The Birth of a Nation : a Roundtable

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Civil War History, Volume 64, Number 1, March 2018, pp. 56-91 (Article)

Published by The Kent State University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2018.0004

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The Birth of a Nation A Roundtable

Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (2016) is the second major motion picture focusing on slavery to be released since 2013 and part of the growing genre of films that have shifted the popular narrative of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruc- tion. While historians of the nineteenth century have long understood the Lost Cause’s problematic nature in defining the narrative of slavery and the Civil War era, popular history, especially that presented through the medium of film, has been slower to tackle this subject. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood films tended to glorify the war, and the realities of chattel slavery—the driving force behind secession—were downplayed. The miniseries Roots and the filmGlory fought bravely against the imagery of the Lost Cause and paved the way for more recent films 12 Years a Slave and The Birth of a Nation, which challenge audiences’ understandings of chattel slavery and the impact of that institution on American society and history. Hollywood’s interest in the Civil War era is not new, though a concerted effort to illuminate its truly complex nature of has emerged relatively recently. Films such as 12 Years a Slave, Lincoln, The Free State of Jones, and The Birth of a Nation, in the broadest sense, challenge the popular narratives of the nineteenth century and in doing so expand our understanding of the period’s nuances, including but not limited to the complicated relationships, identities, and beliefs that ultimately defined the lives of men and women, free and slave. The Birth of a Nation is the first feature-length film to focus on the events leading up to the 1831 slave uprising led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia; like the earlier 12 Years a Slave, it gives viewers an intimate look into the brutal realities of chattel slavery

56 The Birth of a Nation 57 in the American South and the heartbreaking desperation of the men and women forced to toil under the harshest of conditions for their masters’ financial gain. Turner’s revolt was a defining moment in southern history and the history of slavery, for in its suddenness and brutality it reflected all that white slave owners feared: the armed insurrection of their property. Certainly, at its basic level, the institution of slavery must have been somewhat unsettling for southern whites, who often found themselves outnumbered in their homes by men and women forcefully kept in bondage. Indeed, as J. William Harris points out in his foundational study Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society, slave owners were acutely aware of their precarious situation. “Slavery,” he writes, “created by its nature, the possibility of a slave revolt. The potential combination of fanatical outside agitators and black rebels seemed increasingly menacing during the antebellum period.”1 Nat Turner’s revolt in particular, Eugene Genovese notes “especially stood out as a ‘cataclysm’ and a ‘fierce rebellion’ . . . for the primary reason that it drew a considerable amount of white blood.”2 Nate Parker’s version of the event that reinforced the fears of white southerners (which carried over to the postwar period as a means of justifying the violent preservation of the race line) warrants historical analysis and contextual- ization; thus, in this edition of Civil War History we bring together scholars whose work focuses on this pivotal period in the history of American slavery to discuss the merits of the “Hollywoodification” of Nat Turner’s (in)famous revolt. Vernon Burton (VB) is Creativity Professor of Humanities, professor of history, sociology, and computer science at Clemson University. He is author of numerous books on nineteenth-century America, including In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985), The Age of Lincoln (2007), and Penn Center: A History Preserved (2014). Kenneth S. Greenberg (KG) is Distinguished Professor of History at Suffolk University and has written extensively on the institution of slavery. His works include Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (1988), Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting and Gambling in the Old South (1997), and Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (2003). He also served as cowriter and producer of the film Nat Turner: A Trouble- some Property. John Craig Hammond (JH) is an associate professor of history at Penn State Univer- sity, New Kensington. He is the author of Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the

1. J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1985), 39. 2. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1992), 44. 58 Civil War History

Horrid Massacre in Virginia, Illus. in: Authentic and impartial narrative of the tragical scene which was witnessed in Southampton County. [New York], 1831. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Early American West (2007) and the coeditor of Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the American Nation (2011). Catherine Stewart (CS) is the Richard and Norma Small Distinguished Professor of History at Cornell College, where she teaches courses on slavery, history and film, and public memory. She is the author of the recently published Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (2016). Ryan Keating (RK) is associate professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino and book review editor for Civil War History.

RK: This film is a captivating account of the 1831 revolt led by Nat Turner in South- ampton County, Virginia. But watching it, I couldn’t help feeling that there was some context lost in the storytelling—that someone unaware of the history of this event would be somewhat lost and/or confused. I wonder if you could first speak, briefly, The Birth of a Nation 59 to the potential role this film may play in expanding our understanding of the history of slavery, broadly, and the history of Nat Turner’s rebellion, more specifically. CS: Nate Parker’s important film, The Birth of a Nation, ends with a note that tells viewers how hard southern whites worked to suppress the memory of Nat Turner and his rebellion, in part by desecrating his body, which was “flayed and dismembered, his skin sewn into relics, his flesh churned into wagon grease . . . all in hope of preventing a legacy.” Parker aims to restore that legacy by writing into that historical absence with not one, but two films. His documentary Rise Up: The Legacy of Nat Turner, available as a bonus track on the DVD, reveals how the suppression of that history continues to this day. In the town of Courtland, Vir- ginia, where Turner lived and died, there is no public memorial to commemorate Turner or the rebellion or the many African Americans (both free and enslaved) who were killed in reprisal. This is a town in which, as historical archaeologist Kelley Fanto Deetz observes, descendants of the victims of the rebellion, black and white, live side by side, and where memorials to the Lost Cause in the form of statues and Confederate flags mark a landscape where the bodily remains of African Americans who were executed for taking part in the revolt have literally been paved over. Deetz states in the documentary, “There’s actually very little public history here on Nat Turner. That story is something that has been very much suppressed in a lot of ways. It’s a moment of pride for some, and a moment of shame for many in this county.” Both the documentary and The Birth of a Nation make the case that Turner’s rebellion has a significant if largely unheralded legacy, one that African Americans should take pride in, and that rightfully places Turner among a national pantheon of American heroes who took up arms against their oppressors in a fight for liberty. Parker’s film situates Turner’s uprising firmly within a larger historical narrative of a people and a nation’s fight for freedom and emancipation by gesturing backward, at the start of the film, to the revolutionary origins of the American nation and forward, at its conclusion, to black soldiers who fought for the Union, decisively helping to win the Civil War and their freedom. The film begins with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever,” to highlight the paradox of a nation forged out of a revolution for liberty, freedom, and democracy, but one that continued to embrace slavery. Its final image shows a young boy who participated in the uprising witnessing Nat Turner’s dignified acceptance of his own execution by hanging. A close-up of the boy’s tearful face dissolves into the face of a man, now leading a regiment of black soldiers into the fray of the Civil War. Parker aims to both reclaim and rehabilitate Turner’s image from that of a rebellious, bloodthirsty insurrectionary to one of a thoughtful, impassioned fighter 60 Civil War History for freedom, and the film succeeds brilliantly for the most part in communicating this history in a compelling manner to a broader audience, many of whom will not have encountered it before. Unfortunately, the film’s depiction of slavery and the revolt come up short in several ways that simplify and sanitize both of these histories, at times eliding hard truths and the complexities that the American public must grapple with if this history and its continuing presence in our society are ever to be adequately addressed. For example, Parker glosses over the murder of slaveholding women and children by Turner and his fellows. Instead, the only killings we witness are those of male slaveholders. Two supporting characters, Nat’s sympathetic female slaveholders, “Miss Elizabeth” and her daughter “Miss Katherine” in Parker’s telling, are conveniently at a neighboring plantation caring for (as the owners of) Nat’s wife Cherry, who is still recovering from a brutal gang rape and beating perpetrated by a gang of slave patrollers. They are spared from the bloodshed. But, as the ac- companying documentary about the uprising makes clear, the rebellion began, purposefully, with the murder of Nat’s owner, Joseph Travis, and his family and then spread systematically to the neighboring plantations, killing all whites found on the premises, including a mother and ten children at one house. The film’s only reference to this larger carnage is to show a passage from the Bible that Turner had been studying: “Utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not but slay both men and women, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Samuel 15:3). Parker likely shied away from portraying this aspect of Turner’s rebellion for fear of losing the sympathy the film aims to instill in its audience. Yet, if the film had achieved Parker’s goal of persuading viewers of the horrors and violence routinely perpetrated by slaveholders against black lives (adults and children), then he might have been able to include this historic detail without losing audiences’ intended identification with Turner. Parker sells audiences short: By not portraying the full extent of Turner’s rebellion, he doesn’t allow us to grapple with it, which is what historians strive to do in presenting the past—to present it in all of its messiness and complexity. Instead, Parker’s portrayal of white violence focuses primarily on the efforts to quell the uprising and the bloody retaliation that followed in its wake. A disturbing and effective montage of the murderous reprisals against African Americans is accompanied by Nina Simone’s rendition of the antilynching protest song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holliday. In one of the film’s most powerful images, the camera pans back from a close-up of a butterfly that has landed on someone’s chest to reveal that the chest belongs to a young boy’s body, hanging from a cypress tree, and then continues to zoom out to reveal other bodies of men and women hanging from the branches. The Birth of a Nation 61

