KKK Film Ripped in Richmond, Va., Black Newspaper Led the Charge

KKK Film Ripped in Richmond, Va., Black Newspaper Led the Charge

By Jeremy M. Lazarus

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TEWire) - It’s “offensive and inflammatory.” It is “a lie” about Black people. It’s much like the recent re-enactment of the white-supremacist Secession Ball in South Carolina. It frustrates racial healing.

For these stated reasons, Richmond doesn’t need it. Therefore, don’t show it. That’s the message that the White-majority City Council sent this week to the Civil War museum that has been seeking to prominently screen the notorious KKK recruitment film “Birth of a Nation,” which demonizes Black people.

Jolted by a front-page story in last week’s edition of the Free Press, the council approved a tart resolution “to strongly discourage” the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar from sponsoring a public showing of the 1915 silent film based on the novel, “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.” The film is infamous for glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and justifying lynching and other terrorist tactics to repress black political aspirations.

Chris A. Hilbert, 3rd District, led the council charge to condemn the center’s plans to show the film. He introduced the resolution that council put on the fast track and passed by a 7-1 vote, with one abstention.

Praising the Free Press for “bringing this issue to the forefront,”  Hilbert told his colleagues that the newspaper motivated him to go online and view clips of the movie.

“It is absolutely unbelievable that this was put out as some version of history,” he said, labeling the film “a lie.”

“You hear music being played that you think the hero is coming in and it’s the Klan coming in,” he said.

Urging passage, he reminded the council that Richmond is still trying to heal from its past as the one-time “center of the slave trade in North America” and as the former capital city “of the breakaway states” that undertook “armed insurrection” against the Union. “This movie has no place in that healing process.”

The Free Press reported on the center’s failed efforts to show the film in a story headlined, “KKK film still alive.” The story noted that the center had “canceled” its latest attempt to revive the film at the Byrd Theater for lack of funding, but was still defending its efforts and would seek to show it if it could find funding. The center, in its literature, places the losing, pro-slavery Confederates on the same plane as the winning Union and Black soldiers who played a large role in winning the Civil War.

Bruce W. Tyler, 1st District, was the lone opponent on free speech grounds. “There is nothing in this film that I want to see or have shown. It goes against everything I believe in and stand for,” he said, “and it is unfortunate that this film was ever produced.

“But I don’t think it is our right or place to censor freedom of speech even when I disagree with what is being said,” he said.

Charles R. Samuels, 2nd District, abstained after telling council that “I can’t vote for something that condemns freedom of speech.”

But Cynthia I. Newbille, 7th District, who became a co-patron, said the resolution “in no way abridges (free speech) in what is being asked in this paper. It strongly discourages the presentation or sponsoring or screening the movie.”

Council Vice President Ellen F. Robertson, describing the contents of the movie as “offensive and inflammatory,” called it the right of City Council to “have a voice and a very proactive voice at it relates to our support and endorsement” of this kind of material.

Adding her thanks to the Free Press “for bringing this to our attention,” the 6th District councilwoman added herself as a copatron of the resolution. “I am extremely concerned by (the center’s) willingness to blanketly consider this (airing the movie) as something meaningful and good for the city. … I certainly hope it will not air in this city.”

E. Martin “Marty” Jewell, 5th District, who also became a co-patron, praised Mr. Hilbert and the Free Press for raising the issue. He called it “ludicrous” that “there could be some redeeming value of running that movie here as part of the sesquicentennial.” He likened the center’s efforts to show the movie to the Secession Ball held in South Carolina to celebrate that state’s vote to leave the Union and to the “out-of-control speech” that he said might have led to shooting deaths this week in Arizona of six people, including a federal judge, and the wounding of 14 others, including a congresswoman.

Three other members voted for the resolution without comment: Council President Kathy C. Graziano, 4th District; Reva M. Trammell, 8th District; and Douglas G. Conner Jr., 9th District.

Meanwhile, Mayor Dwight C. Jones weighed in after the Free Press sought his reaction before the council meeting, stating he would find “the showing of the film troubling.”

“To show ‘Birth of a Nation’ promotes inaccuracies about our history and continues to defame Blacks and sacrifices Black humanity,” he continued in the five-sentence, e-mail response. “Surely, an argument for historical or educational value may rightly exist. However, if we are all not of the same mind, it can do a great deal of harm.”

The center already has responded with a letter of protest to the council, calling the decision to put on the film part of its effort to “present thought-provoking and engaging programming related to our mission.”

The center’s president, Christy S. Coleman, stated that council did not have the full picture before taking the vote in writing the council  in the wake of the vote. The Free Press obtained a copy of the letter.

In it, Ms. Coleman declared the plan to show “Birth of a Nation’ was “in keeping” with the center’s mission to “explore the cause, course and legacies of the war.”

“We recognized that for many it is a highly evocative film. But it is also one that many have heard of, but have never seen,” she wrote. “Its impact on the American psyche (past and present), its historical inaccuracies and lingering racist and stereotypical imagery is something we believe should be explored, which is why a panel of scholars was integral to its showing.”

Like other films the center has shown, the screening of “Birth of a Nation” would have been another “educational opportunity to dispel the myths created by highly popular, but often historically flawed films,” she wrote.

Ms. Coleman stated that it was “regrettable this information was omitted from the original reporting and not presented to council members for their deliberations” on the issue.