Film History, 32.4, pp. 1–32. Copyright © 2020 Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/filmhistory.32.4.01

S A S H A C R AW F O R D – H O L L A N D

The Birth of a Nation in Canada: Black Protest and
White Denialism across Canada’s Color Lines

ABSTR ACT: This study investigates how The Birth of a Nation’s Canadian exhibition and

reception shaped Canada’s racial formation during a decisive period of nation building.

The notoriously racist film took Canada by storm despite national mythologies founded

on principles of equality and compassion. While Black Canadians grounded their protests

against the film in patriotic ideals, white Canadians brandished those ideals as evidence of

the protests’ redundancy. Analyzing historical discourse in mainstream newspapers, the

Black press, trade publications, and censorship documents, I investigate how seemingly

benevolent, Canadian modalities of racism enabled this white-supremacist film to triumph

north of the border.

KEYWORDS: The Birth of a Nation (1915), transnational, reception, Black activism,

Canadian audiences, censorship, World War I, national identity, anti-Black racism, white

supremacy, liberalism

“We see in the United States what grave problems may arise from the
presence of a race unable to become full members of the same social
family as ourselves.”

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Ca na da
(Liber a l), 19

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“The long history of anti-Blackness in Canada has, for the most part,
occurred alongside the disavowal of its existence.”

Roby n M ay na r d, w riter, activ ist, a nd educator, 201

7

In recent years, racist events in Canada—from police killing Black and Indig-
enous people to evidence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wearing blackface
and brownface—have grabbed international headlines and provoked national
conversations about Canadian racism. Yet efforts to dismantle racist systems
have been repeatedly hindered by those who dwell on the more elementary

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question of whether Canada or its institutions can be accurately described as
racist, especially when compared to the United States. This recurring incredulity
at the prospect of racism in Canada occurs because it contradicts widely cher-
ished mythologies of Canadian equality and compassion. As Cheryl Thompson
argued in the aftermath of Trudeau’s blackface scandal, “acknowledging the
reality—that we have race issues in Canada—would mean we’d have to admit to
the world, and to ourselves, that we haven’t lived up to our own mythology.”1 This
essay examines a part of Canada’s racist history: the exhibition and reception
of D. W. Griffith’s notorious epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) across the coun-
try. The rapturous response to this explicitly white-nationalist American film
demonstrates that virulent anti-Blackness was a sanctioned and central feature
of popular entertainment in Canada from 1915 to 1917. But in order to explain
how white Canada could embrace Birth’s Southern Confederate ideology, I argue
that subtler, Canadian modalities of racism were integral to its flourishing north
of the border. I find that patriotic denialism is neither a new nor an innocent
phenomenon but has a long history of obstructing racial reckonings and insulat-
ing white supremacy through its obstinate adherence to Canada’s superficially
admirable myths.

As film historians know well, The Birth of a Nation consolidated nascent
cultural, economic, and formal features of the commercial film industry that
has since become known as Hollywood. It is commonly regarded, explains
Linda Williams, “as the film in which the movies themselves were born.”2 Birth
narrates a white-supremacist version of the Civil War and Reconstruction
according to which the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) rescued the white South from the
anarchy of Black emancipation. Griffith animates a cast of blackface carica-
tures and misogynistic tropes popularizing structures of difference that have
continued to populate film screens for more than a century. Most notoriously,
Griffith conjures the threat of Black male sexuality to authorize the lynching
of Black men and the domestication of white women. Birth famously catalyzed
the twentieth-century rebirth of the KKK, and more insidiously, its recounting
of the Civil War on the fiftieth anniversary of the South’s surrender fortified
an incipient racial order in 1915 America. Based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel
The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth racialized the
system of cinematic expression that Griffith had developed over the previous
decade by equating the rescue of a damsel in distress to the rescue of the white
nation. During a moment when the contours of whiteness were being extended
to include certain European immigrants, Birth erected Blackness as a threat
against which an unstable white identity could cohere. While radical in its
industrial, cultural, and aesthetic contributions to cinema, Birth’s ideology
was not considered to be politically extreme by most white people who saw the

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film; it simply crystallized and perpetuated the racial tropes that were coming
to structure American and Canadian politics alike, becoming the most popular
and profitable film of cinema’s first decades.3

Black Americans and Black Canadians understood that this film was not
only offensive but also endangered their lives. In mounting challenges to Birth’s
exhibition, they shared resources through a growing number of institutions
dedicated to combatting racial oppression in each country. However, import-
ant differences between Canada and the US also distinguished these protests
and the responses to them. Birth produced a fantasy of Blackness that seemed
to demand white domination, exemplifying a tendency throughout American
history to manage racial discord through explicit hierarchy; it was primarily by
underscoring the film’s danger to a fragile social order that African Americans
successfully argued for bans in certain regions. By contrast, Canadian mytholo-
gies inherited from British imperial ideals furnished the grounds on which Black
Canadians could make claims to national belonging. They opposed Birth in
overtly nationalistic language that drew sharp distinctions between the reality
of American racial tyranny and the promise of Canadian freedom.

White Canadian defenses of Birth were articulated in nationalist terms
as well and took precedence over protestors’ grievances. Their forms of patriotic
dismissal demonstrate how overt white supremacy was complemented by a dis-
tinctly Canadian brand of racism that operates through denial and conditional
inclusion. In the United States, protests against Birth were met with defenses
of the right to free speech; in Canada, they were met with assurances that the
violence depicted onscreen was a foreign problem. These rebuttals exemplify
two distinct national traditions of racism: while hate speech in America is
conventionally justified as an expression of freedom, accusations of racism in
Canada are typically deflected on the circular basis that Canada is not a racist
country. Birth’s explicitly white-nationalist call to arms was ushered through
Canada by this latter, more insidious form of white supremacy so committed
to national myths of egalitarianism that it refuses to acknowledge when reality
contradicts those ideals. By tracking the interplay of Black grievances and white
disavowals across Birth’s Canadian premieres, I find that the compulsion to
romanticize Canada and deflect accusations of racism south to the US has long
obstructed any earnest engagement with the histories and present of anti-Black
violence in Canada.