KG: Telling a story through a feature film and telling it through writing are fun- damentally different enterprises. The creator of each type of history “constructs” the past, but different imperatives and constraints determine the nature of the stories each can tell. A talented filmmaker can certainly tell any story told by a writer, but the nature of the medium pushes the filmmaker in certain directions and away from others. Nate Parker’s tale of Nat Turner and the 1831 Southampton rebellion of enslaved people illustrates this point in many ways. Feature films are at their best when they tell a specific story with characters and dialogue at their center. We should not expect them to speak generally about slavery. This is not a criticism of feature films, but only a recognition of their nature. If it is going to be successful at the box office, the subject matter of a feature film cannot adequately cover the general history of slavery or rebellions. So it should be no surprise, nor a point of criticism, to discover that The Birth of a Nation tells us nothing about Gabriel’s rebellion or Denmark Vesey’s rebellion or the numerous other rebellions of enslaved Americans. Similarly, the film does not offer its audience a grand description or analysis of the many ways enslaved people resisted slavery beyond organized rebellion. We certainly see instances of several of those forms of resistance, but we are offered no wider context. We do not learn in general about running away for short and long periods, poisoning masters, slowing the pace of work, burning cities, learning to read, resisting rape, maintaining families, preserving African and African American culture and religion, or the many other ways enslaved people resisted enslavement. Nat Turner and his community certainly engage in many of these forms of resistance throughout the film, but always in specific instances rather than within the framework of a larger context or pattern. In the same way, feature films tend not to offer comparative frameworks. Hence, in Nate Parker’s film we do not learn that Nat Turner’s rebellion was among the largest in American history or that it was relatively small compared to the rebellion in Haiti that defeated Napoleon’s army and established a nation or Russian serf rebellions, which involved hundreds of thousands of people. However, feature films can take audiences to places normally closed off to historians. Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation does this in several ways. Consider the depiction of Nat Turner’s wife, Cherry. Turner’s relationship with his wife is at the center of the film. Her rape by white patrollers is the trigger that unleashes Nat Turner to begin the rebellion. But the evidence available and the conventions historians followed make it virtually impossible for them ever to tell such a story. The best evidence available to historians that Nat Turner was married is a single sentence in a newspaper article noting that his wife gave up some of his papers “under the lash.” But we know nothing about their relationship, and we know nothing about any words they spoke to each other. Moreover, the historical record 62 Civil War History says nothing about Cherry’s rape or that it motivated Turner to rebel. In other words, Parker invented Cherry, her relationship with Nat Turner, and her rape. This invention should be seen as both desirable and undesirable at the same time. The historical record on this subject does not exist, either because it did not happen or because masters and the institution of slavery destroyed knowledge of its existence. We want “fiction” writers and filmmakers like Parker to invent plausible dialogue, characters, and events under these circumstances in order to prevent the silence of the past from becoming our own silence. Although we have no evidence that Nat Turner was aware of the rape of any African American woman during the period leading up to the rebellion, and certainly not his wife, we also know that rape of black women by white men was common in slavery. Paradoxically, Nate Parker’s invention, based on no specific evidence, may reveal a deeper truth about slavery and rape than the work of historians who cling more tightly to the documentary record. But the invention of Cherry, her relationship with Nat Turner, and her rape are not without problems. For a while now we have been living in a world where the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is increasingly fuzzy. In its most extreme form, we seem to be losing our ability to distinguish “fake news” from “news.” If audiences could watch The Birth of a Nation and understand Parker’s invention as one that also exposes a truth, and if they would also read the scholarship on the historical Turner, then they could appreciate Parker’s contribution to the Nat Turner story in all its complex dimensions. But that seems unlikely to happen. Moreover, Parker’s focus on Turner’s relationship with his wife has the effect of diminishing Turner’s relationship to God—and the documentary record is full of evidence about the primacy of that relationship. VB: I think it is also important to note that much of what we know about Nat Turner comes from his supposed confessions, The Confessions of Nat Turner. It is a highly controversial document, in terms of both its content and its composition, so Nate Parker had a tall task ahead of him as far as untangling the source material. My biggest criticism of the film, in terms of its historical accuracy, is that it blurs Turner’s motivation for leading the revolt. It insinuates that the fictional rape of his wife, as well as the rape of a friend’s wife, animated him to action, when the standard explanation is that he was motivated either out of a desire for freedom or that he believed himself to be some sort of agent of God’s judgment, as his Confessions suggest. I think the film failed to convey a real sense of Turner’s charisma or his prophetic vision. It does not show why other enslaved people would have followed him in the rebellion, risking their own lives. The Birth of a Nation 63

I also do not think the film really comes to terms with the Christianity of enslaved persons, circa 1831, which was neither an inducement to docility, as in the first part of the film, or to revolution, as in the second part. Slave Christianity, as Benjamin E. Mays and Howard Thurman always argued, gave its practitioners a sense that they were “children of God” and had a spiritual equality with or superi- ority to their tormentors and a capacity to withstand the trials of their daily life. I think this is the key to understanding Nat Turner, and if the film had worked more closely with this theme, it might have worked better. I am shocked that religion was removed as one of the primary motivations for Turner’s rebellion. Also, by having Turner preach for a profit, I think the film downplays the existence, as well as the influence, of exhorters and free black and enslaved preachers. We know the enslaved ministers went to great lengths to convene meetings, exhibited a remarkable faith and understanding of the religion, and often became real leaders in the community, both during slavery and then in freedom. In short, enslaved African American preachers are major historical actors, and I feel the movie misrepresents them. There are also major problems with how the white preacher and white religious services are depicted. I thought Nat’s baptizing of the white man who wanted his sins forgiven was powerful. The film had great potential, but ultimately, I found it lacking. I do believe it would be confusing for people unaware of the history of the event. For example, most people think of Virginia as tobacco farming, and the selling of enslaved people to the Deep South by the time of the rebellion (here you have the local selling of African Americans portrayed, not the sending of the enslaved to the Deep South). But it is not just the story of the Nat Turner rebellion, I think it could have contextualized with the Haiti revolution, and other revolutions in the United States: the Stono Rebellion in colonial times, Gabriel Prosser in 1800 Virginia, Denmark Vesey in 1822, David Walker’s Appeal, and Garrison’s publication of the abolitionist journal, the Liberator, the same year as Nat Turner’s rebellion. I don’t believe there is any mention of debates on emancipation or the growing abolitionist movement in the North—and it is possible that in Virginia Nat Turner and other slaves would have heard about these arguments when serving at the dinner table when whites were discussing such issues. The slave trade ended in 1808, so Parker could have done a lot more with Africa and links to Africa than he does, but I applaud that he attempted to make some of those connections—as with the secret, at least away from white eyes, and semi-African “baptizing” or recognition of child Nat Turner as prophetic or some nod toward African retentions in the film via Nat’s wife. Moreover, there would have been a number of slaves who had lived through the American revolution, and that revolutionary period who 64 Civil War History would have been alive during Nat Turner’s rebellion and could have been used to expand on the freedom-fighter theme and link the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and freedom and liberty to Nat Turner. While the film has good intentions, I do not believe it really expands our understanding of the history of slavery, and I am not certain it helps us understand the history of Nat Turner’s rebellion any more than did William Styron’s The Con- fessions of Nat Turner. Both have probably muddied the waters in different ways. I found the additional materials on the CD much better and more enlightening than the film. The director Parker and the other talking heads made it clear that they wanted to portray Nat Turner as a freedom fighter. The film is more fiction than fact, and though I am not an expert in the Turner revolt, it seemed to invent most episodes out of whole cloth, like a Hollywood biopic from the 1930s or ’40s. It has little use as a historic document. I think it could be used to discuss the relationship of fiction and art to history and to get students to think about the responsibilities of the artist when using a historical character such as Nat Turner, as did William Styron in his “meditation” on history, as he called his novel. I like to contrast Styron’s use of a historical figure and event with Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Warren, in contrast to Styron, denied that Willie Stark was based on Huey Long. I worry that however well intended, The Birth of a Nation does show the dangers of using historical characters to portray history. Finally, I am a little surprised that since this film was released in the Age of Obama, it seems that a black filmmaker should have given the black community much more agency. As I watch the film, it is a victim’s version of the revolt, not a hero’s version. JCH: For the better part of three decades now, Nat Turner has enjoyed an exalted position in history departments across the nation. Stephen Oates’s narrative history of the rebellion and Kenneth Greenberg’s excellent collection of primary sources have long made Turner and his rebellion standard fare in the classroom.3 Greenberg served as the moving force behind Nat Turner—A Troublesome Property, a 2003 PBS documentary that has made an appearance in more than a few classrooms.4 Thomas C. Parramore’s local history of Southampton County, Greenberg’s edited collection of secondary sources, and Daniel W. Crofts’s works on post-insurrection Southampton County made Turner and his rebellion a staple of historical scholarship on slavery in Virginia and the Upper South.5 Since the early 1990s, it has

3. Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed. The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston: St. Martin’s, 1996). 4. Nat Turner—A Troublesome Property, directed by Charles Burnett (2003). 5. Daniel W. Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834–1869 (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1992). The Birth of a Nation 65 been difficult if not impossible to write histories of race and slavery, politics and religion, in the first half of the nineteenth-century South without making at least a passing reference to Nat Turner’s rebellion.6 Over the past decade, Nat Turner and his rebellion have been the subject of a robust and growing body of scholarly literature. In 2007, the Journal of the Early Re- public published a probing forum on Turner’s rebellion and Southampton County in 2007. A steady stream of articles and book chapters has appeared since then, joined by two recent monographs that are comprehensive, if not authoritative.7 The future cache of articles and monographs on Nat Turner, slave rebellion and resistance, and white reaction that will grow from this most recent round of scholarship should prove exceedingly valuable and insightful. For as long as historians write scholarly histories of race and slavery in the United States, they will continue to write about Nat Turner. The rebellion he led—and the terror, reactions, and reprisals that followed—are singularly fascinating, revealing, compelling, and significant. Yet for all of the scholarly and student-centered work that has appeared since the 1990s, Turner and the rebellion he led have failed to penetrate the historical memories of many Americans. As Nate Parker reveals, he had “overheard the name” Nat Turner “once or twice in my childhood, but without context—the where, the why, and what of his story had no resonance.”8 Only in college did Nat Turner enter the collective knowledge and historical memories Parker shared with his classmates. Parker’s recollection of his college introduction to Turner surely rings true with our own classroom experiences. Nat Turner does not exist in my students’ historical memories when they arrive in my classes. Indeed, far more often than not, they have little historical memory or knowledge of race, slavery, and the Civil War beyond a vague notion that slavery was cruel and quilts signaled runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad on which Harriet Tubman was the chief conductor.

