Art for Equality: The NAACP's Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights

By Jenny Woodley

A study of the NAACP’s activism in the cultural realm through creative projects from 1910 to the 1960s.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, having dedicated itself to the fight for racial equality since 1909. While the group helped achieve substantial victories in the courtroom, the struggle for civil rights extended beyond gaining political support. It also required changing social attitudes. The NAACP thus worked to alter existing prejudices through the production of art that countered racist depictions of African Americans, focusing its efforts not only on changing the attitudes of the White middle class but also on encouraging racial pride and a sense of identity in the Black community.

Art for Equality explores an important and little-studied side of the NAACP’s activism in the cultural realm. In openly supporting African American artists, writers, and musicians in their creative endeavors, the organization aimed to change the way the public viewed the Black community. By overcoming stereotypes and the belief of the majority that African Americans were physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to Whites, the NAACP believed it could begin to defeat racism.

Illuminating important protests, from the fight against the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation to the production of anti-lynching art during the Harlem Renaissance, this insightful volume examines the successes and failures of the NAACP’s cultural campaign from 1910 to the 1960s. Exploring the roles of gender and class in shaping the association's patronage of the arts, Art for Equality offers an in-depth analysis of the social and cultural climate during a time of radical change in America.

Praise for Art for Equality

“A well-conceived and well-executed study that will add significantly to the historiography of the NAACP, the long civil rights movement, and African American history.” —John Kirk, George W. Donaghey Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

“In this insightful book, Woodley writes with great verve and confidence. As a result, Art for Equality will attract readers in a variety of fields from African American history to art history to American political history.” —Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University

“A necessary contribution to African American social and cultural histories.” —Journal of Southern History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813145174

Book preview

Art for Equality

ART FOR EQUALITY

The NAACP’s

Cultural Campaign

for Civil Rights

JENNY WOODLEY

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Copyright © 2014 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woodley, Jenny, 1980-

Art for equality : the NAACP’s cultural campaign for civil rights / Jenny Woodley.

pages cm. — (Civil rights and the struggle for Black equality in the twentieth century)

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-4516-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4518-1 (PDF) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4517-4 (ePub)

1. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—History—20th century. 2. Arts—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. 3. Anti-racism—United States—History—20th century. 4. African Americans—Civil rights—United States—History—20th century. 5. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century. 6. African American artists—History—20th century. 7. African Americans in art—History—20th century. 8. African Americans—Intellectual life—20th century. 9. United States—Intellectual life—20th century. 10. United States—Race relations—History—20th century. I. Title.

E185.5.N276W66 2014

323.1196'073--dc23

2014003473

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For Niamh,

who arrived when this book was in its final stages

and who is the most wonderful distraction.

Contents

Introduction: The national mental attitude

1. The Birth of a Cultural Strategy

2. Representing the New Negro

3. Du Bois’s Crisis and the Black Image on the Page

4. A union of art and propaganda

5. White in Hollywood

6. Blacks, Reds, White

Conclusion: The true picture of America

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The national mental attitude

In 1926 W. E. B. Du Bois was addressing an audience in Chicago when he rhetorically asked of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), how is it that an organization of this kind can turn aside to talk about Art? Why was it that an organization more commonly associated with courtroom battles and political lobbying should spend time, money, and effort encouraging, publishing, challenging, protesting, and creating poems, novels, short stories, plays, artwork, exhibitions, and films? The beginnings of an answer can be found in an article written by James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP’s first black executive secretary, in 1928. He set out what had been done to try to solve the Negro problem. The approaches to date had been religious, educational, political, industrial, ethical, economic, sociological. There had been some success, but, he argued, the time had come for a new approach. It was one that requires a minimum of pleas, or propaganda, or philanthropy. It depends more upon what the Negro himself does than upon what someone does for him. Johnson’s idea was the approach along the line of intellectual and artistic achievement by Negroes, and may be called the art approach to the Negro problem. Johnson was writing during the Harlem Renaissance and so believed that there was already evidence of its success. The effect of black artistic achievement for the African American could be seen on his condition and status as a man and citizen. Johnson, reasserting a claim he had made earlier in the decade in his Book of American Negro Poetry, argued that the ‘race problem’ is fast reaching the stage of being more a question of national mental attitudes toward the Negro than a question of his actual condition. It was becoming less a matter of dealing with what he is and more a matter of dealing with what America thinks he is. It was necessary, Johnson argued, to challenge racial stereotypes; in this way, the national mental attitude would be altered, and its consequence—racial inequality—would be defeated. This idea, though sometimes modified, formed the core of the NAACP’s engagement with culture during its first half century.¹

