The Birth of a Movement Quotes

“That’s the complete legacy of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—a masterpiece that, due to its bigoted slant, became a dramatic flash point in 1915 for a changing America in mass media and marketing, civil rights, and civil liberties.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“He was no anarchist—rather, a civil rights agitator who promoted direct action to confront racism and demand that a democracy live up to its promise.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“censure. It was as if the filmmaker had expected everyone in the invited audience to fall under the spell of his technical magic, no matter their predisposition. But not J. Mott Hallowell, whose father had commanded one of the all-Negro regiments in the Civil War from Boston, the 54th.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“For opponents, it was sheer anti-Negro propaganda, tantamount to a miscarriage of justice that Griffith had prosecuted in the court of public opinion.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“I told him that I had a Motion Picture he should see, not because it was the greatest ever produced or because his classmate had written the story and a Southern director had made the Film, but because this picture made clear for the first time that a new, universal language had been invented.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“race. “Woodrow Wilson was in essence a white supremacist,” a Wilson biographer wrote, “holding a romantic view of the courtesy and graciousness of the ante-bellum southern plantation owners, as well as uncritically the post-Reconstruction South that arranged to keep black Americans in their place.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“enabled him to catch a career break with collateral benefits unforeseen to him at the time: to experience firsthand—as an actor and as a scenarist—how classical works and historical dramas were compressed from their original length into the compact playlets that were the staple of vaudeville.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“You will find it easier to enter a college in Boston than to enter a shoe factory or counting room,” Washington had told the audience that remained following the melee. “In other words, it is easier to secure an education in the north than to find”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“Trotter’s turn to radicalism,” one historian later wrote, “reflected the collision of his optimistic expectations for his future with the realities of his racial position in the nation.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

“Kentucky’s sensibilities had turned so ardently antebellum that “it was often remarked that she waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union.”
― Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War