Griffith's greatest fear

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2003)

SPOILERS BELOW
D.W. Griffith makes sure his landmark film contains every African-American stereotype invented, but he focuses most strongly on blacks' purported lust for white people. It seems that Griffith perceives miscegenation as white folk's greatest threat. In perhaps the most famous scene in `The Birth Of A Nation', Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) jumps off a cliff to her death rather than endure rape by a black man. Griffith presents her fall as a noble decision; the white woman's virtue, her purity, must be maintained at all costs. Griffith paints Negroes with all sorts of negative qualities, but his two most unlikable characters, importantly, are offspring of sex between the races. Congressman Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) is smitten with a mulatto maid who clings to him hungrily. Their relationship is meant to symbolize the perversity of the North's Reconstruction policies. Stoneman's trusted protégée, meanwhile, is also of mixed heritage. Silas Lynch (played in blackface by George Siegmann) is a power-hungry backstabber who fantasizes about becoming a black emperor of the South. Griffith's narrative renders Lynch most frightening, however, when the political upstart attempts to force Stoneman's daughter (Lillian Gish) into marriage; such behavior is treated as the apex of Lynch's ability to emasculate white men. It is no accident that the Ku Klux Klan and other racists so frequently proclaimed their desire to keep pure the Aryan race. They saw the threat to their political and social power foremost as a rabid sexual ambush.
Rating: 6