6. Thomas C. Parramore, Southampton County, Virginia (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1978); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003); Crofts, Old Southampton; Crofts, Cobb’s Ordeal: The Diaries of a Virginia Farmer, 1842–1872 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997). For examples of Turner’s place in the historiography on politics and slavery, see, for example, William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion; vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). 7. “Communities in Revolt: A Symposium on Nat Turner’s Rebellion,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Winter 2007): 655–728; Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2008); David F. Allmendinger Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014); Patrick H. Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015). 8. Nate Parker, “My Journey with Nat Turner,” in The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement, ed. Nate Parker (New York: Atria, 2016), 3. 66 Civil War History

They also “know” that Abe Lincoln freed the slaves, a notion reinforced by Lincoln, a movie in which black people play no significant role in emancipation and abolition.9 For all of the flaws of this movie and its producer,The Birth of a Nation has the potential to change that. RK: This is one of two major films that have come out in the past few years (12 Years a Slave, of course, being the other) depicting slavery from slaves’ perspectives. The narrative is, of course, vastly different from those portrayed in earlier films that defended the Lost Cause; Gone with the Wind comes to mind first, though there are number of others. This film also premiered during a period of considerable public debate surrounding the legacy of the South and the Confederacy and of race relations in America, in general. What potential role does a film such as The Birth of a Nation play in shifting broader public discourse on the history of American slavery? Is it an effective medium or could the “Hollywoodification” of the story allow some viewers (and, perhaps defenders of the Lost Cause narrative) to dismiss the film as exaggerating the realities of life for slaves? If the latter, what role can historians play in bridging that gap? CS: Any film about slavery faces a cinematic challenge not unlike that posed by the Holocaust; while these are distinct historical traumas, they present a similar problem for filmmakers who wish to use film as a form of witnessing and historical testimony to shape a new culture of remembrance in the public consciousness. The problem of cinematic representation of historical traumas is a thorny one; how does one do justice to the horror in a way that will honor both those whose lives were lost and the survivors without, first, perpetrating another type of victimiza- tion by offering up that horror as a form of spectacle and “entertainment” for Hollywood audiences; second, creating images that are so disturbing as to render the film “unwatchable,” one that viewers will avoid and refuse to engage with; and third, deferring to the viewer’s desire for cinematic pleasure to the extent that the brutality of the institution is not faithfully represented in historical detail? For filmmakers addressing slavery, the problem is compounded by the long history of mythmaking and storytelling in American culture following emancipation that sought to deny the evils of slavery or, in many cases, rationalize the perspective of slaveholders and exculpate the north’s complicity with the system. Pro-Confederate narratives saturated American culture as a result of the efforts of organizations such as the United Confederate Veterans, the Sons of Confeder- ate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but also, thanks to fiction writers, most notably Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon Jr., whose

9. Kate Masur, “In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters,” New York Times, November 12, 2012. The Birth of a Nation 67 novels The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots served as the source material for D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, which Parker’s work aims to displace, and historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips and William Archibald Dunning. In the first half of the twentieth century, social scientists also contributed to a public discourse about the impact of slavery and its legacy in ways that labeled black citizens and families as dysfunctional, culminating in Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report that indelibly linked notions of African American “pathology” to its origins during slavery. Historians of slavery have made considerable progress toward overturning some of these shibboleths, owing in large part to the historic testimony of slaves and former slaves and aided by recent scholarship in fields such as archaeology. But these myths still circulate and proliferate in multiple forms in the mass media (in film, advertising, television shows, and even news coverage). It is challenging for filmmakers, using their medium’s visual language, to portray black lives onscreen in ways that will debunk the myths of slavery as a “benevolent” institution while effectively countering the negative and dehumanizing images of blackness that have been part of cinema since its beginning. This may help explain why Parker’s portrayal of slavery is perhaps not grim enough, if his aim was solely to convey the realities of that world. The first part of the film seems too sanitized in its depictions of a slaveholding cotton plantation; the only scenes of brutality, although they are rendered in ways that make them hard to watch, are shown taking place off of the Turner plantation through encounters with slave patrols and slave traders or on other plantations, as Nat is forced to preach obedience to other slave communities under the watchful but discomfited eye of his owner, Sam Turner, and slaveholders who are paying Sam for Nat’s services. Before Sam succumbs to drink and the corrupting influence of the institution, slaves on the Turner plantation, as well as the plantation Sam’s sister Katherine marries into, are treated well and with kindness. Instead of being punished, Nat is rewarded for his pursuit of literacy by Sam’s mother, “Miss Elizabeth,” who moves him into the manor house and teaches him how to read the Bible. All is beauty, cleanliness, and order, with intact family units living in cozy slave cabins, and even slave labor is initially rendered through a cinematic lens that makes it look more like a type of proto-peasantry. The only inkling we receive that slaves suffer on the Turner plantation comes from a scene showing a young Nat going hungry because he was too slow to the communal bowl. This drives his father to risk his life in search of food for the family, and there is a truly terrifying encounter (off of the plantation) with a slave patrol that leads to Nat’s father having to flee for the crime of killing a white man in self-defense. Filmmakers like Nate Parker have to decide how to strike the right balance between depicting the brutalizing and dehumanizing aspects of slavery and 68 Civil War History representing black people’s ability within those horrific circumstances to sustain and create families, communities, and culture, all of which we know helped the enslaved, as well as freedmen and freedwomen, to endure in the face of entrenched white supremacy. Both aspects are well documented by historians of slavery, but Parker’s desire to emphasize the beauty and strength of enslaved black families leads him to focus primarily on patriarchal family units. The sanctity of the nuclear household is observed, with one important exception: the rape of female slaves. Nat’s wife, Cherry, is brutally raped and beaten, and another slave’s wife is taken to be raped by a visiting slaveholder whose favor Sam Turner seeks. But both of these acts are perpetrated by white outsiders to the Turner plantation. We don’t see the constant threat and reality of families being torn apart as a result of property exchanges or the persistent dangers of sexual assault faced most often by female house slaves and perpetrated by slaveholders. Despite glimpses of the importance that Nat Turner’s mother and grandmother play in Turner’s life, in Parker’s film enslaved women are not much more than supporting players. They are rarely seen, and almost never outside of their relationship to enslaved men. Most often they serve as symbols of the tyrannical power white slaveholders wielded over black female bodies. Parker chooses discretion as the better part of valor in his film’s treatment of the issue of female rape; the camera cuts away from the actual assault to show instead the physical and trau- matic aftermath, as in the case of Cherry, or the emotional damage inflicted on black men as they helplessly watch from a distance the window of the room where one man’s wife is being raped by a visiting plantation owner. While I appreciate Parker’s decision to avoid replicating the brutalization of the black female body for cinematic consumption, I think his choices unintentionally slight this central aspect of slavery and do not do justice to the way women fought, endured, and survived it. White male slaveholders’ salacious references to the sexual uses of female slaves frame the rape of black women within the context of white male desire and competing notions of patriarchal ownership between white slaveholders and black male slaves, as opposed to representing it as a violent tool of exploitation and oppression. The film draws a veil over enslaved black women’s experiences by placing them in the shadow of black men and underplays the essential roles women played in slave communities, not just as mothers and wives but as leaders and freedom fighters in their own rights. Novelist Toni Morrison talks about her responsibil- ity as a writer, documenting the African American experience through fiction, to write into the present absences that exist in slave narrative testimony, particularly those of black women. Literary and gender conventions of the era circumscribed what authors could relate, even when speaking autobiographically: “Over and The Birth of a Nation 69 over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.’ In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things.” Morrison aims to write into those silences, the lacunae left behind in the documentary record; to do so she must “rip that veil” and use the act of imagination “to expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn’t write it.”10 This is what literature and film have the potential power to accomplish for us in terms of reclaiming history from fragmentary and incomplete evidence and making historians’ discoveries about the past accessible to a wider audience. KG: The single most important thing to keep in mind about the ability of Nate Parker’s film to change the public discourse about the nature of slavery is that it was a box office failure. At first, Parker and his supporters had great hopes for the film’s success. I attended its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016. Even before its first screening, there was an intense buzz surrounding it. Just before the festival, it became clear that for the second year in a row, no African American actor had been nominated for an Academy Award. Since Parker wrote, produced, directed, and starred in The Birth of a Nation, newspapers were full of speculation that he would be nominated the following year. Before and after the screening, multiple standing ovations greeted the film, cast, and crew. It won the audience prize and the grand jury prize in the feature film category—and quickly sold to Fox Searchlight Pictures for the highest price ever paid for a Sundance film. It took several months for the excitement to fade. Once the film moved into general release, it received mixed reviews. More importantly, news broke that in 1999, when Parker was an undergraduate at Penn State University, he and his roommate (credited with helping to write the film treatment) had been tried for raping a fellow student. Parker was acquitted, but his roommate was initially convicted, with the conviction overturned on appeal. However, Parker’s 2016 public appearances addressing the issue proved disastrous. He portrayed himself, not the woman, as the victim and did not express appropriate remorse even after learning his accuser had recently committed suicide. Support for Parker and the film quickly disappeared. The Birth of a Nation’s box-office failure should not make us lose sight of such a film’s potential ability to transform perceptions of slavery. Several points need to be made on this topic. First, the film offers an unequivocal portrait of Nat Turner as hero. We live in a culture that does not know how to remember or memorialize enslaved people who rebelled. If you travel today to the town of Courtland, the

10. Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 109–10, 113. 70 Civil War History modern name for Jerusalem (the town near which the rebellion took place), there is no memorial to Turner and the rebels. Turner died for freedom, and yet many in our society do not recognize him as a freedom fighter. One problem with Parker’s attempt to portray Turner as an unambiguous American hero is that he invented a story that would be easily palatable for modern American audiences. The Nat Turner in the Parker film only kills adult men, whereas the historical Nat Turner killed many women and children, including infants. It is possible to tell a heroic, but more complex, story about Nat Turner that includes the killing of women and children. But Parker clearly understood the difficulty involved and sanitized the rebellion rather than directly confront this reality. Parker has indi- cated in public comments that he greatly admired the actor and director Mel Gibson, and it is easy to see that the structure of The Birth of a Nation and the structure of Gibson’s Braveheart are remarkably similar. At the beginning, both movies portray their heroes as peaceful men living in oppressive circumstances. Neither hero rises in rebellion until his wife is attacked by men of the ruling group—and those men become the targets of the rebellion. This structure ensures that modern viewers will unequivocally sympathize with both heroes, but at the cost of misunderstanding the historical figures. Nat Turner should be recognized by our culture as a heroic figure, but we should admire Nat Turner as he was and not as an invention rooted in Mel Gibson’s imagination. Parker’s film does not give us that opportunity. Of course, this is not to condemn all inventions in this or other films. We want filmmakers and fiction writers to imagine aspects of historical worlds that go beyond historians’ abilities to write about them, given the evidence available. Parker does this well when he vividly portrays the brutality and horror of slavery. This makes the film deeply moving and painful to watch. It also captures the central truth about the institution of slavery. To accomplish this, Parker must invent the specific examples of white brutality he portrays in the film. To take just one instance, in Parker’s film Nat Turner witnesses the force-feeding of a chained man by a master who knocks out his teeth. Modern audiences turn away from the screen as they witness this unspeakable brutality. We have no evidence that this incident happened in Southampton County. But it is just this kind of specific invention we want our filmmakers to undertake in the service of conveying a more general truth to a modern audience. VB: There is no doubt that the defenders of the Lost Cause will dismiss the film as exaggeration, but they would do that with any film that showed the reality of the cruelty and violence of slavery. So I do not think that we can blame that reaction on the film. But as I will explain regarding Sam’s “paternalism,” some subtleties of the different ways African Americans were controlled—from violence, to threats of violence, to paternalism—might have helped the film and made it less vulnerable to the criticisms of “exaggerations” of the horrors of slavery. The Birth of a Nation 71

The film certainly works as a balance to Gone with the Wind and perhaps might be successful in contrasting the two with students. One exercise I used was to have students compare Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, to African American novelist Margaret Walker’s Jubilee. One reason 12 Years a Slave is so much more successful, I believe, is that it is based on the autobiography of Solomon Northrup. I used that book in class and stressed that it was such a powerful former slave autobiography in large part because North had been free and aware of the larger world before he was kidnapped and forced into slavery. Thus, he brought that perspective of freedom, however limited by prejudices, into his observations of slavery. We do not have anything like that for Nat Turner. But we do have Thomas Gray’s interview with Turner and supposed transcription of that interview. I think the film made a mistake by completely ignoring Thomas Gray, probably out of a desire to make sure this is Turner’s story. But I can imagine the movie opening something like this: Gray: Boy, [or worse language], I want to talk to you. Turner: Why the hell [or worse language] should I talk to you? Gray: Because you’re going be swinging from a tree in about two days. If you want anyone to know your story, I’m your only voice. What turned you into such a monster? Turner: Why the hell should I care what white people think about me? Why should I trust you to report what I say? All you do is write lies. There’s no way a cracker like you could possibly understand. Gray: Why should I trust you to tell the truth to me? . . . And then, eventually Turner narrates his version of what happened. JCH: Generations and individuals have the right to interpret the past on their own terms, in their own way, and in their preferred genres. Alex Haley’s Roots first appeared on the screen in the 1970s’ preferred genre, the network TV miniseries. It was recently remade as a cable TV miniseries that will almost certainly appear on a streaming service in the near future. Likewise, art-house film producer Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is art far more than it is entertainment, even if it ultimately produced revenue approaching that of a big-screen production. The slave-escape serial-drama Underground enjoyed a two-season run on cable. Enter The Birth of a Nation, which Parker produced as a big-screen blockbuster, with Nat Turner as the hero who meets a tragic, untimely death. The value, significance, and limitations of The Birth of a Nation are inseparable from Parker’s decision to tell Nat Turner’s story in the action-hero genre. Historians, public intellectuals, and film critics have been especially harsh in their evaluations of The Birth of a Nation. Leslie M. Alexander wrote a devastating and 72 Civil War History entirely convincing review that argues, “Parker created a deeply flawed, historically inaccurate movie that exploits and distorts Nat Turner’s story and the history of slavery in America.” Continuing, she notes that “nearly everything in the movie— ranging from Turner’s relationship with his family, to his life as a slave, and even the rebellion itself—is a complete fabrication.” Though “the film contains sprinklings of historical fact,” the “bulk of Parker’s story about the rebellion is fictitious.” Film and culture critics have been equally unsparing. It’s difficult to find fault with these reviews; yet they seem to miss the point almost entirely.11 Parker did not produce a film intended to woo critics writing in the New Yorker. Likewise, he did not produce The Birth of a Nation for me or for the readers of this journal; we know the details and significance of slavery, Nat Turner, and rebellion well enough. Rather, he made the film to introduce Nat Turner and slavery to a generation that knows precious little about either. He also produced the film for the moviegoing public that purchases tickets for the action-adventure-blockbuster of the month showing at the local multiplex. Importantly, he also produced the movie to show Hollywood that black men could produce blockbuster, action-hero movies about slavery and that those movies could sell lots of tickets. Nate Parker knows his audience better than history professors and New Yorker film critics. It seems likely that had it not been for the controversy surrounding the sexual assault charges filed against Parker in college, The Birth of a Nation would have been the semi-blockbuster he envisioned.12 The film’s shortcomings as history are evident and understandable. Parker, like any ambitious film producer, faced certain constraints in trying to produce a historically accurate blockbuster. The demands of commercial cinema are diametri- cally opposed to the standards of good historical scholarship. As scholar Andrew Schocket notes, “historians envision history as complex, nuanced, and multicausal, with events having multiple possible beginnings and inconclusive or incomplete endings.” Scholarly standards of historical writing and scholarship welcome complexity and abstraction. In contrast, “screenwriters are taught to give films a simple

11. Leslie M. Alexander, “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Is an Epic Fail,” Nation, Oct. 6, 2016, https:// www.thenation.com/article/the-birth-of-a-nation-is-an-epic-fail/. See also Vinson Cunningham, “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Isn’t Worth Defending,” New Yorker, Oct. 10, 2016; Richard Brody, “The Cinematic Merits and Flaws of Nate Parker’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” New Yorker, Oct. 9, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-cinematic-merits-and-flaws-of-nate- parkers-the-birth-of-a-nation. 12. I won’t pretend to know how to speak wisely or adequately about the controversy surrounding the sexual assault charges filed against Parker. I remain unable to disentangle the art from the artist. The best I can do is examine how this film portrays what we know about slavery and Nat Turner’s rebellion to audiences not steeped in the scholarship of slavery. The Birth of a Nation 73 structure: movies should have three acts—a clear beginning, a confrontation, and a satisfying resolution—separated by plot points on which the action pivots.” The Birth of a Nation’s flaws as history and scholarship are inherent to the medium. So are its shortcomings as film. The “conventions” of big-screen film production require “modes of storytelling that necessarily emphasize the personal over the structural, character over content, and the visually dramatic over slower or internal transformations. In doing so, they naturally focus on founding heroes over messy complexities.” Schocket concludes that “there aren’t many good major films about any period in American history because movie industry logic works against the complexity such movies would require.” It’s difficult to imagine how The Birth of a Nation could be made more complex or more scholarly without alienating moviego- ers raised on a steady diet of Transformers films, Star Wars sagas, and the latest war movie. If this telling of the Nat Turner rebellion is simple and conventional, that’s because the far great majority of Hollywood films are simple and conventional.13 RK: I couldn’t help but follow the demise of Sam. He was Nat’s childhood friend and a man who appeared to treat his own slaves with kindness and who was ap- palled with the conditions of slaves on the other plantations he and Nat visited. Yet, in an effort to save his own plantation and his family name he becomes complicit in, among other things, the rape of one of his slaves and Nat’s brutal beating. Ultimately, he is the first victim of Turner’s revolt. Do you have any thoughts on this subplot as it relates to our understanding of the impact of slavery on southern whites and on southern society in the years before the Civil War? CS: Black filmmakers, like writers, often face the challenge of creating texts for a dual audience, composed of white and black viewers. As one scholar has observed, “the politics of publishing and the politics of community [have forced] the African American author to write consciously for two audiences—one white, the other black—with conspicuously different goals for each.”14 I think Parker’s decision to portray Sam and his mother Elizabeth and sister Katherine as kindly owners goes beyond a desire for historical accuracy by representing a wider spectrum of slaveholders, which there certainly were; I imagine he feared, with just cause, that he might lose the good will and emotional investment of white audiences if there weren’t sympathetic whites onscreen (and if he had depicted Turner and his fellow rebels killing white women and children). Sam’s devolution over the course of the film, from Nat’s childhood friend to a slaveholder who increasingly places profit