The NAACP launched a number of cultural campaigns between 1910 and the 1960s that included publishing art and literature in its magazine, the Crisis, and becoming involved with the Harlem Renaissance; using the arts to change white attitudes toward lynching; and protesting degrading images in film and television and lobbying for more positive depictions. These were not just random excursions followed on a whim or fancy but were driven by a specific strategy. This strategy was to use representations of African Americans in the arts and popular culture to challenge race prejudice. The NAACP believed that racial inequality was caused by the attitudes of white Americans toward blacks. The association hoped that if it could change those views, then it would open the way for greater civil rights. Prejudices were reflected in and reinforced by stereotypical depictions of African Americans. Therefore, the NAACP believed it needed to challenge these representations, enforce their removal, and replace them with more positive images. This would alter white attitudes about African Americans and deliver a blow to race prejudice. Following this logic, the NAACP hoped that cultural forms could influence opinions about specific issues and be used to bring about political change. Furthermore, the NAACP argued that, in some cases, the very creation of the arts should be celebrated and that black talent would provide proof of the race’s status. Its cultural work, therefore, was directly linked to its legal and legislative efforts. These ideas shaped its attitude toward and involvement with a whole range of cultural media and art forms for half a century.

The way in which the NAACP conceived of the race problem was central to its development of a cultural strategy. It believed that racial inequality was the result of race prejudice. In other words, African Americans suffered political, social, and economic discrimination because of the attitudes of white Americans toward the race. To the NAACP leadership, racism existed as an ideology or doctrine rather than in the structures of society. This reflected discourses about race during this period. As early as the 1850s, Frederick Douglass defined racism as the diseased imagination. George Frederickson traces the historiography of racism and finds that scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century were concerned with the history of ideas rather than with the social and political applications of prejudiced beliefs and attitudes. Indeed, the very term race prejudice suggests an emphasis on thoughts rather than action. Nevertheless, the NAACP did recognize the practical and structural implications, and implementations, of racism. It spent the majority of its time fighting educational inequality, segregation in public facilities and housing, disenfranchisement, and inequality before the law. However, it saw these problems as manifestations of prejudicial beliefs and argued that if these attitudes could be changed, then the practical applications of racism would also end.²

In 1910 W. E. B. Du Bois argued that much of race prejudice is born of ignorance and misapprehension, honest mistake and misguided zeal. The NAACP would, therefore, fight the wrong of race prejudice by doing away with the excuses for prejudice, by showing the unreasonableness of prejudice, and by exposing the evils of prejudice. The NAACP saw racism as something that could be eradicated through exposure, education, and persuasion. It wanted to show whites the true nature and real achievements of African Americans and hoped that this would convince them to treat blacks as equal citizens. The NAACP needed to change the way white America thought about blacks. As Moorfield Storey said, We want to make race prejudice . . . as unfashionable as it is now fashionable. If racism existed in the minds of white America, then public opinion would be a key tool in the NAACP’s battle for civil rights.³

Racism as an ideology did not fully emerge in America until the nineteenth century. It was not until abolitionists began their sustained attack on slavery that whites needed a coherent argument to defend America’s peculiar institution. The process of defining blackness (and therefore whiteness) in the United States began with slavery but accelerated in the post–Civil War era. Race, Grace Elizabeth Hale suggests, became the crucial means of ordering the newly enlarged meaning of America. White supremacy was an ideology that grew in strength as blacks won greater freedoms and threatened whites’ way of life and their sense of identity. Antiblack prejudice varied in degree, but most racist whites shared common ground. The central tenet was that blacks were physically, intellectually, and morally different from whites. Furthermore, they were inherently inferior to whites. The differences between the races either were permanent or would only change very slowly, and therefore an integrated society was virtually impossible.⁴