This essay departs from previous accounts of Birth’s Canadian exhibition
and reception, situating this episode as a contest over the wartime emergence of
national ideals that both structured and disavowed Canadian anti-Blackness.
Melvyn Stokes has outlined Birth’s Canadian exhibition to demonstrate that
the film itself changed as it traveled internationally, altered by regional censors’

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cuts, bilingual intertitles, and a compensatory epilogue.4 This article builds on
Stokes’s comparative approach to Birth’s textual instability by examining how
paratextual elements adapted this supremely American film to Canadian ide-
ologies. In another account of this history, Greg Marquis shows that Canadian
reactions to Birth reflected Black Canadians’ exclusion from the supposedly
egalitarian promises of citizenship.5 This analysis must be extended to attend
more completely to the discourses that Black Canadians mobilized against Birth
and to the grounds on which their grievances were dismissed; only then can
we understand how specifically Canadian formations of race and racism were
being negotiated through Birth’s journey northward. As I illustrate in the first
section, press and exhibitors made the film resonate in Canada by highlighting
its relevance to a nation that was defining its own ethnonational identity during
this period. Next, I examine how Black Canadians protesting Birth made claims
to national belonging that reflected their circumstances as formerly enslaved
people oppressed in a nation that imagined itself to be a safe haven from racial
terror. The subsequent section demonstrates that white Canadians dismissed
these claims by investing in a set of possibly well-intentioned but fundamentally
harmful discourses that idealized Canada and ignored its reality while adorning
white supremacy with a benevolent façade. Finally, as I trace Birth’s rhetorical
legacy in Canada, I show that this maneuver by which liberal ideals shroud racist
realities was a chronic trademark of nation building during this critical period
in the construction of Canadian identity.

CINEMATIC NATIONALISM

Birth’s Canadian runs were among its most successful outside the United States.
Despite initial concerns that its American story would not appeal to Canadian
audiences, Birth played in every major city and many towns throughout Can-
ada, filling theaters, hockey arenas, and town halls to capacity and breaking
countless audience records.6 As in the US, Birth was exhibited in opulent ven-
ues that elevated cinema’s cultural status, accompanied by a traveling staff of
mechanics, cutting-edge projection technology, live sound effects, and a thirty-
piece orchestra. Promotional materials framed its presentation as a singular
cultural event: the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” “the greatest art conquest
since the beginning of civilization,” “so far beyond anything our stage has ever
known that the usual avenues of comparison do not offer a road to follow in this
instance” (fig. 1).7

Griffith’s distribution company, Epoch, booked Birth’s premiere in
Ottawa before selling exclusive Canadian exhibition rights to Basil Courtney’s
Basil Corporation.8 A weeklong premiere run began on September 13, 1915, after
which Courtney launched simultaneous road-show exhibitions from Toronto

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Fig. 1: Advertisements for Birth’s premiere run in Toronto. (Toronto Globe, September 15, 1915, 2;
Toronto Star, September 25, 1915, 12; Toronto Star, October 2, 1915, 7)

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and Montreal. Birth’s Toronto debut defied expectations, repeatedly filling the
1500-seat Royal Alexandra Theatre to capacity. The theater’s manager com-
pensated an incoming production to cancel their show so that he could extend
Birth’s run to three, then four weeks.9 Crowds of hopeful spectators lined up at
the box office every day of the extended run and were often turned away, break-
ing records in a city where traveling theatrical attractions had never stayed
longer than two weeks.10 Moving Picture World marveled at Birth’s “triumph
in a city which boasted it would never accept two dollar pictures.”11 Within a
few months, the film had played to more than 30 percent of Toronto’s popula-
tion—a record “never before attained here by any production, no matter how
big.”12 Concurrently, audiences packed the Montreal Arena—one of the first
dedicated hockey arenas, which a “small army” converted into a theater after
a fire destroyed Birth’s intended Montreal venue, the Princess Theatre.13 This
suspected arson provoked “considerable gossip” and a police investigation, hav-
ing occurred the day after Black Montrealers met to organize their opposition
to the film, though the resolution they adopted only expressed an intent to use
“legitimate” means to prevent the screening.14 More than twenty thousand
Montrealers saw Birth during its first week, which was extended to three. The
following month, it played at the brand-new Théâtre Saint-Denis with, “for the
first time in the whole world,” both French and English intertitles.

15

Following these parallel triumphs, Birth traversed the country. Courtney
sometimes traveled with the production, receiving enthusiastic welcomes when
he did.16 The Toronto show toured through southwestern Ontario before head-
ing east through Quebec to Atlantic Canada. The Montreal production traveled
west to Ontario and through the Prairies to British Columbia. The shows then
meandered through smaller cities and towns, allowing the film’s reach to extend
well beyond urban audiences. Canadians in rural areas made use of specially
chartered transportation or traveled independently to small theaters nearby.17
Across the country, newspapers promoted the film’s educational value and
theater managers arranged special rates for school groups, leading a grateful
child in Nova Scotia to reflect that “this was a special favor as they do not let us
go into town often.”18 Advertisements for The Clansman populated Canadian
newspapers (including a list of “Breezy Vacation Reading”) and Birth became a
paragon of success commonly referenced in the promotion of other films.19 By
January 1918, after multiple transcontinental trips, Birth had been viewed by
more Canadians than “any other presentation, either film or speaking.”

20

Trade publications detailed Courtney’s triumphs and reported regularly
on the Canadian records Birth broke to demonstrate that the film was “an
inexhaustible gold mine” (fig. 2).21 Although he was primarily a banker with
few long-term connections to the film industry, Courtney’s enormous payoff

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on this risky investment demonstrated to Canadian exhibitors that select films
could pack theaters for years of repeated showings.22 Birth also inspired the
establishment of dozens of Canadian feature film production companies.23
Its white-nationalist message may have contradicted Canadian principles of
equality, but it stimulated an emerging domestic industry struggling against
American monopolies. While skeptics had initially doubted Birth’s Canadian
appeal, its record-breaking engagements across Canada indicated that “the
thrilling intensity of the work of the Ku Klux Klan” captivated viewers on both
sides of the border.