13. Andrew M. Schocket, Fighting Over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2015), 130, 127, 128. 14. Devon Boan, The Black “I”: Author and Audience in African American Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 8. 74 Civil War History above the well-being of his slaves, is held up as evidence of the corrupting nature of the institution. Sam changes from a slave owner shocked by others’ mistreatment of their slaves to an alcoholic who allows a visitor to rape the wife of one of his slaves and who authorizes Nat Turner’s brutal punishment. This trope of depicting the evils of slavery as extending to the moral degradation of good Christian slaveholders has its origins in the antebellum slave narratives that sought to document the institution’s harm for whites, and not just the enslaved, in the hopes of gaining more supporters for the abolitionist cause. By doing so, the authors hoped to make a persuasive case that white slaveholders weren’t intrinsically immoral; rather, the evil tyranny and despotism enabled by the institution made them so. Parker uses creative license in making Sam, Nat’s former playmate, his master when he reaches adulthood. This heightens the dramatic tension when Nat chooses to kill him first and plays on another Civil War trope of brother turning against brother. But it also may help convey a message that enslavement even under “good” slaveholders is still slavery, and even slaves who were of especial value to their owners were still treated as property instead of human beings; even “privileged” slaves could be brutally punished. More troubling is the way Parker’s film presents an idealized depiction of southern white womanhood. The portrayal of female slaveholders as friends and sympathizers with their slaves caters too much to white audience expectations. Throughout the film, Sam’s mother, Elizabeth, and sister Katherine are visions of moral rectitude and sentimental womanhood, with nary a cross word uttered to their slaves. Unlike Sam, they are not personally affected by or complicit with the system that they actively participate in as slaveholders. They are incorrupt- ible. When Cherry is raped and beaten by the slave patrol, they are shocked and horrified to such an extent that they put her up in a well-appointed bedroom in the manor house and nurse her back to health, all the while caring for her and Nat’s young daughter. Even after it is discovered that Cherry’s husband led the rebellion that killed neighbors and friends, her status doesn’t change. It is hard to imagine that Cherry would not have faced violent reprisal in some form or, at the very least, been sold “down the river.” As a number of scholars have documented, female slaveholders participated in the system in order to maintain their economic and social position. At times, they proved themselves even crueler dispensers of punishment, owing in part to their more tenuous positions as a result of their gender and their husbands’ illicit relations with female slaves that often resulted in slave progeny. Drawing richly on evidence provided by the ex-slave narratives collected by the Works Projects Administration, Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage makes a persuasive case for the way the power dynamics and violence of slavery as a system played out The Birth of a Nation 75 within the domestic sphere of southern households between slaveholding women and their female house slaves.15 KG: Nate Parker completely invents Samuel Turner. The historical Samuel Turner died in 1822. At the time of the rebellion, Nat Turner was owned by nine-year-old Putnam Moore, whose mother had married Joseph Travis. We know nothing about Nat Turner’s relations with Samuel Turner and nothing about Samuel’s character. However, this invention does capture something important about the institution of slavery, and it is helpful for modern audiences to be exposed to such a character. Slavery would not have survived very long if it consisted only of masters who were obviously brutal sadists. The historical record is full of masters who thought themselves morally decent, men and women who tried to do the right thing. But the logic of the institution was that individual masters aspiring to moral decency were doomed to fail. Decent people who needed to earn a profit learned to “push” their laborers toward greater productivity through the use of force. “Kind” masters died, and the people they enslaved could fall into the hands of others who were less “kind.” Enslaved people could be sold at any time. The preservation of slavery required the imposition of brutal laws and practices, regardless of anyone’s individual morality. Enslaved people who tried to run away had to be captured and returned. The protection of law did not extend to enslaved women raped by white men. Enslaved people could not testify in court in cases involving whites. Marriages between slaves were not legally recognized. Overall, slavery was a violent and brutal institution that ultimately undercut the decency of anyone who assumed the role of master. Nate Parker’s Samuel Turner is a powerful creation, a man who aspires to moral decency and yet simultaneously embodies slavery at its most brutal. VB: The film did a good job of showing how a slave’s future often hinged on the financial position of a master. No matter the relationship between master and slave, financial interest tended to drive a master’s decision making. In fact, Sam’s experience was not exceptional. It was quite common for a plantation to encounter financial ruin, resulting in the liquidation of assets—which, of course meant that slaves were sold, tearing apart families and communities. The film did a good job portraying this issue. And there were other vulnerable times: for example, death of a master or mistress, a marriage as the one portrayed in this film, when an enslaved person would go with the bride or groom, breaking up a family unit in the home or when part of the family moved west, etc. The life of uncertainty and separation from family and what was home was always in the background, always a threat to enslaved African Americans.

15. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation House- hold (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008). 76 Civil War History

The depiction of alcohol and alcoholism is a good addition, although probably not historically accurate for Sam. Alcoholism was a real problem for both blacks and whites in the rural South. And with the power dynamics under slavery, it brought out disturbing tendencies for whites, including sadism. So whether the alcoholism should have been portrayed through Sam or not, I am glad it was part of this film. Sam’s descent also undermines one of the movie’s themes that could have been used to better effect and probably been more historically accurate. Sam is initially portrayed as a paternalistic master. In the Styron novel, it is clear that Nat has to kill Sam because of the paternalism used to control enslaved people, even if it al- lowed the enslaved to bargain or argue, as Nat did in the movie for Sam to buy the enslaved woman in whom Nat was interested in and would eventually marry. The film could have shown more of how at least some enslaved people found room to move within the system and get concessions from masters. By the time Nat kills Sam, we do not see a paternalistic or “kind” master, we see this white man who beat Nat Turner and forced a married slave to have sex with a visiting white neighbor, just to curry favor with that neighbor. The rapes in the movie are important, and that horrible side of slavery needs to be shown. Throughout the narratives of former slaves, the two powerful memories and images of slavery are the violence and whipping and, secondly, the exploitation of enslaved women by white men. Rape of married enslaved women probably was rare, certainly rarer than of unmarried, younger enslaved women. It is fairly unrealistic to have the woman, her husband, and Nat beg Sam not to allow this horrible thing, while Sam insists. It would have been dangerous for the whites and destructive of their paternalistic system to control their enslaved people in this way. JCH: Despite filmmaking conventions and demands, The Birth of a Nation effectively conveys many of the lived realities of slavery, subordination, and white supremacy. It also portrays well the forces that mitigated against slave rebellion while giving weight to the unique personal experiences that inspired Nat to do what so many others thought better of. The film makes it clear that rebellion meant death for loved ones and hundreds of innocents. The house servant who warns Nat against rebellion is not portrayed as a simple Uncle Tom. He is a wise and weary man who insists Turner has no right to condemn his fellow slaves to a brutal death simply because he believes himself an instrument of God. While the movie is not always accurate or faithful to what historians know about the Nat Turner rebellion, it does contain many essential historical truths about slavery in the Upper South. It presents in graphic detail the awesome amounts of violence and terror on which slavery rested. It explores how slaves used African religious practices alongside the Old and New Testaments to create narratives that gave meaning to their lives while providing solace in the face of slavery’s unrelent- The Birth of a Nation 77 ing physical and mental demands. It reveals the seemingly impossible choices that slavery forced on the enslaved. It powerfully recounts the struggles between whites and blacks for mastery and control over the lives of black people. It shows—in vivid detail—that the scarred, tortured bodies of black people served as the sites of those struggles. It also reminds viewers that slavery destroyed everyone and everything it touched, from the beautiful but haunted landscape of rural Virginia to the disfigured bodies of slaves to the utterly immoral behavior of whites who exercised unchecked power over slaves. This film gets much right about slavery and the lives of whites and blacks in a slave society. RK: Nat Turner’s growing awareness of the realities of slavery plays a key role in his decision to revolt. Some viewers might wonder why more slaves did not resist the treatments and conditions of chattel slavery. While there is no simple answer, the film alludes to violence and threats of violence as the primary means of preserving order in these areas. How accurate is that depiction? What should viewers take away from the film’s depictions of race relations? CS: The film does gesture toward other forms of intimidation besides violence, even as it ignores slaveholders’ frequent threats to sell family members away from one another—threats that wielded great psychological power and were often carried out. Enslaved African Americans who were successful in purchasing their own freedom often still found themselves the emotional hostages of slaveholders who held family members in bondage and who often proved obdurate in their refusal to permit the purchase of their liberty. The Birth of a Nation successfully portrays literacy and religion as tools of control wielded by slaveholders but also as the primary sources of sustenance and inspira- tion for survival that helped slaves dismantle the master’s house. Parker draws the connection between literacy and freedom in Nat Turner’s personal journey from slave to revolutionary much as Frederick Douglass does in his autobiography. Dou- glass, like other authors of slave narratives published during the antebellum era, suggests that the acquisition of literacy is what liberated his consciousness from the shackles of ignorance imposed by slaveholders as a means of psychological control. Parker’s film highlights slaveholders’ control of knowledge as a tool to prevent slave uprisings and “insurrection.” Nat, unlike many of his fellow slaves, not only reads the Bible but studies it and learns, as Parker’s film successfully demonstrates, the power of textual interpretation. The book that slaveholders expect Nat to preach from to inculcate slaves’ obedience is the same one that inspires Nat and his fellow slaves to seek vengeance and justice in this world, not the next. As Nat prepares to embark on the revolt, he exchanges biblical quotes with the house slave Isaiah, who seeks to deter him by quoting: “He is a God of love, Nat. Don’t you forget that.” Turner replies “I won’t. Nor will I forget he’s a God of wrath.” 78 Civil War History