The ideology of racism was perpetuated and reinforced through American culture and more specifically through the representation of African Americans within that culture. There is a long history of derogatory depictions of blacks in America, which began in the antebellum period but persisted and developed after the Civil War, as racism grew in strength. African Americans were depicted in art and literature, in songs and on sheet music, in cartoons, in advertising, as collectibles and on household goods, on stage and in films. White creators of these depictions followed a prescribed pattern of looks, speech, actions, and traits. Some of the stereotypes had names—Sambo, Mammy, Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, Jim Crow, and Zip Coon—while others were nameless caricatures.⁵ These cultural representations provided a way for whites to work through issues about race and to enforce the ideology of racism. For example, images of contented slaves and loyal ex-slaves, which were so common in early twentieth-century American culture, absolved the South of blame for slavery and the North of any responsibility for America’s blacks. African Americans also appeared in more threatening guises as the black beast, which showed the black man freed from the restraints of slavery and reverting to his natural savagery. Such depictions were used to justify the repressive treatment of African Americans, particularly through mob violence. Cultural products could spread the message of black inferiority to a wide audience. In those areas where there was little contact between the races, cultural representations shaped people’s opinions about blacks. In others, like the South, they not only confirmed existing prejudices but also increased hostility. Deriding and mocking the race helped keep blacks in their place. American culture thus taught both whites and blacks the acceptable boundaries of behavior and interaction.

The NAACP believed that the way in which African Americans were represented culturally affected how they were treated socially and politically. Race prejudice worked by suggesting that African Americans were as dim-witted, docile, or depraved as their cultural image and therefore that white America was correct to treat them as such (never mind that such depictions often contradicted each other): blacks were stupid and so could not be trusted with the franchise; they were lazy, and therefore education would make no difference; they were content with their lives, so philanthropy was misguided; they were immoral and violent, so they must be segregated from white society; and they were licentious and needed to be controlled. The NAACP was convinced that it had to change this perception of African Americans in order to open the door for such advancements as the franchise, desegregated education, and, ultimately, full civil rights. It sought to remove these damaging images from the culture; to encourage the introduction of what it considered positive depictions of African Americans and black life; and to educate Americans about black talent and achievements. It believed that if it could alter the cultural representation of African Americans, then it would be one step closer to eradicating racism.

The NAACP’s cultural strategy worked in a number of ways. It wanted to change the way African Americans were portrayed in a wide range of media, from literature and art to advertisements, songs, and greetings cards. It focused particular attention on images of blacks in visual mass culture: first motion pictures and then television. At times, it was concerned with simply removing the offending images or preventing their distribution, which led it to advocate the controversial and limiting tactic of censorship. At others, the association lobbied for the inclusion of what it considered to be positive images. The NAACP’s cultural strategy also involved the development and promotion of black literary and artistic talent. The association encouraged black authors, poets, painters, playwrights, and other creative individuals. These artists were to be shining examples of what the race could achieve and would prove to whites that African Americans were civilized and therefore deserved equal rights. According to August Meier, the striving for literary and intellectual accomplishment was connected with the idea that it would be the intellectuals who would lead the race into achieving higher culture and civilization. Du Bois had predicted that the intellectual, educated, and professional blacks, what he called the Talented Tenth, would save the race. Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? he asked. Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.⁶

The emphasis on cultural attainment began with the formation of the NAACP’s official magazine, the Crisis, in 1910 and led to the association’s involvement in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The NAACP also used the arts to change public opinion on specific issues, most notably lynching. It hoped to turn public apathy and approval of mob violence into condemnation by exposing the true nature of lynching. Furthermore, it wanted to challenge the white story of lynching—the way lynching was remembered and explained—and the arts allowed African Americans to create an alternative to the dominant white narrative. This reflects its broader desire to challenge America’s historical memory, an issue that took on great significance when it came to the Civil War and Reconstruction. The NAACP’s objection to such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915) was based, in part, on its depiction of this important period of American, and black, history. The final element of the NAACP’s cultural strategy focused not on white attitudes, but on those of African Americans. The creation of black culture and the projection of positive black images were intended to raise black pride and to forge a sense of collective African American identity. This self-esteem and collectivism were crucial in the struggle for civil rights. These different strands can be seen weaving their way throughout all the NAACP’s cultural campaigns during its first fifty years. Underpinning them all was the principle that the arts and popular culture could be used to shape opinions about African Americans.

