Transcript: The Birth of a Nation

Narrator: In 1915, the Clansman was made into a motion picture Birth of A Nation, The NAACP launched a major campaign to ban it. Violence erupted in many cities where the film played. In Lafayette Indiana, a white man killed a black teenager after seeing the movie. Elsewhere gangs of whites attacked blacks on the streets. And the Ku Klux Klan was reborn.

Thomas Cripps: The one thing about the Birth of a Nation and its link to Ku Klux Klan recruiting is not so much the numerical quantity of it, but rather that ideologically it gave Northerners some form of rhetoric that helped them understand the racism they were already believing anyway.