simultaneously one of the most significant movies and probably the most racist one ever

Rating: 1/10 (13 September 2019)

As James Loewen put it in "Lies My Teacher Told Me", "The Birth of a Nation" is probably the most racist major movie of all time. It partly holds historical significance due to having been Hollywood's first epic, but it's hard to look beyond the hagiography while watching it. No surprise that the Klan rose to prominence for the second time following the release, and ended up dominating the state governments of many southern states, as well as Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon, with African-Americans getting lynched as far north as Duluth, Minnesota.
I guess that we simply have to understand the historical context.