Assignment 5: D.W. Griffith and Oscar Micheaux

a)       D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation starts with a prologue about how bring Africans to America was the cause of unrest and the Civil War because whites and blacks shouldn't have to live by each other. It is about 2 families who live opposite of each other on the Mason-Dixon line. The sons are friends because they went to boarding school together. The Civil War starts and they fight on each other's respective armies. A couple of them die then reconstruction begins and black people are freed so they and the carpetbaggers cause the South to go into disarray. Then the Ku Klux Klan gets formed and saves the South by not allowing black people to vote and putting them in their place.

b)       Oscar Micheaux's Within our Gates is about a light-skinned black lady Sylvia as she travels to the North to try to get funding for a black school. She gets hit by a rich white woman's car and she decides to donate money to the school. We then get a flashback to Sylvia's history where her adoptive parents get lynched for a murder they didn't commit. Meanwhile, the murder victim's brother goes to try to rape Sylvia but then he finds out that she is his daughter from an affair with a black lady, he's been the one putting her through school.

c)       The Birth of a Nation is effectively a racist propaganda film that posits that the Ku Klux Klan was a good for the South. It is a masterfully made film that argues for evil. On the other hand, Within our Gates is a film that tries to deal with the issues that black people have to deal with now that they are free but then not really equal citizens. It is not as affecting as The Birth of Nation because it didn't have a immensely talented filmmaker like D.W. Griffith behind it. It is essentially a decently made film that argues for equality. The ending of Within our Gates shows that white people being sexually aggressive toward black women was much more prevalent then the opposite that is portrayed in The Birth of a Nation.

d)       The Birth of a Nation actually led to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the film was used as a recruitment tool. People who were ignorant of the history of the Civil War ate the film up and perceived everything in it as true and probably pushed efforts to equalize black people into society even further back as the film portrayed them as not being worthy of the vote.

e)       It made the people who were supportive of the film react extremely to the point that Klan members would dress up and ride in full regalia in New York City. Also, the NAACP's effort weren't that successful but it did raise the profile of the NAACP as a organization who'll fight for black people's equality. Their campaign did successfully persuade film censorship boards to spring up in cities such as Boston and Chicago to ban The Birth of a Nation.