The complicated narrative of Birth of a Nation needs to be placed in two distinct historical eras. The first involves the time portrayed in the movie, roughly from the 1850s to the 1870s. The second involves the time when the narrative was created, roughly from 1905 until 1915 between the years that Dixon's novel was published and Griffith's film was released. Each of these time periods had its distinctive historical issues that inform the meaning of the movie.

To address issues of the first time period, the viewer must ask: How accurate is Griffith's portrayal of the pre-war South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction after the war?

Many of these interrelated topics are subject to historical debate. For example, Griffith's depiction of slavery reveals racial stereotypes that suggest African Americans were happy to be slaves. Such a view conflicts with evidence that many blacks resisted slavery, actively and passively. During the Civil War, slaves were quick to escape from their masters and sought safety behind the lines of the Union armies. After the Civil War, ex-slaves eagerly searched for their lost families (especially relatives who had been sold away), attempted to achieve economic independence, and built African American cultural institutions separate from their former owners. [See American Journey, "Condition of Women in a Rural District."]

Griffith's portrayal of government corruption during Reconstruction also conflicts with some historical evidence. For instance, Birth of a Nation ignores the immediate postwar years, 1865-66, when whites took control of the southern state governments, used violence against freed slaves, and enacted "Black Codes" to restrict their political, economic, and social rights. Thus the initial "agony" of Reconstruction, much lamented by Griffith, could not be attributed to black misrule. Equally important, in no southern state did blacks exercise complete political power. Only in South Carolina did blacks gain a majority in the state legislature. The law to end the prohibition of interracial marriage, described in Birth of a Nation, was part of an effort to eliminate all racial distinctions. Nor does the film pay homage to several prominent black legislators who served honestly and without antipathy to whites. The celebration of the knightly Ku Klux Klan also neglects the terrible violence committed against innocent people of all colors. Finally, the portrayal of Austin Stoneman as Thaddeus Stevens is largely fictional; the congressional leader had no children and never visited South Carolina.

The historical context of the period 1905-1915 is equally important to understand the meaning and place of Birth of a Nation. After federal troops left the South in 1877, ending the era of Reconstruction, white political leaders appealed for racial unity to restore white control of the former Confederate states. This return of white leadership came at the expense of African Americans who had voted qualified blacks into public office and sometimes held the balance of power between the political parties. Whites used intimidation and state laws to deprive most blacks of the right to vote. [See American Journey, Excerpts from Studies in the South.] The disenfranchisement of southern blacks coincided with the passage and enforcement of state laws that segregated blacks from whites in nearly all aspects of public life. [See American Journey, A Defense of the Negro Race.] In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of "separate, but equal" in the Plessy case, permitting segregation in railroad cars, and other public accommodations such as schools, toilet facilities, and drinking fountains. [American Journey, Plessy.] Woodrow Wilson, whose writings were often quoted in Birth of a Nation, took credit for ordering the segregation of federal buildings in Washington, D.C.

As a son of the South, Griffith supported the principles of segregation and believed that the United States should be a country of white persons. He considered the importation of Africans the prime cause of the political conflicts between the North and the South. That is why he described the end of Reconstruction and the emergence of white leadership in the South under the Ku Klux Klan as "the birth of a nation."

For African Americans, however, white rule often meant violent suppression. Failure to comply with racial segregation, or even slight violations of social customs that forced all blacks to defer to all whites, could result in arrest, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and death. After 1890, whites increasingly resorted to lynching and public burnings to enforce black subordination. That was why the Ku Klux Klan could use Birth of a Nation to recruit new members. And that was why African Americans and other reformers objected to Griffith's heroic portrayal of the Klan and attempted to suppress the film.

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