But aside from individual acts of violence perpetrated by individual slaveholders, the film lacks the sense of slavery as a larger institution, a totalizing system in which all of the laws, systems, and military force upheld slaveholders’ complete authority. It is only in the documentary that viewers learn of the law passed by the Virginia legislature in 1830, a year before the rebellion, prohibiting slaves from literacy. Slaves had little recourse in the courts, as later cases like the Dred Scott decision made clear. After the 1787 Convention, federal fugitive slave laws, culminating with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which took federal power to a new level, ensured that those who escaped to the North lived in constant fear of being discovered, caught, and returned to slavery. The closest the film comes to depicting slavery as an all-encompassing system is in its accurate and chilling portrayal of the optic regime of slavery. Slaves were under white surveillance, on and off of the plantation, but forbidden from looking back, or returning the gaze of whites. When Nat Turner preaches to slaves on other plantations, he does so under the watchful eyes of Sam and the slaveholder who has paid Sam for Nat’s services. At various points, we see Nat gazing directly at whites, who regard this as an act of insubordination. For African Americans both during slavery and under Jim Crow, the act of looking was an act of defiance; looking back, as bell hooks reminds us, is a political act.16 This is as meta as the film gets, as Nat’s critical, unblinkered gaze at whites’ barbarous behavior is a form of witnessing that resembles Nate Parker’s directorial gaze, which puts slavery on trial onscreen, building a case for Nat Turner and his fellow rebels. However, heroizing Turner as the lone, galvanizing force around whom other slaves were finally drawn to revolt doesn’t do justice to the long legacy of slave resistance and rebellion that came before Turner. Although rebellions were the exception rather than the rule, slaves managed to resist both covertly and overtly in many ways. Slave resistance in multiple forms affected the evolution of slavery as an institution, creating space for the development of black culture and consciousness and contributing to slavery’s demise, in large part by African Americans’ participation and leadership within the abolitionist movement. In addition to running away and gaining literacy, often at great personal risk, slaves claimed personal agency by other means even within the tight confines of enslavement. Secret meetings, coded speech, the transmission of West African cultural practices and belief systems, the use of their own skilled labor and acquisition of specialized knowledge for limited participation in a free-market economy, the geographical literacy slaves gained by

16. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1992), 115–16. The Birth of a Nation 79 traveling off of the plantation and the social network or grapevine that many used to pass information, feigning illness or injury, and poisoning or tampering with the food prepared for slaveholders are all forms by which enslaved individuals and communities sought to gain some control over their lives and their fate. Focusing on Nat Turner as the exceptional slave implies that others were more “natural” slaves. It doesn’t credit them with the agency Parker gives Turner, and it undermines one of his central objectives, namely to provide a younger generation of African Americans with a historical heroic role model for resisting the forces of white supremacy. The narrative of the great man as great leader is not only historically incomplete; it doesn’t inspire people to become their own agents of change. Civil rights activist Ella Baker knew how easily appointed leaders could be “neutralized” by the powers that oppose them; only a grassroots movement made up of large numbers of individual revolutionaries could survive and by surviving, succeed. KG: Enslaved people resisted slavery all the time and in many different ways. They slowed the pace of work, broke tools, learned to read, lied to masters, devel- oped and practiced distinct African American forms of religion and music, visited friends and loved ones on neighboring farms at night, ran away for short and long periods of time, burned buildings, murdered masters, resisted rape, and engaged in countless other “rebellious” acts large and small. Organized rebellions of enslaved people, such as the Nat Turner insurrection, were not the most common form of resistance to slavery, although we now know they were more common than many historians of an earlier generation recognized. The Birth of a Nation depicts the full range of acts of resistance to slavery, but it does so within a framework that places organized rebellion as the most important and consequential type of resistance. The outbreak of rebellion is the climax of the film, and the audience awaits that moment with anticipation. This has the effect of diminishing all the other acts of resistance. It also duplicates the oversight of an earlier generation of historians and others who equated resistance to slavery with organized rebellions—and with the men who largely engaged in such rebellions. The film certainly portrays violence and the threat of violence as the major way masters controlled enslaved people. The patrollers forcefully restrict movement; people are whipped and otherwise physically brutalized; white men rape black women; masters murder enslaved people; the rebellion itself is suppressed by organized militias; and Nat Turner and other rebels are summarily executed or hanged after short trials. Violence is at the heart of Nate Parker’s film, and in this it offers a good representation of the actual way slavery operated. But to be fair, the film also depicts other mechanisms by which masters attempted to control enslaved people. Consider literacy. The film notes the laws and customs 80 Civil War History that tried to prevent whites from teaching enslaved people to read. Parker does invent a plantation mistress who teaches Turner, but he presents that act as a single instance of resistance within the larger framework of a system that forbids it. Parker also shows the way masters attempt to use religion as a method of control. Nat Turner ultimately subverts that, since it is his religion that inspires his rebellion. Nonetheless, the film accurately depicts the way some masters tried to use religion to support slavery. At least for part of the film, Samuel Turner hires Nat to other farmers and planters for the purpose of preaching a pacifying proslavery religion to the people they have enslaved. Parker even depicts the kindness of individual masters as another mechanism of control. The benevolent Samuel Turner plays this role; whenever Nat Turner witnesses the brutality of slavery he first turns to Samuel for help rather than turning to rebellion. Of course, in the end, none of these mechanisms ultimately worked for Nat Turner, but they did for a while and certainly had a pacifying effect for a time on some others. Ultimately, of course, the film is really focused on the failure of the mechanisms masters used to control the enslaved population. It is centrally about the collapse of a system. But in that sense, it is misleading, since we know the system did not collapse in 1831—it lasted for more than another three decades. VB: This, to me, was one of the more interesting portrayals. Slavery did rest on violence and the threat of violence, and that has had a huge influence on the culture of the American South, among both white and black southerners. The one sadistic plantation owner may have been a little over the top, but we do know there were horrible sadistic masters who tortured slaves. The film personalized the violence perhaps too much. Turner reacts to the rape of his wife and to being whipped, rather than lashing out against a lifetime spent accepting his treatment as a slave, finally having enough of this treatment, and believing that perhaps security was lax and there was an opening for a revolt. The film would be more effective if his master remained a “good” master throughout. As pointed out, that would have made it more in line with the Confessions, that Turner was attacking the system of slavery, not just exacting revenge for mistreatment. And as also pointed out, it would have been nice if somehow there was a hint of stories of Haiti, or Gabriel, or Vesey circulating with Turner when he was growing up. The film failed to give a sense of how extraordinary the rebellion was, of how rare such events were. There was not enough time discussing the strategy of the revolt or a full sense of the savagery of either the rebellion itself or the counter-savagery afterward (the film needed to show that many of the enslaved persons killed had taken no part in the rebellion) and how the South reacted to it—it was the 9/11 of its time, with all sorts of new restrictions on black folks—fast forwarding to the Civil The Birth of a Nation 81

War was too much of a leap; it should have stuck in the 1830s, or maybe included a discussion among enslaved persons, circa 1860, of Turner’s legacy. JCH: The portrayals of slavery seem stock and familiar to historians well-versed in both film and print: blood-stained cotton bolls make their appearances in all recent films about slavery. The scars from whippings are graphic. The use of the bit and forced feeding are stomach-churning. But for the uninitiated, The Birth of a Nation powerfully portrays the routines and norms of day-to-day life in a slave society: unrelenting labor, violence, terror, deprivation, class conflicts that divided whites and blacks, gender conventions that structured the lives of men and women, struggles over religion, and fights for control over the lives of black people. The Birth of a Nation effectively captures the full range of violence and terror on which slave society rested. It also conveys convincingly the reasons outright rebellions were so few and far between. RK: How might educators best use this film in class? What might you recom- mend in regards to introducing the film and contextualizing it for students? What do you feel is the single most important issue educators should focus on? CS: Nate Parker’s film could prove useful for courses on slavery, as it portrays enslaved people with dignity and respect, as thinking individuals. Particularly moving is Nat’s love and devotion for his wife, Cherry, and hers for him. It might be interesting to have students read Thomas Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner and compare its depiction of Turner and the revolt to Parker’s. To address the gaps in the film regarding enslaved women’s experiences, college-level instructors could pair it with a female slave narrative, such as Harriet Ann Jacob’s (Linda Brent) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, or assign Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage.17 To problematize Parker’s idealization of Turner as a lone, heroic figure of slave resistance, I would assign Anthony E. Kaye’s fascinating essay on the importance of slave communities and neighborhoods in the revolt, “Neighborhoods and Nat Turner: The Making of a Slave Rebel and the Unmaking of a Slave Rebellion.”18 Daniel Rasmussen’s American Uprising has restored the history of an earlier and larger slave revolt than Turner’s (although Turner’s killed more whites than any other rebellion in the United States).19 It would be illuminating to view and discuss Parker’s biopic in the larger context of the history of other slave revolts in U.S. history or compare it to slave uprisings outside of the United States.

17. Harriet Ann Jacob’s (Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: The Author, 1861). 18. Anthony E. Kaye, “Neighborhoods and Nat Turner: The Making of a Slave Rebel and the Unmaking of a Slave Rebellion,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Winter 2007): 705–20. 19. Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). 82 Civil War History

Parker’s film succeeds in framing Turner’s rebellion as a bid for freedom and as a rational response to the violence of slavery, as opposed to lawlessness and anarchy. For history courses that also cover the twentieth century, Parker’s film could help students reflect on other historic moments of African American protest that resorted to violence, such as the “race riots” in cities like Harlem (1935 and 1943), Detroit (1943 and 1967), and others that erupted between 1965 and 1968 and consider whether these “riots” may be better understood as rebellions. Regardless of the approach, I think it would help students’ comprehension if they were first shown Parker’s documentary, Rise Up: The Legacy of Nat Turner, which provides some much needed context for understanding Turner’s rebellion and also raises significant questions about this historic event and Nat Turner’s place in public memory.20 The documentary includes interviews with educators, social workers, public historians, and scholars and features performances by spoken word artists, such as the rapper Loaded Lux, about the legacy of Nat Turner. Viewing the documentary before the film would enable students to critically evaluate and reflect on the cinematic narrative of The Birth of a Nation and could lead to a more substantive discussion about Parker’s goals and objectives for the film and the role film can play in shaping public consciousness about the legacies of slavery and this revolt. Seen through this lens, the films could be used in tandem for a course on film and history or a course on African Americans and film. The documentary is hosted by writer, director, and actor Roger Guenveur Smith, who also plays the house servant Isaiah in The Birth of a Nation. It provides essential historical context for the rebellion’s significance as well as for current contemporary controversies and debates over which American revolutionaries are commemorated and which are consigned to the dustbin of history. The documentary raises important questions not addressed directly by the film about the problem of mediated texts, like Gray’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and the racial politics of commemoration not just in the South but in national narratives as well. And it faces head-on hard questions about the continuing legacy of black oppression by the forces of law and order, connecting the history of slave patrols to racial profiling by police. I plan to use the documentary for my course on public memory and public history. The documentary includes excerpts from Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), along with interviews with descendants of Nat Turner, one of whom now owns a cotton farm, and also a descendant of one of the few white survivors of Turner’s rebellion, a pregnant slaveholder who was saved by one of her female slaves.21 Rick