24

Fig. 2: Advertisement targeting prospective exhibitors in 1924 by highlighting that nine years
after its release, Birth could still draw packed houses in Toronto. (Exhibitors Trade Review,
December 13, 1924, 3)

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But Birth was not simply a profitable spectacle in Canada; it was a priv-
ileged site for the construction of national identity during a pivotal moment in
Canadian history. Exhibition and publicity practices reframed the film’s signifi-
cance so that it could present what Paul Moore calls an “imported nationalism”
by adapting a foreign cinematic tradition imbued with patriotic significance
(the American epic blockbuster) to a new national context.25 Birth’s national
premiere was held at the annual Central Canada Exhibition in Ottawa, the
nation’s capital, where promotional materials distinguished the film’s exhibi-
tion as a Canadian achievement that would contribute an “important innova-
tion” and “big improvement” to the fair’s entertainment programming.26 When
it played in smaller cities with all the trappings of prestige, Birth became a
source of local pride.27 It is remarkable that Griffith’s ode to white America
could so seamlessly be made Canadian, given Canada’s ideals of toleration and
history of anti-Americanism inflamed by US neutrality in World War I. However,
like British audiences, Canadians recognized their own national struggle in
Birth’s realistic depiction of war, which supplemented a dearth of images from
Europe’s frontlines.28 Birth even circulated as a recruitment device in Canada,
with appeals for enlistment projected onscreen throughout its premiere run in
Ottawa.29 From Saint John’s Opera House to Winnipeg’s Walker Theatre, Birth
played in venues that doubled as recruitment halls, linking the film’s call to arms
to the nation’s.30 In Toronto, officers paid for thousands of soldiers training at
Exhibition Camp to see the film before being deployed.

31

Griffith’s tale of a nation forged through war anticipated Canada’s expe-
rience in World War I, commonly marked as the crisis through which Canada
grew truly independent from the British Empire. Today’s Canadian passport
features the words of Brigadier General A. E. Ross reflecting on the 1917 Battle of
Vimy Ridge when all four divisions of the Canadian Corps first fought together
and defeated the German Army: “in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of
a nation.” Canadian leaders have often repeated that phrase, underscoring that
the war cohered a sense of unique Canadian nationhood. Similarly, Griffith’s
title expresses the notion that America emerged as a unified nation through the
reassertion of white supremacy that followed the Civil War. Griffith adapts this
premise from US President Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People,
which he quotes throughout the film. Wilson was the first Southern president
since the Civil War and, like Griffith and Dixon, sought to overcome lingering
divisions between North and South by articulating a new nationalism that—as
one of the film’s most notorious intertitles puts it—would bond “former enemies
of North and South … reunited again in common defense of their Aryan birth-
right.” Even Birth’s contributions to the art of montage, implementing parallel

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editing at an unprecedented scale, were dedicated to expressing how clashing
elements could be united through shared antagonism.

Whereas Birth’s American tale failed to engage Australian audiences, its
form of cinematic nation building resonated in another sprawling settler colony
striving to outgrow its imperial progenitor.32 Sarah-Jane Mathieu has shown
that in the late nineteenth century, rural Canada and the American South had
a great deal in common, including tenuous new governments charting paths to
modern statehood through “white supremacy as a rational model of modernity
and civility.”33 Birth dramatized these histories by reminding white audiences
of the racial groundwork on which their societies had predicated progress.
While rural Canada resembled the South, urban Canada romanticized it in
cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy. Canadian blackface performances,
popular in official theater houses and community spaces such as high schools
and churches, adapted American nostalgia to speak to local anxieties about
modernization and immigration. Thompson demonstrates that these perfor-
mances “delineate[d] real and imagined boundaries of belonging” to Canada
by caricaturing Black people as premodern relics of a simpler time who were
“out of place in the industrialized north.”34 Likewise, Birth—as an emblem of
technocultural modernity mobilized in service of a lost past—assuaged anxiet-
ies about a rapidly modernizing nation and its growing immigrant population
with a narrative of ethnonational futurity. During this period, Birth and World
War I presented Canadians with concurrent opportunities to solidify the porous
boundaries of national belonging.

While Michael Hammond suggests that British interpretations of Birth
downplayed its racial messages in favor of wartime themes, the Canadian case
illustrates the extent to which these discourses were entangled.35 In 1915 and
1916, Black Canadians protested Birth while fighting for the right to enlist, seen
as an opportunity to prove their eligibility for the rights and responsibilities of
citizenship. They were initially prevented from joining the Canadian military
and, as the need for reinforcements grew, were eventually authorized to form
a segregated construction battalion.36 An estimated half of its recruits were
African Americans who had fled Jim Crow only to serve in a segregated army
that starkly revealed the limits of Canadian inclusion.37 Unlike French censors
and a small British opposition who worried that Birth would stoke hostility
against the colonized Africans in their ranks, Canadians enlisted the film to
support their war effort.38

For example, in Winnipeg, censors made cuts due to concerns that “the
sight of women crying over … their husbands going to war” would hinder recruit-
ment efforts.39 Rather than reject the film, nationalists repurposed its emotional
force. They held a recruitment night at Winnipeg’s largest theater the evening

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before Birth premiered there in November 1915. Military bands and marching
soldiers worked the audience up “to a condition of intense patriotic emotion”
so that they were “in a receptive mood” when a church leader “delivered an
impassioned speech on ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ giving a vivid and realistic depic-
tion of one’s feelings while viewing the magnificent production,” followed by an
appeal for recruits and a speech from the mayor.40 This event fused Canadian
militarism and American white nationalism into a melodrama of duty. Williams
explains that Birth connected “new feelings about race to equally new feelings
about national identity.”41 Canadians then transposed those composited emo-
tions to their context, producing the nation as an object of feeling that must be
guarded against its constitutive others. As Marquis demonstrates, World War
I recruitment efforts in Canada employed similar rhetorical strategies to Birth,
evoking fears that defeat would result in German colonization of Canada and
mass rape of Canadian women.42 Birth superimposed these two anxieties by
merging racial and sexual paranoia so that the threat to the patriarchal family
analogized the threat to the white nation, both of which demanded the same
response: violence. Promoters emphasized that Birth conveyed both a “pictorial
record” and “the spirit” of “War as it actually is,” inviting viewers to identify a
documentary appeal in its battle scenes.43 But it was less Birth’s depiction of
the Civil War than the ensuing race war—the reassertion of white supremacy
during Reconstruction—that offered a template to white Canadians struggling
to define their emerging nation’s identity through this period of national crisis.

