen at the White House and praised enthusiastically by President Woodrow Wilson. Whites, especially in the South, loved Birth and regarded seeing it as a “religious experience.” It “rendered lynching an efficient and honorable act of justice” and served to help reunite the North and South as a white Christian nation, at the expense of African Americans. After seeing Birth, one white man in Kentucky left the theater so excited that he shot and killed a
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