Fixing The Birth of a Nation?: Hampton Institute and The New Era

Abstract

The New Era was Hampton’s answer to the nefarious representation of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation. Believing in the persuasive evidence inherent in their films of African American uplift, the institute provided footage taken from one of their fundraising campaign films, Making Negro Lives Count, to append to Griffith’s epic. Contemporary and subsequent criticism has generally described this association as a straightforward mistake, yet Hampton was responding to complex sets of problems and demands. For Black leaders across the political spectrum—from Washington to W. E. B. Du Bois to William Monroe Trotter—the popularity of The Birth of a Nation demanded a response, which ranged from letters to legislators, newspapers, and Black leaders through rotten eggs thrown at the screen to full-blown riots. The struggle over censorship of The Birth of a Nation has been well documented and marks a significant moment in the history of institutions such as the NAACP. As Thomas Cripps has shown, responses to the film by Tuskegee representatives, the NAACP, and the Black press were overwhelming, but they also presented African American leaders with a dilemma.

This essay is excerpted and adapted from Chapter 4 of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). See the complete chapter for a fuller discussion of the African American responses to The Birth of a Nation.