BLACK PROTEST

Black Canadians responded to the danger Birth posed by demanding and per-
forming full citizenship. In 1915, the vast majority of Black Canadians were
descended from refugees formerly enslaved in the United States. Their histo-
ries have often inspired Canadians to mythologize the nation as a safe haven
of freedom from American racial tyranny, drawing on anti-Americanism to
authenticate myths of Canadian benevolence. In migration narratives about
the so-called Black Loyalists or the Underground Railroad, Black Canadians
are characterized as foreigners in a welcoming nation rather than citizens who
have contributed to and been persecuted by it for centuries. For Rinaldo Wal-
cott, Canadian Blackness names an ambivalent “brew of desires for elsewhere,
disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile.”44 Potential pleasure
has long been tempered by disappointments in a nation that has practiced
all-too-familiar forms of anti-Black racism, from enslavement to segregation to
brutal policing. While Canadian white supremacy was not as violent in the 1910s
as it was in the American South, this was not, as Mathieu has shown, “for want
of trying” on the part of white Canadians.45 Eliding the similarities between

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Canada and the United States, the narrative of emancipatory migration north-
ward functions in national mythmaking as a source of denial that discursively
produces Canada as sanctuary by hyperbolizing the meaning of the border. As
we will see, relentless comparatism and historical amnesia have coalesced into
a powerful force entrenching Canadian anti-Blackness.

In the early twentieth century, Black and Indigenous people were deemed
unfit for citizenship even as diverse groups of white settlers were being enfolded
into an emerging national culture. Nonetheless, Canada’s abolitionist legacy and
imperial identity based on British principles of civility and fair play suggested
to many Black people that they might one day be meaningfully recognized as
equal citizens. Despite ubiquitous discrimination, they mobilized the language
of patriotism, Canadian exceptionalism, and imperial subjecthood to challenge
the contours of Canadian belonging. When Black Canadians heard that Birth
was scheduled to play across Canada, they conveyed their dissent in overtly
nationalistic terms.

Protests organized through churches and community networks were
registered against the film in all of Canada’s most populous cities, including
Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Halifax, as well as
smaller cities such as Saint John and Windsor. The extent of these protests is
itself remarkable because Canada’s relatively small Black population possessed
little political power and risked retaliatory violence in speaking out. However,
they recognized that Birth’s widespread circulation would imperil their oppor-
tunities and endanger their lives. The film glorified the KKK, promoted lynch-
ing, and featured white actors in blackface depicting Black people as barbaric
and sexually violent. The effects of this slander were exacerbated by Griffith’s
innovations to a relatively new and realistic medium and his inclusion of his-
torical facsimiles that contributed to Birth being received as historical fact.
The danger was further compounded in Canada because demographic realities
and segregationist policies ensured that most white Canadians living outside
of major cities had only ever encountered Black people as villains in popular
folk tales and political rhetoric.46 Birth threatened to synthesize those fantasies
into a visually authenticated historical narrative. As Anna Everett succinctly
puts it, these “moving pictures literally signified matters of life and death.”47
Black Canadians aimed their appeals at elected officials and censor boards that
were explicitly tasked with defending Canadian nationalism against American
cultural imperialism. With few avenues of dissent available to them, protestors
invoked palatable values such as nationalism and morality, imploring white
Canadians to live up to their national ideals.

In Toronto, Black organizers held a meeting on September 16, 1915, in
anticipation of Birth’s premiere on the twentieth. They read a telegram from

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Ottawa, perhaps from G. K. Vernon, who had recently urged Ottawa’s Board of
Control to cancel Birth’s premiere for depicting “the black race in a way which
was most undesirable.”48 The telegram warned to “endeavor to stop if possible”
because Birth’s racism “should not be tolerated in a country where liberty, jus-
tice, and equality are not mere bywords.”49 The Canadian Observer published
reports on the meeting and short opinion pieces that employed nationalis-
tic reasoning to advocate that the film be censored. One contributor wrote:
“We are here, under the British flag—emblem of Liberty and Right wherever it
floats. Whatever may be allowed to the south of us is no reason for the same to
be perpetrated here. The British flag is its own leader and does not require to
learn from others void of backbone the right and wrong of things. Cut it out.”50
Another writer insisted that the screening “must be stopped in Canada if she
is to remain worthy of the British flag that flies over her domains.”51 Drawing
their moral authority from an imperial flag that “in theory represented racial
equality,” these writers aligned their cause with allegiance to the empire under-
girding Canadian nationhood.52

Other Black dissenters articulated the specifically Canadian nationalism
that grew more prominent over the course of World War I. Windsor teacher Ada
Kelly wrote: “Our Canada once held out its arms of protection to the slave. Will
this same Canada rise up and protect the children of this liberated people? We
are peaceful, law-abiding citizens and love our Canada, and do not wish the
discordant features of the ‘Birth of a Nation’ to break our harmony with the
other race.”53 Similarly, in Montreal, Reverend Arnold Gregory reasoned: “If it
is forbidden in the United States,” as it was in a few jurisdictions, “how much
more reason is there that it should be forbidden in Canada, to which our people
fled for safety when persecuted in the United States?”54 Invoking the history
of crossings that furnished Canada’s myth of compassion, Gregory, Kelly, and
others advocated Birth’s censorship on patriotic grounds while challenging the
nation to fulfill its own fantasy of racial equality.

Black institutions burgeoned during this era in Canada and the US and
were in frequent communication with one another, sharing tactics, funds, and
occasional success stories.55 The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) led the American fight against Birth, raising the orga-
nization’s public profile during this period. The NAACP received applications for
assistance from Black Canadians working to prevent local premieres and may
also have taken a page from its Canadian allies when in 1917, as the US entered
the war, it began voicing arguments against Birth as patriotic calls for national
unity. 56 Birth ironically strengthened Black political networks as activism grew
increasingly transnational, though local circumstances continued to inform
what tactics would be most effective.

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Like the NAACP, Black Canadians warned that Birth would incite vio-
lence. Speeches at a Montreal protest emphasized that the film threatened “in
a most dangerous fashion to raise race feeling against the negro to the point of
hatred; to glorify the doings of the Ku Klux Klan;” and “to justify the lynching
of the negro.”57 Gregory analyzed descriptions of the film to demonstrate that
Birth was historically inaccurate “in the most deadly manner.”58 Milton Fuller,
a barber who headed Vancouver’s Negro Christian Alliance, wrote on the com-
munity’s behalf: “Canada does not wish to see her citizens lynched, shot and
burned by low-browed, half-witted individuals defying all law and order. Yet
this shameful outrage will become a matter of history in Canadian national
life if the picture-play called ‘The Birth of a Nation’ is allowed to be exhib-
ited throughout Britain’s most promising oversea dominion.”59 Whereas Black
Americans warned that Birth would cause underlying social discord to surface,
Black Canadians made patriotic appeals to whites who conceived of racist vio-
lence as a foreign problem that might disruptively invade Canada’s social order.

