Essay on the Movie Birth of a Nation

Thesis statement

This movie supported racial segregation, disenfranchisement and brutal murder. The film is most remembered for its racist description of the time in American history following the Civil War known as Reconstruction.

Introduction

The Birth of a Nation was re-released in 1924, 1931, and 1938, so it stayed in the minds of movie lovers and human privileges activists for decades. The racism that African Americans experienced in both the South and the North throughout the war years could be glimpsed in numerous arenas of American life, encompassing the movies. It is not astonishing, possibly, that The Birth of a Nation was both one of the breakthroughs in the annals of American movies and a breakthrough in American racism (Franklin, 15).

Description

The Birth of a Nation recounts the annals of the Civil War and reconstruction through the eyes and knowledge of Southern whites who vehemently are against the political and social advancement made by freshly freed African Americans after the Civil War. It in an open way depicts southern blacks as vicious and lascivious, their northern white allies as cunning, unscrupulous, and conceited, and the film's southern whites as pain repeated political and sexual indignities at the hands of white northerners and very dark southerners. The movie has a racist, white supremacist message (Franklin, 15).

The Civil War saw Americans take arms against each other over issues for instance slavery and government against state power that had lived since the beginning of the United States. The time span after the conflict, renowned as Reconstruction, was just as tense and controversial. After the South lost the conflict, both to the north and south whites, and African-Americans, laboured to reconstruct the district and the nation. The film's renunciation of political and communal equality is a renunciation of the U.S. Constitution, America's ...