Actors wearing Ku Klux Klan regalia chase down a white actor in blackface in The Birth of a Nation. Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption ...

At noon on a Friday, two men in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan rode their horses down Pittsfield’s North Street. The date was Jan. 7, 1916, and they were heralding the debut of D.W. Griffith’s film ...

A hundred years ago, on February 8, 1915, D. W. Griffith released “The Birth of a Nation.” The movie became the fledgling film industry’s first blockbuster. It ran for over three hours at a ...

As a young journalist in the late 1970s, Lehr infiltrated the local Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for a story. He met their leader at the time, David Duke, who was there to recruit the next wave of ...

New ‘Birth of a Nation’ Posters Recall D.W. Griffith KKK Propaganda Film. Griffith's 1915 silent film is now considered KKK propaganda. ... while the Ku Klux Klan is shown as heroic. ...

It also helped inspire the Ku Klux Klan’s revival at Stone Mountain, Ga., ... had it not been for “The Birth of a Nation,” the Klan might not have been reborn.) In 1912, ...

A black woman watches as robed Ku Klux Klansmen walk in downtown Montgomery, Ala., prior to a cross burning rally that night on Nov. 24, 1956. The July 9 Retropolis column "How 'The Birth of a ...

D.W. Griffith's 1915 silent film, featuring actors in blackface portraying watermelon-eating caricatures intent on raping white women while the Ku Klux Klan is seen riding to the rescue, sparked ...

A rising wave of racist violence in the South prompted President Ulysses S. Grant to legal and military action against the Ku ...

Today marks a raw and uncomfortable anniversary in film history: One hundred years ago, D.W. Griffith’s highly fictionalized history of the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, “The Birth of a Nation ...

Ad Policy. The front page of the Palo Alto Times of May 31, 1946. “Rumor is abroad on the Stanford campus to the effect that a unit of the Ku Klux Klan is in process of formation here.