Despite this palatable rhetoric, only allies in Halifax and a white lawyer
in Winnipeg answered calls that the protest “not only be made by our people,
but by all who call for Canadian idealism and for the rights of man.”60 In the
western provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, the social con-
sensus was especially anti-Black. Refugees who had recently fled segregation,
disfranchisement, and violence in Oklahoma were met by an outpouring of
hostility from whites demanding that Black migrants be excluded and expelled
from Canada.61 Protestors in these regions resorted to placing their faith in
the neutrality of Canada’s institutions. In Winnipeg, they lodged complaints to
local councils and officials, hoping that a protest “based on the ground of moral
principle” would see “ justice … take its course.”62 For Black people in the Prairie
Provinces to voice such seemingly normative appeals required incredible cour-
age amid threats of deportation and extrajudicial violence.

British Canadian patriotism was unlikely to build support for a margin-
alized cause in Quebec, regarded as a culturally endangered Catholic and fran-
cophone minority within Canada. When Black Quebecers protested Birth, they
often deployed the language of morality instead, which made their grievances
legible to the censor board’s Catholic priorities. Tapping into contemporary
fears about cinema’s moral influence on urban populations, they exploited the
ambiguous definition of obscenity to foreground Birth’s violations of Catholic
taboos. Black leaders presented Quebec’s chief censor with a community res-
olution against the film, expressing their “emphatic protest” against Birth’s
tendency to “promote racial antagonism and to defame the character of the
women of our race.”63 The board’s president “promised to keep the complaint in
mind” and later mandated cuts to scenes depicting the “pursuit of girl by negro,”

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“colored woman, immodestly dressed, drinking,” and “white girl in the arms of a
mulatto”—racist scenes that contravened Catholic sexual mores.64 While Stokes
is correct to point out that these cuts would eliminate Birth’s most racist scenes,
this is only because Griffith racializes sexuality as a threat to white purity to be
defended through white-supremacist terrorism. While these cuts would have
deprived the film of its ideological fulcrums, some records suggest that the
scenes were shown in Montreal despite censors’ objections.65

Black Canadians raised their opposition as a matter of patriotic concern
by mobilizing discourses of nationalism, civility, and morality to frame Birth as
an affront to Canadian ideals. That their demands were largely dismissed should
not be taken to suggest that they were unsuccessful, as some have argued.66
These efforts deployed a form of critical patriotism that underscored and worked
to close the gap between Canadian myth and reality while strengthening Black
community organizations and networks across Canada. Insisted Gregory: “Even
if our protest does not help any, it will show that we know when we are slapped
in the face.”67

White Canada’s resistance to these forms of appeal demonstrates the
insidiousness of Canadian racism. When a single Black Canadian viewer,
Reverend Cecil Stewart, endorsed the film, its white proponents invoked
the review as permission to ignore the grievances that predominated Black
Canadian discourse about Birth. Stewart expressed “regret that the promoters
and Board of Censors were made to feel that they had been sowing seeds of
dissension” because Birth “is a marvel of production and tends to do honor to
the negro even at the expense of the white man.”68 Griffith’s film provoked dis-
agreement even among Black leaders, reflecting contentious debates over the
means and meaning of racial uplift.69 These debates echoed in Black viewers’
diverse, sometimes contradictory responses to the films they saw. Jacqueline
Stewart emphasizes that Black spectators’ encounters with cinema have always
been open to “a range of possible responses” navigating between seemingly
incommensurable perspectives, especially when a text peddles pleasures that
radically contradict one’s own interests.70 This indeterminacy has been even
more acute for those caught in the ambivalences that Walcott identifies between
the pleasures and perils of being Black in Canada. When Black Canadian com-
munities from Vancouver to Halifax adopted resolutions against Birth, they
presented a consensus negotiated from many perspectives in contrast to Cecil
Stewart’s individual voice. However, many of Birth’s white Canadian proponents
tokenized Stewart’s conciliatory article as though it represented a broadly held
view. In Vancouver, the premiere’s manager countered the Negro Christian
Alliance’s resolution by having Stewart’s commentary republished in a local
paper; the mayor then quoted Stewart during a city council debate at which he

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successfully advocated the film’s approval.71 While Black leaders speaking out
against Birth modeled the kinds of civic concern that their communities were
routinely denied, white leaders tokenizing Stewart feigned such concern to
fortify their positions. As I elaborate in the next section, such gestures enabled
Birth to circulate as a text that was compatible with Canadian civic ideals.

WHITE DENIALISM

E xcavating the g rounds on which Black protests were d ismissed, we
uncover the log ics that have permitted white supremacy to thrive in Can-
ada. A n exceptiona l example was the temporar y ban in Nova Scotia, where
Canada’s largest Black popu lation held some politica l sway. Follow ing a
March 1916 appea l to Ha lifa x’s Board of Control, a mu ltiracia l delegation
v isited the prov incia l government to arg ue that Birth wou ld “prejudice
the minds of the friends of the colored race against a defenceless minorit y
of citizens.”72 A prov incia l censor v isited Moncton to v iew the f ilm and
u ltimately the venue’s president ag reed to cancel the premiere “ in the
interest of good feeling in the communit y.”73 However, this ban seems
to have been partia l and informa l, motivated by electora l politics; April
screenings were held in Pictou and New Glasgow regard less, w ith “spe-
cia l train arrangements” for nearby tow ns.74 By Januar y 1917, a journa list

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Fig. 3: Advertisements for Birth’s belated Halifax premiere. (Halifax [Nova Scotia] Evening Mail,
January 13, 1917; Halifax [Nova Scotia] Evening Mail, January 17, 1917)

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reported v ictor y over the “whims and fancies” of Nova Scotia’s Black pop-
u lation: “Now that the election is over and the present off ice holders w ill
r u le supreme for four years, the ban has been lif ted and ‘ The Bir th of
Nation’ w ill have a triumpha l procession into the cit y.”75 The production
was rushed from Winnipeg—“the longest jump ever made by a theatrica l
company in Canada”—and politicians lef t a private screening unanimous
“that the picture shou ld be show n w ithout cuts of any k ind.”76 Newspa-
per ar ticles and publicit y underscored that Birth wou ld screen in Ha l-
ifa x “w ithout cuts and exactly as g iven in a ll the big cities of Canada”
(f ig. 3).77 Even where Black Canadians w ielded a sma ll deg ree of politica l
power, their safet y was only a concern as long as their votes were.

