page_title: Thomas Dixon Jr.
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Dixon Jr. / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: The front page to Thomas Dixon's The Clansman.
context_page_description: Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. was an American white supremacist, successively a politician, lawyer, Baptist minister, lecturer, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Referred to as a "professional racist", Dixon wrote two best-selling novels, The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden – 1865–1900 and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, that romanticized Southern white supremacy, endorsed the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, opposed equal rights for blacks, and glorified the Ku Klux Klan as heroic vigilantes. Film director D. W. Griffith adapted The Clansman for the screen in The Birth of a Nation, which inspired the creators of the 20th-century rebirth of the Klan.
context_section_description: Dixon was born in Shelby, North Carolina, the son of Thomas Jeremiah Frederick Dixon II and Amanda Elvira McAfee, daughter of a planter and slave-owner from York County, South Carolina. He was one of eight children, of whom five survived to adulthood. His elder brother, preacher Amzi Clarence Dixon, helped to edit The Fundamentals, a series of articles (and later volumes) influential in fundamentalist Christianity. "He won international acclaim as one of the greatest ministers of his day." His younger brother Frank Dixon was also a preacher and lecturer. His sister, Elizabeth Delia Dixon-Carroll, became a pioneer woman physician in North Carolina and was the doctor for many years at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.
  Dixon's father, Thomas J. F. Dixon Sr., son of an English–Scottish father and a German mother, was a well-known Baptist minister, as well as a landowner and slave-owner. His maternal grandfather, Frederick Hambright (possible namesake for the fictional North Carolina town of Hambright in which The Leopard's Spots takes place), was a German Palatine immigrant who fought in both the local militia and in the North Carolina Line of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Dixon Sr. had inherited slaves and property through his first wife's father, slaves worth $100,000 in 1862.
  In his adolescence, Dixon helped out on the family farms, an experience that he hated, but he would later say that it helped him to relate to the plight of the working man. Dixon grew up after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction period. The government confiscation of farmland, coupled with what Dixon saw as the corruption of local politicians, the vengefulness of Union troops, and the general lawlessness, embittered him, and he became staunchly opposed to the reforms of Reconstruction.
caption: Frontispiece to the first edition of Dixon's The Clansman.
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