Judge it according to its time, not ours

Rating: 10/10 (14 July 2004)

This film is sometimes denounced as racist, and it appears to be when judged by a time following the race riots and black civil rights movement.
The black citizens are often shown as illiterate and ignorant. They were, not because of any failing of theirs, but because of laws forbidding their education. The carpetbaggers came to take unfair advantage of a beaten people and a large uneducated population. Their activities caused a great deal of backlash, much of which was unfairly directed at the former slaves. That backlash happened at the time, it was not invented by Griffith. The Klan is shown not as the gang of thugs and bigots most people consider it now, but as an army saving the people from the carpetbaggers. This also must be judged both by the situation at the time, and with the realization that there were real wrongs to be righted (the carpetbaggers again).
Now that a DVD with essentially the whole movie is available, watch it again, trying to put yourself in the place of someone who has heard stories of the civil war (the Southern viewpoint) and reconstruction all your life, and who probably had a father or uncle(s) who fought for the Confederacy. It looks a lot different that way.