For many years the NAACP had a reputation for being controlled by whites and for being assimilationist, middle class, and conservative. Some of these charges, such as the first, have been challenged by historians; others remain.⁷ This study is not an attempt to either defend or criticize the NAACP, but rather to try to understand its approach. It asks why the association followed the tactic of a cultural strategy, what it hoped to achieve, and how it responded to and used different forms of culture. I examine what these campaigns reveal about the NAACP as an organization and how it approached questions of assimilation, cultural pluralism, class bias, cultural elitism, censorship, and propaganda. Furthermore, consideration is given to the impact of this work on the organization. I evaluate whether adopting a cultural agenda was an overly cautious approach to the civil rights struggle or a necessarily pragmatic tactic, given the racial situation in which the NAACP operated. In so doing, I place the cultural campaigns within their historical context and alongside the association’s other work.

The NAACP’s approach to fighting racial inequality reflected its origins and the ideologies of its founding members. The association’s immediate beginnings lay in the horrified reaction of liberal whites to the violence meted out against African Americans. On August 14, 1908, in Springfield, Illinois, the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, a race riot broke out during which six African Americans were shot, two were lynched, over fifty were wounded, and thousands fled from their homes. The following month, William English Walling, a wealthy southerner, reformer, and socialist, published a scathing report on events in the Independent. Race War in the North warned of dire consequences if America let such violence pass without action. Summoning the spirit of abolitionism, Walling called for action to assist America’s black populace, asking, what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to their aid? Mary White Ovington, a settlement house worker already interested in the plight of African Americans, responded to Walling’s call. Along with the journalist Charles Edward Russell and Dr. Henry Moskowitz, a social worker, they vowed to form such a body. Their first meeting was held at Walling’s New York apartment in January 1909. The group soon expanded to include, among others, Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley, who were both leading settlement house workers; and two black ministers, Bishop Alexander Walters and Reverend William Brooks. They issued a call for a conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.⁸

The National Negro Conference was held in New York on May 31 and June 1, 1909, and was attended by three hundred men and women of both races. During the keynote speech William Hayes Ward, editor of the Independent, declared that the purpose of the new organization was to re-emphasize in word, and so far as possible, in act, the principle that equal justice should be done to man as man, and particularly to the Negro, without regard to race, color or previous condition of servitude. The delegates called for a campaign to educate America about the achievements of the race, for a legal bureau, and for a political and civil rights bureau to secure the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. A Committee of Forty to establish a permanent organization was chosen, and the group passed a series of resolutions demanding equal civil and educational rights; the right to work; and protection against violence, murder, and intimidation. The organization’s second annual conference was held a year later, again in New York. After some wrangling the organization adopted its new name, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed.⁹

In its earliest years the NAACP’s leadership positions were dominated by whites. To begin with, the association could not afford to pay most of its leaders and therefore relied on the pro bono services of wealthy whites.¹⁰ Moorfield Storey, a Boston lawyer, was the first president, and Walling became chairman of the Board of Directors. Joel E. Spingarn, a wealthy professor of literature, held both these positions in the following decades. His brother, Arthur Spingarn, was responsible for much of the NAACP’s early legal work. Ovington held a number of positions during the many years of her involvement, including secretary and chair. Another woman, May Childs Nerney, was executive secretary from 1912 until 1916. Villard was chairman and treasurer. Initially the exception to this white dominance was W. E. B. Du Bois, who was appointed director of publicity and research. He was the only African American in a salaried position until James Weldon Johnson first became field secretary and then replaced John Shillady as executive secretary in 1920. By the time Johnson was replaced by Walter White in 1931, blacks had taken control of much of the day-to-day running of the association. Jessie Fauset was Du Bois’s assistant editor, and Robert Bagnall, who became director of branches, and William Pickens, field secretary, did a good deal to increase the NAACP’s presence in black communities throughout the country. The Board of Directors was almost evenly split along race lines. Perhaps most significantly, by 1919 it was estimated that nine-tenths of the NAACP’s members were black.¹¹

