The Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights

At the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, Monroe Trotter, a journalist agitator, and D.W. Griffith, a technically brilliant filmmaker, incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against the fight for equality.

Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation, included actors in b...