Dr. Murray describes her talk:

Contra Nationis Natum

Two of the chief architects of the cultural infrastructure of the Jim Crow era were Thomas Dixon Jr. (January 11, 1864 – April 3, 1946) and D. W. Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948). At the dawn of the twentieth century, Dixon, a preacher and politician, had emerged on the literary scene as the White Southern novelist and playwright. He aimed at cementing white racial solidarity across class lines in the post-reconstruction era by shoring up the white supremacist ideology of Jim Crow in his novels and plays. Dixon’s notorious “The Reconstruction Trilogy,” The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden –– 1865–1900 (1902), The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907), were instant best sellers that perpetuated the myth of the “Lost Cause” and the “Black Rapist.” The novels were wildly popular, as were the lynchings and racist terror that they incited. Dixon adapted the storyline of the trilogy into a play that D.W. Griffith famously spun into cinematic gold in his epic film, Birth of a Nation. The extent to which the White supremacist vision of America presented in the novels and its adaptations for the stage had become normalized by the time Griffith produced Birth of a Nation  in 1915 is evident from the fact that the film premiered in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. 

Nevertheless, the erection of Jim Crow in the South and the spread and normalization of White supremacist ideology generally did not emerge as the way to prevent the empoverished, whose numbers were growing in the wake of the Gilded Age, from finding their power through solidarity without resistance from anti-racist writers, artists, and activists. In this lecture, Dr. Jackie Murray looks at the reception of antiquity in the literature, theatre, and cinema of Charles Chestnutt, Kelly Miller, W.E.B Du Bois, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston in their attempt to undermine the White supremacist collective memory of the reconstruction era that Dixon, Griffiths, and the like were concocting to contribute to the naturalization and justification of the racial and class divisions in America, divisions that were becoming increasingly unmanageable for wealthy elites and politicians at the turn of the 20th century.