‘Birth’ perspective

Re “The Worth of ‘A Nation’ ” [Sept. 19]: Many people, whites included, considered the sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan in “Birth of a Nation,” and by implication the Confederacy, to be treasonous. However, President Woodrow Wilson was a college friend of Thomas Dixon, whose book, “The Clansman,” was the basis of the film. He arranged a private screening at the White House and gave it his thumbs-up seal of approval as a patriotic film. When the film premiered in Atlanta, a cross was burned on Stone Mountain in Georgia for the first time in 40 years. The Ku Klux Klan was reborn as a mass organization, and its members marched, in robes and open-faced hoods, down the streets of Washington.

The Klan named governors and U.S. senators and held dominant positions within different geographic sectors of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Klan members were deputized to track down draft dodgers and fight rum runners during Prohibition, and entered the ranks of law enforcement, particularly in the South.

“Birth of a Nation” is far more than a scandalously effective piece of racist “art.” It is a concrete piece of racist propaganda that helped shape the entire subsequent history of the country for ill. Any presentation of the film that fails to provide this essential context perpetuates the deadly racist impact of the film still further, and perpetrates a crime against humanity.

I condemn The Times for screening the film and printing the pro-Klan imagery without elaborating on this history.

Shame on you.

Michael Novick

Culver City

Michael Novick is a member of Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles.

*

The lesson of your enlightening panel discussion of “Birth of a Nation” is that you may be taking your life in your hands if the wrong person sees you pick up a copy at the video store, and you should do it anyway.

Andrew Block

Oakland