W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White had very different personalities and contrasting ideas and methods. Nevertheless, their strengths meshed together so as to diminish each individual’s weaknesses. Johnson, in particular, was a steadying influence between the clashing egos of Du Bois and White.¹² These three men developed and instigated much of the NAACP’s work during its first forty years, and they were especially influential when it came to its cultural work. Indeed, the association’s cultural campaigns were shaped by the ideas, preferences, and talents of these leaders. It is significant that, even during the early years of white domination, the association’s black personnel led this work. Du Bois and his literary editor, Jessie Fauset, set the cultural agenda for the Crisis, and Johnson and White were heavily involved with the Harlem Renaissance. White also spearheaded the association’s work in Hollywood. The exception to this rule was the fight against The Birth of a Nation, which was led in the national office by white secretary May Child Nerney. However, this protest also provides another exception, in that much of the initial impetus came from African Americans in the local branches, and much of the work was done by these city and state chapters. Most of the other cultural projects were initiated and implemented by national staff members, and there were very few national campaigns that required assistance from local branches. It is important to note that there was not just one cultural strategy. The NAACP’s approach to culture changed over time and across different forms. There were disagreements and debates between leaders, between branches and the national office, and between salaried officers and members.

Historians have examined many areas of the NAACP’s work, from its fight against lynching and segregation, to its battles in court and lobbying of Congress, to the struggle for black enfranchisement. Much of this research has focused on the association’s legal and legislative campaigns and often on the national organization. While there has been some broadening in this historiographical approach in recent years, there have been no full-length studies that focus solely on the NAACP’s cultural work. A number of studies do explore specific aspects of the NAACP’s cultural work, and these are discussed in subsequent chapters. Many of these scholars recognize that the NAACP was involved in cultural activities during the first half of the century, but no previous attempt has been made to place this aspect of its work at the center of the research, nor do any of the existing studies compare the association’s treatment of different cultural forms. Research into the NAACP, an organization that was founded in the first decade of the twentieth century, provides evidence for a long civil rights movement, a now widely accepted recognition that the movement was not confined to the classical phase between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This study fits within that historiography by focusing predominantly on the period before 1955 and by demonstrating how the seeds for its relationship with culture were sewn in the early years of the NAACP.¹³

Scholars have done much important work on the intersections between civil rights and culture. This has included studies of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. While I focus on a different era and consider different participants, I share with these scholars an interest in considering the political aspects of culture in order to more fully understand the black activism of our respective periods. Two of the most useful monographs on an earlier era are Barbara Savage’s study of African Americans and radio during the Second World War and Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff’s examination of black culture and the New Deal. Both Savage and Sklaroff use an approach similar to that adopted in this study: they show how African Americans thought about culture and how they attempted to use it, and they consider how this cultural production needs to be understood in its historical context and the ways it was shaped by outside forces. Finally, and perhaps most important, Savage and Sklaroff demonstrate that the way the NAACP conceived of culture and its relationship to civil rights was shared by others. Sklaroff argues that while African Americans realized positive racial images or black cultural production were not a substitute for political and economic rights, they nonetheless understood culture as central in procuring civil rights. Savage explains black efforts to engage with radio in a similar manner. She also reminds us of why it is important to study culture. It is, she warns, too easy to dismiss protests about representations or efforts to increase black control simply as efforts to find ways of presenting idealized positive racial imagery. In fact, attempts to alter representations in the mass media and popular culture can reveal a keen and sophisticated appreciation of the relationship between popular images, political symbolism, public opinion and public policy. It is a similar appreciation by the NAACP, albeit one that was sometimes flawed or problematic, that I examine in the following chapters.¹⁴

