so here it is

Rating: 1/10 (2 August 2011)

D.W. Griffth's 1915 epic "The Birth of a Nation" is probably the one movie that everyone should see at some point, just to understand the American mentality of the era. As far as I could tell, the movie professed to be an indictment of war. Of course, as is well known, it came out as an exaltation of the Ku Klux Klan, and possibly the most racist major movie of all time.
What one has to realize is that the era in which the movie got released was the nadir of race relations in the US. Indeed, then-Pres. Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist to the core (among other terrible things). "TBoaN" was based on "The Clansman", written by Thomas Dixon, one of Wilson's college buddies. As I read in "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong", Dixon's obsession with race was "...unrivaled until 'Mein Kampf'". The movie's release is one of the factors that spurred a resurgence of the KKK, and the period 1917-1921 saw more anti-black violence than any other time since Reconstruction.
So, we can debate the movie's merits, or we can understand what the mentality of the era was. Like I said, everyone should see "The Birth of a Nation".