A propagandistic film made millions feel redeemed in lynchings and segregation

Evidence

“It is like writing history with lightning,” Wilson reportedly said after the film. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Millions of White northerners and southerners packed movie houses beginning on February 8, 1915, to watch the widely believed truth of the Reconstruction era. By January 1916, more than 3 million people had viewed the film in New York alone. It was the nation’s highest-grossing film for two decades, and it enabled millions of Americans to feel redeemed in their lynchings and segregation policies. The film revitalized the Ku Klux Klan, drawing millions of Americans by the 1920s into the club that terrorized Jews, immigrants, socialists, Catholics, and Blacks. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 803

Categorization

• XREF: The film’s power to make audiences ‘feel redeemed’ in existing policy is a textbook case of Kendi’s reversal: the segregation policies already existed, and the film’s racist ideas were consumed to justify them — testable against the stated reading purpose.