The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War

In a scene at the end of the Civil War, James Trotter, a sergeant in an all-black union regiment, marched into Charleston, South Carolina just as the Kentucky cavalry that included Colonel “Roaring Jake” Griffith fled for their lives. The two men were bit players in the vicious struggle for their country’s future. Fifty years later their sons, Monroe Trotter and D.W. Griffith engaged in a public confrontation that roiled the entire country, pitching black against white, Hollywood against Boston, free speech against censorship – and the focus of the attack was a film that depicted the events of the American Civil War: The Birth of a Nation.The film – which included actors in black face, racist portraits of blacks and heroic portraits of the Ku Klux Klan, and the depiction of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – was although a silent movie loudly controversial.