On September 21, 1915, shortly before 10 p.m., a brick crashed through the glass window above the entrance of Philadelphia's Forrest Theatre. Instantly, the streets erupted into a “bloody scene” of the “wildest disorder.” Police charged with batons and revolvers. The crowd, which consisted mostly of black demonstrators, scattered. A few dashed for the building's main entrance. Hundreds more fled up Broad and Walnut Streets, the police at their heels. “Those who could not run fast enough to dodge clubs received them upon their heads.”Footnote ¹ Two protesters threw milk bottles at the patrolmen pursing them. At the corner of Walnut and Broad, someone hurled a brick at Officer Wallace Striker. On Juniper Street, either a rioter or a police officer fired shots into the air. By night's end, more than a score were injured, several arrested, and the theater defaced. Nineteen-year old Arthur Lunn, a farmer from Worcester County, Maryland, was charged with inciting the riot. Dr. Wesley F. Graham, pastor of Trinity Baptist, sustained “severe injuries.” Lillian Howard, a caterer; William A. Sinclair, the financial secretary of Douglass Hospital; and a thirty-three-year-old laborer named Lee Banks received severe lacerations.Footnote ²

The clash between Philadelphia's police officers and the local black population—“young and old,” poor and relatively wealthy—occurred during the protests against D. W. Griffith's photoplay, The Birth of a Nation.Footnote ³ Black Americans had already organized demonstrations against the film in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. Soon after, tens of thousands of black protesters, including those in Philadelphia, joined the broad-based, concerted battle against the film. The campaigns engaged hundreds of organizations, and unfolded in more than sixty cities in the United States, the Canal Zone, Hawaii, and Canada. By the end of World War I, the fight against The Birth of a Nation had transformed into the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴

Why do the protests against The Birth of a Nation matter? Since Thomas Cripps's groundbreaking study Slow Fade to Black, scholars have described the campaigns against the film as a vivid example of black agency and resistance during the nadir of race relations. Historians have acknowledged that the protests helped activists gain experience and build institutions, but have wondered if the efforts were ultimately counterproductive—providing free publicity for Griffith's film, and drawing resources away from other causes and from black film production.Footnote ⁵ Interpretations of the success of the campaigns are based on several assumptions: that they were primarily legal battles, solely interested in film censorship, and spearheaded by middle-class organizations such as the NAACP (which is given the lion's share of credit for organizing protests). Curiously little attention is paid to people on the ground. Yet it was their demands and desires, and their long engagement with the motion pictures that made the mass movement possible.

A broad swath of black Americans campaigned against The Birth of a Nation because the movement encompassed many of their most urgent material, cultural, and political concerns. Black communities had early and substantial engagements with the moving pictures. Nearly two decades before the debut of Griffith's film, black Americans had forged their own cinema. Individuals' interactions with the motion pictures varied, but as a whole, black Americans had invested in the medium as an industry, a communication tool, and a form of leisure. This history fueled the campaigns against The Birth of a Nation, but as protesters interacted with each other—and the white supremacists that defended the film—the mass movement took on new dimensions. In cities such as Philadelphia and Boston, the local campaigns came to emphasize police brutality and the role of law enforcement in the protection of private property. Today, on the centennial of The Birth of a Nation, the protest movement offers important insights into our historical present.

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“The officers that had me by the throat were choking me in such a manner that I couldn't remember anything,” Reverend Aaron Puller testified in a Boston court shortly after his arrest on April 17, 1915.Footnote ⁶ As in Philadelphia, violent encounters between black protesters and police officers marked the Boston campaign against The Birth of a Nation. On the day in question, Puller arrived at the Tremont Theater shortly before a scuffle broke out between a police officer and several protesters. Puller interceded; as he wrote down the badge number of the officer involved in the incident, a plainclothes policeman knocked the minister to the ground. In the chaos, Puller recalled Sergeant King shouting, “lock that nigger up.” Two officers grabbed Puller by the throat, and another, by the back of the neck. Puller gasped for air. The officers dragged him for at least fifteen city blocks as he faded in and out of consciousness. Back at the theater, the chaos continued as plainclothes officer Dennis Harrington punched William Monroe Trotter in the jaw.Footnote ⁷