20. Rise Up: The Legacy of Nat Turner, directed by Bengt Anderson (National Geographic, 2016). 21. Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia (Richmond, Thomas R. Gray, 1832). The Birth of a Nation 83

Francis now works for the Southampton Historical Society, the repository of arti- facts pertaining to the revolt, including Nat Turner’s sword, and his conversation with Smith is riveting. This reference to the slaves who didn’t join Turner and who helped save the lives of their masters raises interesting questions about what explains their actions; this could lead to a fruitful discussion with students about the range of slaves’ responses to Turner, also discussed by Kaye. KG: The film is powerful and provocative. But since it deviates so much from the historical Nat Turner, educators should supplement its screening with original documents and works by historians. Suggested new books include the second edition of Kenneth S. Greenberg’s edited volume, The Confessions of Nat Turner with Related Documents (2016); Patrick Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (2015); and David F. Allmendinger Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (2014). Also helpful on the issue of how our society has treated the memory of Nat Turner ever since 1831 is the film I cowrote and coproduced with Charles Burnett and Frank Christopher:Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002). It was broadcast nationally on PBS.22 The most important thing to teach students about this film is that it is largely a work of fiction but that when studied carefully along with historical works it is a work of fiction that can tell us many true things about the past. The characters, the dialogue, and much of the plot are inventions of Nate Parker. Yet the film moves us emotionally and tells us much about violence and rape in slavery, about the mechanisms by which masters controlled enslaved people, about the nature and impact of resistance to slavery, about rebellions, and more. But educators should keep in mind that the film does not speak for itself and cannot stand alone as a work of history. VB: Perhaps it would be best to use this film, first, in discussing the relationship to art / historical fiction and history. Parker’s film has to be taught alongside Con- fessions, if or when it is taught. Maybe even David Walker’s Appeal, too. Perhaps with Styron’s novel Confessions of Nat Turner, which I used to teach against Wil- liam Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Authors Respond.23 It might do well to show that the major question back in the late 1960s and early ’70s was whether a white writer could understand the black perspective. And what did Styron do to a black

22. Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner with Related Documents (New York: Macmillan, 2016); Patrick Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015); David F. Allmendinger Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014). 23. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles (Chapel Hill: Documenting the American South, 2011); William Clark Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner; A Novel (New York: Random House, 1967); John Henrik Clark, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Authors Respond (West- port, CT: Greenwood, 1968). 84 Civil War History hero when he made him a Hamlet-hesitant, intellectual, instead of a macho man of action, etc. So you might ask, what has the African American artist Parker done to a black hero, or how is he trying to portray a black hero in 2016? Second, this is an ideal way to get historiography into the classroom. I would use the film not with a lecture on slavery per se but on how historians have interpreted slavery and ask students why they have interpreted slavery in different ways at different times and what sources each group of historians has used to make its arguments. One might begin with the white Georgia historian U. B. Philips and his “school house of civilization” and also discuss paternalism that Genovese later incorporated and put into a Marxist perspective—and all of the state studies of Phillips’s students who used mainly Phillips’s methodologies and the white planters’ sources.24 Then introduce Kenneth Stampp and his challenge using runaway ads from newspapers and the descriptions of the scars from whippings and brandings and other mutilations, and Stampp’s argument against paternalism. And include the famous statement from Stampp’s preface, that “Negroes are, after all, only white men in black skin.”25 Then draw in Stanley Elkins’s attempt to break up the rather sterile debate between Phillips and Elkins with a comparative approach and his famous, or infamous, concentration-camp analogy and the internalization of the “Sambo” image.26 Then use Orlando Patterson’s early work and, especially, John Blassingame’s work The Slave Community, Herbert Gutman, Sterling Stuckey, Larry Levine, and variants like Genovese with paternalism.27 This was my grad school generation of writing about slavery; we argued for a slave community, as I did in In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. And now, Orlando Patterson, in reaction to those of us who challenged the black matriarchy thesis, has asserted that revisionist arguments about slavery, such as mine, are “an intellectual disgrace, the single greatest disservice that the American historical profession has ever done to those who turn to it for guidance

24. Ulrich B. Philips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1927); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1972). 25. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956), vii. 26. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chi- cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959). 27. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1977); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought, from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978); John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979). The Birth of a Nation 85 about the past and the etiology of present problems. Indeed, in many ways this denial of the consequences of slavery is worse than the more than two centuries of racist historiography that preceded it.”28 The development of the newer slavery studies school around Peter Kolchin argue—wrongly, I believe—that my generation overdid the community school of slavery and downplayed the violence and harshness of slavery and the divisions within the black community, the alcoholism, the black-on-black violence, the spousal abuse. This newer emphasis on the harshness of slavery or the divisions among African Americans in the their community is especially well done by the latest generation of scholars of slavery—Kathy Hilliard, Jeff Forret, Larry McDonnell, and Ed Baptist, for example—and I would argue brings some nuance and other emphasis but still within a slave community school of interpretation.29 JCH: The movie’s shortcomings reflect the shortcomings of so many big-screen Hollywood films. Most characters are one-dimensional. The good guys are good; the bad guys are unambiguously bad (Nat’s owner, Sam, is perhaps the only mul- tidimensional character in the movie.) Men are the heroes; women, the helpless and mostly silent victims. Viewers first meet Nat’s wife, Cherry, at a slave auction where the seller makes it clear that she will make a fine concubine. Nat intervenes, persuading his owner to purchase Cherry, saving her from sexual exploitation. Later in the movie, the rapes of two women—Cherry and Ester (his friend Hark’s wife)—serve as two of the three incidents that lead to the choice for rebellion. In the film, Nat and Hark’s decision to lead an uprising is inseparable from their decision to reclaim their manhood, which slavery and subordination have stolen from them. The film revolves around the responses of men, rather than women, to

28. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1998), xiii. (See Eric Foner, “The Crisis Is Within,” review of Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood, New York Times, Feb. 14, 1999, 12.) For a listing of what Orlando Patterson believes are the “best of the counterrevisionists,” see 286n34. He cites female scholars, relying especially on Deborah White, Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995), and Brenda Stevenson, “Distress and Discord in Virginia Slave Families, 1830–1860,” in In Joy and Sorrow: Women, Fam- ily, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900, ed. Carol Bleser (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 103–24. Stevenson’s own book is Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). 29. See, for example, Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014); Jeff Forret, Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2015); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Lawrence T. McDonnell, “Money Knows No Master: Market Relations and the American Slave Community,” in Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society, ed. Winfred B. Moore Jr., Joseph F. Tripp, and Lyon G. Tyler Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988), 31–44. 86 Civil War History slavery’s horrific sexual violence. More broadly, this is a work written by two men in a genre that appeals to young male audiences. These are shortcomings too often inherent to the genre; the film fails in all the ways that Hollywood blockbusters do. This is not a good film. It works hard to cast itself as a standard Hollywood action film: tragedy gives birth to a hero; the hero resists; the hero dies in the face of insurmountable odds. The plot devices are standard and formulaic, even clunky and ham-handed. This movie has been made many times before with different settings, different heroes, and different outcomes. The Tuskegee Airmen–inspired Redtails (in which Parker played a leading role) comes immediately to mind, as do other historically based films, especially Mel Gibson’s The Patriot and Brave- heart. There is much truth in one reviewer’s title, “Braveheart for Black People.” Whereas Gibson’s William Wallace bellows “Freeeeedom,” Parker’s Turner thun- ders “Reeeeebellll.” The shtickiest of Hollywood shtick fills this film.30 Nonetheless, there is something to be said for a feature film portraying Nat Turner as an action hero who meets a tragic fate. The Birth of a Nation might fail as art and history, but the critics ask far too much of a single film, made by a first-time producer, intended to reach a wide audience and a younger generation. Parker set out to tell a story about Nat Turner and slavery in a generic Old South, and he did a mighty fine job at that. It’s the kind of movie my students spend $10 to see on weekends. Parker didn’t produce “Braveheart for Black People” so much as he made “Braveheart with Black People,” for whites, blacks, and everyone else. We need more movies like this. In a few years, I expect that a third or so of my students will have seen the movie. For better or for worse, film plays an enormous role in forging collective historical memories. Much of the plot and the details will be forgotten soon after viewing. But in its ability to convey essential truths about racial subordination and slavery, violence and terror, The Birth of a Nation succeeds. Indeed, I expect that “Reeeeebellll” will echo in the heads of more than a few students when I introduce Turner and his rebellion in my classes. The Birth of a Nation also removes some of the taboo that still surrounds discussions of race and slavery in the classrooms of those of us who teach in schools with predominantly white middle- and working- class student populations. That’s something we can build on, and for that, we should be glad that Nate Parker made this movie. Indeed, I look forward to seeing Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Denmark Vesey on the big screen sooner rather than later. It will give me and my students one more place to begin our examinations about race and slavery.