Characterizing Black grievances as arbitrary and irrational, the jour-
nalist quoted above exemplifies how Canadian gatekeepers excluded Black
political speech from the arena of legitimacy. In Montreal, as in Moncton,
Birth’s premiere was attended by some Black spectators—perhaps aligned with
Cecil Stewart’s politics, perhaps trapped in the paradoxical position of what
Everett calls “informant-spectator[s]” who faced the conundrum of having
to endorse the film at the box office in order to form a credible opinion about
it.78 The Gazette reported that despite their attendance, “there were no audible
expressions of dissent, nor to the unprejudiced observer did there appear to be
ground for any.”79 The notion that Black people were prejudiced against Birth
(not the other way around) illustrates how the issue of censorship became itself
racialized. In his pamphlet The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, self-
published in 1916 to defend Birth against “the root of all censorship”—“In-
tolerance,” Griffith personifies censorship as a “malignant pygmy” that “has
matured into a Caliban.”80 This racialized figure is pitted against the syn-
thesized embodiment of free speech and America: a tall white woman but-
tressed by “reason” and “history” who banishes censors from the state. In what
David Rylance describes as a “masterpiece of rhetorical conflation,” Griffith’s
pamphlet incorporates the binary opposition of censorship versus free speech
into Birth’s racial logic, framing censorship as a contaminant and unbridled
expression as a patriotic virtue that, like Griffith’s paranoid imagination of
whiteness, can be lost if it is not defended.81 White Canadians also disquali-
fied Black thought as being marked by innate, indelible prejudice. As Canada’s
demographic contours stretched to populate expropriated land with settler
bodies, Blackness constituted a limit against which an increasingly diverse
body politic was made to cohere.

Not only was Black opposition dismissed as a menace to civil rights, but
the seemingly equitable discourse of minority rights could also function to
insulate white supremacy. As one columnist noted, Birth’s approval by censors

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was especially contradictory in Quebec, “where there is so much pretence about
safeguarding the interests of minorities.”82 While Quebec’s censor board dili-
gently protected the province’s religious sensibilities from Canada’s majority,
the same concern was not extended to the Black minority within Quebec. The
rhetoric of besiegement that guards Quebecois culture against Anglo-Canadian
dominance ended up legitimating the oppression of minority groups within the
province. (Ironically, the second Klan to which Birth gave rise would become
anti-Catholic and antifrancophone, linked to terror attacks in Quebec.)

As these examples illustrate, Canadian endorsements of Griffith’s white
nationalism were rarely explicitly racist. Instead, officials tacitly affirmed Birth’s
worldview through racially preconditioned rights discourses and practices of
deflection that allowed them to avoid conflict without resorting to explicit rac-
ism. Perhaps the most literal instance of deflection occurred in Toronto, where
a delegation of prominent Black leaders led by politician William Hubbard
raised their objections to Toronto’s chief theater censor, who referred them to
the provincial Board of Censors, which advised that they speak with the Board
of Appeals, who sent them to the provincial treasurer, who was not in Toronto.83
The group eventually met with Ontario’s premier, who referred them back to
the appeal board. Such disregard was unusual for this censor board, featured
in a 1916 nonfiction reel jumping up and down in delight as they watch “40,000
feet (about 9 miles) of rejected film” lit ablaze by Toronto’s fire chief (fig. 4).84
That this film was even made indicates that Ontario censors were usually more
enthusiastic about their vocation.

A similar rationale may have been operative in Windsor, home to a large
Black population who lodged their opposition with municipal and provin-
cial officials and were preparing an injunction when Birth’s planned run was
abruptly cancelled. Despite the legal basis for the cancellation—the manager
defied contractual prohibitions against foreign patronage by advertising across
the river in Detroit—it was suspected that officials were looking to avoid a
racial confrontation.85 “Fight Is Ours,” reported the Canadian Observer.86
Within a year, however, Birth played in Windsor against renewed objections,
with the initial opposition defused and the momentum of nationwide triumph
at its back.87

The most common form of def lection was rhetorical: redirecting
responsibility for Birth ’s racism to the United States. For example, Ontario’s
chief censor explained that Birth “simply treats one period of histor y in
the United States, w ith which neither England nor Canada had any part”
and therefore had “no objectionable features from a national standpoint.”88
Similarly, theater managers remarked that the premiere had no “national
bearing” because “the only troops shown are American.”89 Such justif ications

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Fig. 4: Stills from a short film by photographer William James in which Ontario censors George
Armstrong, Robert Wilson, and John Burns celebrate the ignition of nine miles of censored
nitrate. “[Forty Thousand Feet of Rejected Film Destroyed by Ontario Censor Board] (1916)”
(William James Sr. fonds/IDCISN: 130532, Library and Archives Canada)

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were founded on the assumption that fundamental differences between
Canada and the US inoculated Canadians against American racism. In fact,
Canada’s decentralized censorship apparatus was united under that ver y
assumption: a common mandate to guard Canadian nationalism against
American cultural imperialism. This v iew presupposed the existence of
radical differences between the two countries that must be protected, yet
paradoxically, that putative difference became the ver y premise on which
censors, politicians, and journalists based their defenses of a Canadian right
to enjoy racist American cinema.

Although, as we have seen, Birth’s Canadian paratexts imported its
nationalism north, many insisted that the film bore no relevance to the national
context because it was neither about the present nor about Canada and thus
completely extraneous to Canadian actuality. A writer for the Calgary (Alberta)
Herald claimed that it was “as foolish for the enlightened colored people of the
twentieth century to feel themselves brothers of those depicted in Civil War
times as it would be for Darwin to consider himself a fit companion for a mon-
key.”90 This writer also references an intertitular disclaimer in Griffith’s film:
“This is an historical presentation … and is not meant to reflect on any race
or people of today.” Yet the way that nationalism—and the very concept of the
nation—functions is precisely by glossing over such discontinuities between
past and present, between here and there, to cohere a totality united by a com-
mon geography, history, and future.91 Birth is a master class in the construc-
tion of nationhood; it narrates a myth designed to circulate as a history of the
present and makes groundbreaking use of parallel editing to forge the principle
of simultaneity that Benedict Anderson identifies as an enabling condition
of the national imaginary.92 Canadian performances of nation building from
blackface minstrelsy to Birth’s exhibition grounded themselves in historical
continuity.

