The film “Birth of a Nation” has a character for almost every stereotype imaginable.  Its extremely negative view of free blacks is just one of these stereotypes, and it’s easy to overlook other biased depictions, such as the cavalier or the pious white woman.  Free blacks, cavaliers, and the pious white woman were all portrayed negatively through the eyes of today’s society, even though the original audience of the film agreed with all the portrayals and admired the latter two.

        The first free black shown in the film is Stoneman’s mulatto housekeeper, Lydia.  Lydia is shown “brimming with lust and rending her clothes in a sexual frenzy” (http://www.filmsite.org/birt1.html).  This stereotype of free blacks as oversexed also manifests itself in the character of Silas Lynch, the mulatto chosen by Stoneman to lead the blacks.  In one of the first scenes with Lynch, he is ogling Stoneman’s daughter Elsie, repeated throughout the film until the climax where Lynch manhandles Elsie, trying to force her to marry him.  The former slave, Gus, who chases and causes the death of Flora, is another example of the oversexed black.  Power-hungriness is the other major stereotype of free blacks.  A subtitle labels Lynch as “a traitor to his white patron and a greater traitor to his own people, whom he plans to lead by an evil way to build himself a throne of vaulting power.”  The freed blacks use their new power to intimidate whites from the elections
and to force white women into marriage.  These two stereotypes of the free black are strong images of what Southern white must have feared most during the
Civil War and after.  The laziness, stupidity, and disrespect of the free blacks shown in the reenactment of Congress only reinforce old stereotypes held from the days of slavery.  The old stereotypes represent another fear of what could happen if a lazy, stupid, and disrespectful race was able to rule through brute force and sexual drive, and uphold the popular feeling of racism.

        The people of 1915 must have thought the cavaliers in this film were noble and honorable, upholding family values and white supremacy, but today these
characters can be seen otherwise.  The characters of the cavaliers, Ben and Dr. Cameron, have a twisted sense of justice.  The formation of the Ku Klux Klan proves that their American value of liberty and justice is completely off-base.  The “fair trial” of Gus is a prime example.  The silent film format doesn’t allow for the actual proceedings to be heard, but the trial is held at night, without a government-appointed judge, and an all-white jury.  The judge is most likely the prosecutor, and the final outcome is the lynching (and cut from the film, castration (http://www.filmsite.org/birt3.html)) of the black man.  The portrayal of a cavalier doing these things in the name of honor (and in disguise) creates a negative image, for me at least, of the cavalier as the upper class, intellectual, and honor-bound man of the South.  The popular image of the cavalier in this film is completely perverted.

        The white women of this film are also negatively portrayed according to today’s standards. First is Margaret, who upholds the family honor first by breaking off her relationship with Phil, who was on the side of the Civil War that killed two of her brothers.  At the end of the film, however, Phil’s shooting of a black man while helping Margaret and her father escape changes Margaret’s mind about him and she marries him  at the end of the film.  Next there is Elsie, who supports her father’s pro-black ideals, even breaking off her engagement with Ben because he is a member of the anti-black Ku Klux Klan.  Elsie becomes a hypocrite when Lynch
proposes marriage and she is horrified.  Elsie and Margaret are racists by today’s standards, going back on family honor to support those ideals.  Only
Flora truly upholds the popular ideal for Southern women by refusing to let a sexual relation tarnish her family’s good name, but her motivation is also
racist in nature.  Perhaps to the original audience, Margaret, Elsie, and Flora were noble and honorable, but in today’s society they are passive and
fickle, upholding whatever ideals the men in their life uphold.

       In all cases, free blacks, cavaliers, and white women would be viewed as typical of popular image in 1915 and earlier.  The actions of the cavaliers and the white women would be viewed as honorable and admirable, although today they would be viewed as racist.  The stereotypes of the free blacks are more of what the whites feared, and are the most blown out of proportion stereotypes in the film.  All of the stereotypes work to create an image of  the South as a land where white supremacy was needed for peace and the romantic plantation life to reign.

Katie Spofford