30. Alden Young, “Braveheart for Black People: A Review of Birth of a Nation,” Black Perspec- tives (the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society), Oct. 25, 2016, http://www. aaihs.org/braveheart-for-black-people-a-review-of-birth-of-a-nation/. The Birth of a Nation 87

: Finally,RK is there meaning behind the title, especially as it relates to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation? CS: In interviews he gave prior to the film’s wide release, Nate Parker made it very clear that his intention was to supplant D. W. Griffith’s pro-Confederate film, which glorified the birth of the Ku Klux Klan as a defense against the im- minent dangers of “Negro rule” and cemented racist caricatures of black identity in the public mind. “The business of Hollywood,” Parker observed, “was built on the propaganda of D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation. . . . I wanted to put a spotlight on this film—what it did to America, what it did to our film industry, what it did to people of color with respect for domestic terrorism. There’s blood on that title, so I wanted to repurpose it. From now on, The Birth of a Nation is attached to Nat Turner, one of the bravest revolutionaries this country has ever seen.”31 Parker is not the first black filmmaker to engage in this type of cinematic intervention with Griffith’s film. Most recently, in 2004, Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, created a remix titled Rebirth of a Nation, which added an original score to the film, performed by the Kronos Quartet, along with computer graphics intended to disrupt Griffith’s narrative. Parker’s film successfully repurposes the title by portraying Nat Turner’s rebellion as the birth of black nationalism and self-determination and by connecting it to the rebirth of the United States as a result of the Civil War. But other films more effectively serving as a direct rebuttal to the images and the ideology contained in Griffith’s 1915 film. In a course I teach on the history of African Americans and film, I pair Griffith with independent filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, a “race” film from 1920 that intentionally counters, both visually and nar- ratively, The Birth of a Nation. Micheaux’s sophisticated silent film negates Griffith’s propaganda and even signifies, by incorporating, as Griffith did, historical details to help authenticate the film as a historical narrative and by addressing competing claims to the truth from white and black perspectives. From a more contemporary vantage point, Cheryl Dunye’s brilliant film The Watermelon Woman (1996) interrogates more broadly the longstanding relationship between Hollywood and Confederate mythology by deconstructing the image of the “Mammy” through a satire of plantation school films and the creation of its own mythopoesis. With The Birth of a Nation, Parker joins a long tradition of African American artists using their craft to tell truths about black history that were excised, omitted, or written over, and the film adds much-needed images of blackness and black lives still largely underrepresented onscreen. It serves as an essential counter-archive

31. Jada Yuen, “The Birth of a Nation’s Nate Parker on Directing the Biggest Movie in Sundance History and Its Message,” Vulture, Jan. 28, 2016, http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/nate-parker- the-birth-of-a-nation-dw-griffith.html. 88 Civil War History of images of black identity and as a counternarrative of American history. In this way, it can be understood, along with films like Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, as a political intervention in cinematic form. In an interview, Dash and bell hooks discuss the absence of onscreen portrayals of blackness that black people could relate to; black audiences, and black women in particular, have been “starved for those images.” As hooks explains, as part of “our efforts to decolonize and liberate ourselves as black people, or any other oppressed group globally, we have to redefine our history and our mythic history as well.”32 Parker’s film begins with a physical and symbolic space slaves have claimed for themselves, away from the plantation, at a secret meeting where the language and spiritual practices from West African nations are practiced and where, as a young boy, Nat Turner, is initiated, through the rites of the community, as a future leader. With images like these, of culture and community, and by retelling the history of Turner and the revolt, Parker’s film works to redefine not only African American history but also the history of the United States as a nation of paradox. KG: The 1915 The Birth of a Nation was a deeply racist extravaganza that has long been considered a classic. It was the first feature film, the film that gave birth to Hol- lywood. It was a production that included for the first time many of the techniques that became standard in the industry. Films before Griffith’s mammoth epic had typically run fifteen to thirty minutes. Griffith’s film had a running time of three hours. Before The Birth of a Nation, the dominant technique of filmmaking was still rooted in the conventions of theater, with a stationary camera filming actors as if they were on a stage. Griffith moved his camera in ways that added excitement and visual spectacle. He also used multiple cameras and put the finished film together in the editing room, creating scenes in which cross-cutting between cameras added tension to the drama. Moreover, The Birth of a Nation was a spectacular box office success. It was ad- vertised on giant billboards all over the country; in the South, special trains brought patrons from rural areas to watch the film in cities; and in many locations usherettes wore period costumes and a full live symphony orchestra supplied the music. Even today, many university courses on the history of American film begin with the story of the birth of Hollywood along with a screening of The Birth of a Nation. It is a sad commentary that the origins of our film industry begin with a film so deeply enmeshed in our troubled racial history. The film tells the epic story of the Civil War and Reconstruction—but through a now long-discredited interpre- tive lens that dominated the era’s historical thinking. The heroes of the film are

32. “Dialogue between bell hooks and Julie Dash,” Apr. 26, 1992, in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust: Making of an African American Woman’s Film (New York: New Press, 1992), 41, 32. The Birth of a Nation 89 members of the Ku Klux Klan. They ride to the rescue of white women threatened by black men intent on rape—saving the white South from racial mixture and from domination by African Americans. These racial fantasies dominated white thinking during this era of segregation, and The Birth of a Nation gave them vivid visual representation. Not only did this film mark the birth of Hollywood, it also stimulated the rebirth of a nearly defunct Ku Klux Klan. By 1920, hundreds of thousands of Klansmen marched through Washington DC, no longer worried about removing their hoods. We can only admire Nate Parker for appropriating the title The Birth of a Na- tion. If ever a title deserved to be taken for a new purpose, this was it. Consider the timing and circumstances: it was shortly after the hundredth anniversary of the release of the Griffith film. Given the subject matter of Parker’s work, the common title of the two films would compel writers to connect them and to write about the racism of the earlier film instead of just focusing on its technical achievements. Moreover, shortly before Parker’s film premiered at Sundance, for the second year in a row Hollywood failed to nominate any African American for a major Academy Award. Here was a vivid illustration that the racism so intensely present at the moment of Hollywood’s birth in 1915, was also intensely present a century later. Parker had written, directed, produced, and starred in this new The Birth of a Nation, and, given the early reception of the film, he was identified as the African American who could win one or many Academy Awards in 2017. Of course, the hopes for Parker’s film were unrealistic from the beginning. Cer- tainly, we can admire Parker’s intention to question the historic place of the original 1915 film. But this was a low-budget production. It was an independent film, and Parker struggled to raise the production money—he just barely succeeded through the force of his own moral commitment and personality. The subject matter of the film was not the epic story of the Civil War and Reconstruction but a single rebellion of enslaved people. At the end of the film, Parker awkwardly tried to connect the rebellion to the Civil War, but the correlation is strained. Parker clearly hoped to tell the story of the birth of a black nation in contrast to the Griffith’s story of the birth of a white nation, but his film never made clear how a single rebellion connected to the founding of a nation. Moreover, the film included no major filmmaking innovations; in fact, it used many of the techniques Griffith invented. And Parker was not an established star whose name alone could draw a mass audience. The rape controversy that sur- rounded him further undercut his audience appeal. Hence, most importantly for a feature film hoping to displace the 1915 The Birth of a Nation, Parker’s work was a failure at the box office. The film received no Academy Award nominations. But it did leave a legacy. Now, if you search on the internet for The Birth of a 90 Civil War History

Nation, the first listings include more links to information about Parker’s film than to Griffith’s. The film has also has raised consciousness about Nat Turner. It has added to the interest in books about Turner and in the Nat Turner Bible currently held by the Museum of African American History in Washington, DC. It has also added intensity to the search for the bodies of the rebels hanged in Courtland (once Jerusalem) and now buried in unmarked graves. Perhaps one day the town will have a memorial to the rebellion. Perhaps one day the nation will appropriately honor the enslaved people who sacrificed their lives for freedom. VB: Of course, we think D. W. Griffith was referring to both the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and then, in the larger meaning of the film, the birth of the nation through Reconstruction and the coming together of the nation after the Civil War. The nation comes back together through white supremacy. The original version of the film opened with slave ships bringing enslaved Africans to the United States and concluded with African Americans being shipped back to Africa. It is interesting that President Woodrow Wilson, no mean historian himself, who had lived in Columbia, South Carolina, as a youngster during Reconstruction, was a friend (they were graduate students together in political science at Johns Hopkins University) of Rev. Thomas Dixon, author of the 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the basis for the movie. Wilson, who segregated the federal government and Washington, DC, screened W. D. Griffith’s classic film in the White House and endorsed it. Then you have Parker’s film coming out when the United States has its first African American president, and right before he is replaced by a president who campaigned explicitly against that president’s accomplishments, even arguing that his predecessor was not an American citizen or at least was not born in the United States. And, of course, the Nat Turner film also comes after the horrible massacre by white supremacist Dylann Roof at the Mother Emanuel AME church and all the soul-searching about who we are as Americans following the massacre and in the turmoil of police killings of African Americans and the Black Lives Matter movement. I think one can extrapolate that the Nat Turner film is suggesting that slavery and the violence in all its manifestations, black and white, as well as exploitation are part of what makes the birth of a nation, and here I think he means the United States, not, as Steve Hahn implied in his terrific book, A Nation under Our Feet.33 We probably cannot really be sure why Griffith chose this title for his film, and we can be even less sure why Parker did. I liked the title of that old biography by

33. Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003). The Birth of a Nation 91

Stephen Oates, The Fires of Jubilee.34 Or perhaps, with a nod to Malcolm X, it could be titled “The Autobiography of Nat Turner.” One of the things that strikes me in evaluating the film is that it sometimes sounds as if Parker’s The Birth of the Nation is less a response to Dixon/Griffiths The Birth of a Nation and more one to Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner and the great cultural and intellectual battle spawned in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Styron’s novel appeared, the slave community historiography was just developing, but now Orlando Patterson and Peter Kolchin are saying we had gone too far, so either Parker had read Patterson and Kolchin or does not know the slavery community school that within the interstices of slavery African Americans created space to move around and reject the negative stereotypes whites were so eager to provide for them (the old Elkins theory).

34. Stephen Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).