Such interactions brought concerns about police violence to the forefront of local campaigns against Griffith's film. In Boston, black witnesses testified that police had discriminated against black patrons and used excessive force during the demonstration at the Tremont. Besides black leaders such as Puller and Trotter, working-class protesters clashed with police. Clara Foskey, a thirty-year-old black Canadian married to a railroad porter, was charged with assaulting an officer. On the same night as Puller's arrest, Patrolman Van Lanningham had ordered her to move away from the theater. When Foskey refused, Lanningham attempted to “force her to go along”—probably by pushing her or by stepping on her feet.Footnote ⁸ As she was placed under arrest, three other black protesters ran to her rescue: Stephen Massey, a driver; James T. Bivens, a railroad porter; and a woman named Lugenia Foster were charged with attempting to rescue a prisoner. Black newspapers brought these confrontations to national attention. The Chicago Defender reported that during the Philadelphia riot, police officers kicked black women, and “Men were mobbed and beaten with police clubs because they believe in truth and liberty and the respectability of their wives and mothers.”Footnote ⁹

It was no coincidence that these protests occurred at the cinema. By 1915, black institutions, industries, and cultural practices were entwined with the motion pictures. Cinema in the early twentieth century was ubiquitous. Even those black urban dwellers who avoided the theater were confronted daily with its presence: churches hosted film exhibitions as fundraisers, black newspapers published film reviews, and motion picture houses lined the streets that black urbanites walked on their way to work or school. While white American film producers constructed their own cinema, which by World War I was had grown into a powerful transnational industry, black Americans produced and exhibited their own films, which was an essential aspect of black urban leisure in the Jim Crow city.Footnote ¹⁰

Deeply invested in the moving pictures, black protesters mobilized against The Birth of a Nation. They cited the film's libelous representations of the race, its ability to incite violence, its showings in racially discriminatory theaters, and the undue political power of its white producers. Criticisms of the film pointed to the growth of the Hollywood film industry. As one correspondent for a black newspaper reported, the “moving picture trust, gorged in wealth it has filched from the people through their patronage of its efforts” had become “strong enough and powerful enough to entrench itself behind special legal barriers.”Footnote ¹¹ In the Montgomery, Alabama, protests, W. H. Watkins of the Montgomery Business Men's League for Negroes linked Griffith's film to lynchings in Alabama and Georgia.Footnote ¹² Working-class black protesters frequently targeted discriminatory public accommodations. In Cleveland, protesters, including “a number of city employe[e]s and saloon loafers,” threw stones at a Jim Crow streetcar after police blocked their demonstration in front of the local opera house.Footnote ¹³ In other cases, the battle against The Birth of a Nation was more surreptitious. Bennie Johnson, a former janitor of the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa, for example, was arrested for breaking into the theater's operating room, stealing the several reels of The Birth of a Nation, and throwing them into the incinerator.Footnote ¹⁴

On April 26, 1915, more than a thousand black protesters in Boston adopted a resolution that that linked the objectionable film to police brutality and discrimination. The resolution criticized local police who had behaved as agents of the theater managers: “To act as ticket sellers or ticket takers for a theater is not the proper function of a policeman who[se] salaries are paid by public taxation.” Referencing the actions that led to the arrest of several of the protesters, another clause stated, “For a policeman to stop a citizen in the entrance lobby of a theater is illegal and for a policeman to demand to see and scrutinize the theater ticket and to check a citizen at the door is a violation of personal liberty.”Footnote ¹⁵ The final declaration read:

Issues such as police brutality had became inseparable from the protesters’ campaign against The Birth of a Nation.

The protests against Griffith's film reveal how cinema—as a place, a medium, and a set of practices—overlapped with the experiences of black people in the early twentieth century. For the black men and women who protested the film, The Birth of a Nation was more than a projected image. It was part of a fast-growing industry, exhibited for the most part in segregated theaters, protected by the police, and promoted by white supremacists. Within the campaigns, therefore, were critiques ranging from police harassment and brutality to theater discrimination, economic privilege, state-sanctioned violence, and demands for the right to access public space and leisure venues.Footnote ¹⁷

Recent centennial reflections on The Birth of a Nation have cast the film as a powerful symbol of the past, and as evidence of a shameful history of racism that American society has overcome. Yet if we consider the goals, demands, and desires of the men and women who fought against the photoplay, a different lesson comes into view. In light of ongoing anti-black police violence, the continued exclusion of black Americans from public spaces, and the systemic valuation of private property over black lives, the history of The Birth of a Nation has as much to tell us about our present as it does our past.