Some did promote a more explicitly white-supremacist position. For
instance, an Ontario tobacco industrialist from North Carolina endorsed
enslavement while bemoaning the “cruelty” of having “taught” Black people
“that there is a remote possibility anywhere in the dim distant future that they
shall ever stand on an equal social or political footing with the Anglo-Saxon.”93
Urging all Canadians to see Birth, he threatened Black protestors to “remem-
ber that Anglo-Saxon blood has dominated always and everywhere and that
the Canadian people will not be dictated to by a handful of negroes as to the
nature of the theatrical performances that they will see or hear.”94 Such bigotry
is easy to repudiate. Yet not only was it published by a major newspaper; it
also expresses the very worldview that all of Birth’s tacit supporters helped to
promote.

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For example, we find a very different commentary on Birth in a Toronto
review that echoes the Calgary writer: “No negro who respects himself or
his race will find anything in the recital that he need be ashamed of. Rather
it is cause for pride … that the negro race in little more than half a century
should have risen to the height which the closing pictures of ‘The Birth of
a Nation’ illustrate.”95 These closing pictures are known as the Hampton
Epilogue, culled from a film produced by the Hampton Institute depicting
Black progress since Reconstruction and quick ly appended to Birth as a
means of appeasing American—and apparently, Canadian—censors. The
institute intended this short film to serve as a corrective to Birth ’s disparag-
ing representations of Black people, but it was widely perceived (including
by that reviewer) as being part of the text, as elaborating Birth ’s vision of
white supremacy into a segregated and paternalistic present.96 The epilogue’s
absorption into Griffith’s film illustrates how ideologies of eventual, super-
vised progress simply reinforced Birth ’s worldview. When white Canadians
defended the film by pointing to the epilogue as evidence that racial prog-
ress had been made, and by insisting that Birth ’s distant American past was
nothing like the Canadian present, they ensured that the opposite would
remain true.97 Although ethnonationalist propaganda and ideologies of grad-
ual progress can be discursively counterposed, in practice they worked in
tandem to circulate Birth ’s hateful message and entrench the conditions of
Canadian anti-Blackness.

For white nationalists and white liberals alike, Black protests disturbed
cherished myths about the nation. A “prominent member” of Canada’s Red
Cross insisted that “patriotic societies are not paying any attention to [the
protests]” because “any offence [Birth] could give to the colored people must
surely be slight.”98 Many echoed this view that Black protests against Birth
were not only unwarranted but also unpatriotic, suggesting that placative
stipulations preconditioned Black people’s access to the category Canadian.
Recalling the ways that white Canadians have often been more alarmed by
accusations of racism than racism itself, the mainstream Canadian press
largely characterized Black grievances during this period as threats to civic
order; they narrated American protests against the film as though Birth
threatened to incite Black—not white—political violence.99 By doubly dis-
placing the responsibility for racial conflict onto the United States, then
onto Black people themselves, these accounts reversed protestors’ warnings
to claim that Blackness, not Birth, posed the danger to Canadian society. As
I show in the concluding section, this reversal was not unusual but encap-
sulates how the era’s emerging Canadian ideals were erected on anti-Black
foundations.

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CANADA’S COLOR LINES

As Birth toured Canada, the nation was governed by the Conservative govern-
ment of Robert Borden, who won the 1911 election on an explicitly nativist and
xenophobic platform. Yet the Liberal government of his predecessor Wilfrid
Laurier had already implemented measures restricting people of color’s ability
to immigrate to Canada, even as his administration desperately courted Amer-
ican and European settlers. These measures included efforts to ban all Black
migration to Canada, leading W. E. B. Du Bois to conclude that Canada did in
fact have a color line—traced along its southern border.100 Canada’s superin-
tendent of immigration justified the plan as being “not only in the interest of
Canada, but also in the interest of coloured people themselves,” reframing rac-
ism as humanitarianism by arguing that the exclusion of Black migrants would
protect them from experiencing racism in Canada.101 Whereas Black leaders
worried that Birth would spread American racism around the world, Canadian
government officials were concerned that Black migrants themselves would
bring anti-Black racism across the border. Despite being the custodians of a
purported safe haven, they justified racist border practices—denying asylum to
African American refugees fleeing racial terror—as benevolent actions designed
to prevent racism from being perpetrated against them in Canada. Nonetheless,
rhetorical differences distinguished Laurier from Borden, white liberal from
white conservative. Whereas Borden’s campaign slogan in British Columbia bla-
tantly advocated “A White Canada,” Laurier’s administration worked carefully
to exclude Black migrants without explicitly being racist through a combination
of euphemisms, bribes, and paternalistic platitudes.102 Concurrently, charitable
organizations worried that Black migration would tarnish the nation’s brand
by forcing white Canadians to commit white-supremacist lynchings.103 Like
government officials, they posited racial discord as an effect of Black existence
and anti-Black violence as an inevitable reaction to Black presence. While most
white Canadians did not explicitly condone such violence, many contributed
to its enabling conditions by clinging to nationalist fantasies of benevolence,
civility, and Canadian exceptionalism that suppressed the claims of those who
experienced Canada otherwise.

The color line at Canada’s border was supplemented by internal partitions
that segregated Black Canadians from centers of public life in which the nation’s
civic ideals were coming to be defined. Black protestors underscored the con-
tradictions of Canadian idealism by drawing attention to such practices, explic-
itly relating American racism to its Canadian parallels—something the white
press rarely did. Describing the racial injury inflicted when the “misery of the
terrible years of the past is thrown onto a screen,” a Toronto writer recounted:

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“the white brother, whenever the opportunity seems to offer, fires dirty water in
[the Black man’s] face in more ways than one. He is tabooed from enjoying the
pleasures of a twenty five cent seat in most places of amusement, he is thrown
out thru the back of hotel doors, he is segregated to a corner severely his own.”104
Refuting fantasies of inclusion, this testimony calls attention to the practices of
segregation that structured both American and Canadian modernity. Similarly,
Arthur King, secretary of Montreal’s Union Progressive League, wondered about
the implications of sowing racial conflict while the nation was at war: “Is this
not the time when everything should be done to create solidarity among all
classes and races of the community? Must we, in these days, inform our people
in other parts of the world that we are publicly insulted and humiliated in this
way here?”105 King’s exclusion from the solidarity implied by Canada’s wartime
ideals informed his critical, even internationalist perspective. As Jacqueline
Stewart demonstrates, African American spectators have always had to be crit-
ical viewers, in part because segregated theater seating denied them the kinds
of total absorption predicated on forgetting one’s identity that characterize
classical models of cinematic spectatorship.106 In Canada, segregated theater
balconies contradicted the notion that the racism depicted onscreen was a
foreign problem, just as serving in a segregated battalion attenuated any sense
of inclusion that Black Canadians may have felt in the emerging nation. The
differences between the birth of a nation witnessed from the ranks of Canada’s
segregated army and that viewed from the balcony of a segregated theater were
negligible.