This study of the NAACP’s cultural campaigns begins with the association’s fight against The Birth of a Nation, a struggle that established many of the key principles of its cultural strategy. Chapters 2 and 3 consider how, between 1910 and 1934, the NAACP used African American art and literature to advance the race. Chapter 2 examines its involvement with the Harlem Renaissance and attempts to establish the NAACP’s model of African American culture. Chapter 3 looks at the association’s magazine, the Crisis. During the twenty-four years of his editorship, Du Bois used African Americans’ creative work to challenge stereotypes, encourage racial pride, and forge a sense of black collective identity. In Chapter 4, I evaluate the NAACP’s strategy of using the arts to change opinions about a specific example of racial discrimination: lynching. The deployment of plays, poems, and paintings with an overt political message in the antilynching fight provides one of the clearest examples of the NAACP’s fusing of art and propaganda. Chapter 5 assesses Walter White’s attempts to change the portrayal of blacks in motion pictures during the Second World War. The final chapter investigates the NAACP’s cultural strategy between 1945 and 1955. It considers the signs of improvement in movies at the same time that a new medium—television—forced the association to resort to former tactics. In the conclusion I examine the continuation and modification of the NAACP’s cultural strategy from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s. Stretching the project over half a century allows a comparison among different contexts, attitudes, and media. In so doing, I hope to answer the question that Du Bois put before his audience in Chicago in 1926.

1

The Birth of a Cultural Strategy

This book begins, perhaps inevitably given the nature and scale of the struggle, with the NAACP’s fight against The Birth of a Nation. The campaign against D. W. Griffith’s film remains the best-known and most widely discussed of all the examples of the NAACP’s attempts to challenge offensive depictions of the race in popular culture. It marks the first time the association spent considerable effort on such a cause. The campaign tells us much about the NAACP’s attitude toward culture as it established paradigms central to the ways in which the organization would try to influence the depiction of African Americans. The NAACP’s response to stereotyped representations of blacks, the tactics it used to challenge the film, and the issues it encountered in this campaign would all be repeated during the NAACP’s first half century.

As a film that made cinematic history, The Birth of a Nation has received much scholarly attention. The most complete account of the film, its reception, and the NAACP’s campaign against it is by Melvyn Stokes. While Stokes’s focus is broader than just the NAACP, he considers the reasons for the protests, arguing that the association understood the dangerous power of film and thus saw Birth as a racist attack on African Americans. Stokes also explores the effects of the struggle on the organization and, by taking a long view, finds them to be, on balance, largely positive. Stephen Weinberger also reflects on the ways in which the campaign helped to shape the NAACP and concludes that, despite its limitations, the fight elevated the association to a position of national stature and indeed preeminence in the struggle for civil rights in America. Significantly, the organization had to change its methods when dealing with Birth: it couldn’t use the courts and instead was forced to turn to censorship. Weinberger also argues that, for better or worse, the association felt it had no choice but to respond to the movie. While the campaign was reactive rather than proactive, the NAACP did in fact have a choice about whether to respond; it made a conscious decision to launch a full-scale attack, and that decision reflected, in part, its approach to cultural representations of African Americans. This chapter, then, aims to build on the existing scholarship by placing the NAACP and its ideas about culture at the center of the discussion. It considers why most in the NAACP were so vehemently opposed to the film, what the resulting struggle tells us about its beliefs about culture and about the NAACP as an organization, and how this fitted within the context of the wider struggle for civil rights.¹

D. W. Griffith’s film ran across twelve reels and lasted three hours. It remains one of the most popular, profitable, and certainly most controversial motion pictures of all time.² It was largely based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905), which had previously appeared as a stage play. It is a historical epic, told through the lives of the northern Stoneman and southern Cameron families. It incorporates plantation nostalgia and the reconciliatory narrative of the Civil War as a conflict in which North and South fought with a shared heroism and pain. The film paints Reconstruction as a time when blacks ran wild and only the formation of the Ku Klux Klan could restore order. The NAACP was extremely worried about the effect the portrayal of the race in Birth would have on white people’s attitude toward African Americans. It believed negative images of the race confirmed and reinforced white people’s negative perceptions. The images in The Birth of a Nation went beyond negative: they reinforced every prejudice white America held against blacks. Du