Birth continued to shape the nation that emerged through this period as
the imaginary threat of the Black male rapist became a staple of ethnonation-
alist discourse. While this trope has appeared in Canadian political rhetoric
since being invoked by the nation’s first prime minister, Birth popularized the
narrative that consolidates the sexual and racial dimensions of white patriar-
chal paranoia into a thrilling visual spectacle.107 The figure of the Black rapist
who threatens daughter and nation became a recurring trope used to justify
Canada’s racist border practices and by the 1920s was informing drug legislation
and policing.108 Birth also instigated the rise of the KKK of Kanada, which estab-
lished local chapters in every major city and countless smaller ones, command-
ing political influence in Saskatchewan’s legislature and committing violence
across the nation.109 In 1930, Oakville’s Klan targeted a marriage between a
white woman and a man perceived to be Black who claimed Indigenous heri-
tage; this only begins to indicate how Birth’s logics of negative cohesion could
be configured against other racialized groups—an important area for future
research given the genocidal imperatives undergirding the Canadian project
and the anti-Asian racism structuring the era’s politics in British Columbia.110

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Following a rare effort to prosecute Klan violence in Canada, Ontario judges
denounced the Oakville men’s lawlessness without mentioning race or racism;
Constance Backhouse suggests that these elites objected less to the Klan’s racist
beliefs than to its importation of American problems into Canadian society.111
Even as white-supremacist violence intensified across the nation in Birth’s wake,
Canadian leaders continued to dismiss it as an American problem.

As the KKK’s Canadian membership grew exponentially through the
1920s, a new metaphor was used to describe Canadian diversity: the mosaic.
This term has come to emblematize national ideals such as multiculturalism
and inclusion that seem diametrically opposed to the white supremacy of the
Klan. However, in its originary articulation as a metaphor for nation building,
the mosaic was to be constructed of tiles “from British stock or from among
the more readily assimilable peoples of Europe.”112 When the roots of Canadian
multiculturalism were being sown, it was not a posthierarchical fantasy but
rather a technique of governance self-consciously borrowed from the British
Empire to bolster Canada’s image as an independent colonial power and to
manage differences explicitly understood as problems.113 As Richard Day has
tracked, in the early twentieth century this new approach to diversity was
used to justify Canada’s practices of exclusion, deportation, segregation, and
disenfranchisement based on “a desire for unity and identity achieved through
rational bureaucratic action said to be in harmony with liberal ideals.”114 Letting
Birth in and keeping Black refugees out were both seen as ways of fostering such
unity. Whether banning Black refugees from Canada to protect them from rac-
ism or endorsing white nationalist cinema for depicting how far Black people
have progressed, liberal ideals equipped projects of white supremacy with a
benevolent façade. As the case of Birth in Canada illustrates, national ideals
promoting Canadian exceptionalism, equality, tolerance, and civility institu-
tionalized white denialism in the 1910s, so intoxicating to their adherents that
evidence of their fictitious status was to be rigorously disavowed. While these
ideals described a Canadian fantasy opposed to American racial tyranny, in
practice they maintained oppressive conditions while obstructing efforts to
address the material facts of anti-Black racism.

The Birth of a Nation triumphed across Canada despite national myths
founded on Canada’s differences from Griffith’s worldview. Acutely aware of
this gap between Canadian myth and reality, Black protestors practiced a form
of critical patriotism aimed at narrowing it. However, the national ideals that
protestors invoked functioned for white Canadians as reassuring mechanisms
of denial into which even Birth could be assimilated as evidence of social prog-
ress and Canadian exceptionalism. In a duplication of Birth’s scapegoat narra-
tive, white Canadians perceived Black people as unassimilable threats to those

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ideals—not only in their protests against Birth, but across many sites of early
twentieth-century Canadian nation building, from immigration to enlistment
to municipal, provincial, and federal politics. White Canadians leveraged Birth
to experience audiovisual pleasure, to stimulate a burgeoning industry, and to
cohere an emerging nation at the expense of Black Canadians, who began to
invest in different strategies.

In 1919, demobilization delays left the Black battalion and white working-
class Canadian soldiers stranded in British port cities, in impoverished camps
lacking basic supplies. As conditions worsened, newspapers reported that
emboldened Black veterans returning home across the empire were stealing
white women and jobs.115 The lethal blend of patriarchal anxiety and racial
paranoia familiar to all who had seen Birth sparked race riots in the camps.
Although these events were overdetermined by many intersecting factors,
Birth had recently consolidated them in a single cultural text that rationalized
and romanticized anti-Black violence as the necessary response to imperiled
white masculinity—a response legitimated as a noble defense of the nation.
These events prompted Black Canadians to reassess their own investments
in the nation. Canada’s vulnerability to American cultural imperialism has
often fostered, according to Walcott, “a retreat to discourses of nationalism
which become short-sighted in terms of the transnational political identifi-
cations that might be crucially necessary.”116 Although Walcott writes from
a different historical perspective, Black protestors denouncing Birth in the
1910s may also have reiterated those discourses at the expense of the kinds of
“diasporic connectedness and intimacy” that Walcott identifies as casualties
of Canadian nationalism.117 Segregated military service culminating in race
riots disillusioned Black Canadians who had enlisted in the hopes of accessing
equal citizenship only to find that their fellow servicemen might kill them if the
enemy on the battlefield did not.118 These events deepened racial consciousness
among Black Canadians, whose activism became more international and less
conciliatory, defined increasingly by transnational solidarity.119 Campaigns
targeting Birth may have failed to persuade white Canadians against glorifying
anti-Black violence across Canada, but they succeeded in strengthening Black
Canadian institutions, political networks, and imaginaries that would support
the increasing militancy of demands for racial justice for decades to come.

Notes

I am grateful to Ally Field, Jackie Stewart, Simran Bhalla, Emma Pask, and an anonymous reviewer for
their incisive comments on previous versions of this essay. Participants in the Mass Culture Workshop
and attendees of the Film Studies Association of Canada’s 2019 conference in Vancouver also provided

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helpful suggestions. Thanks to Dennis Moore and Elizabeth Price at the Multicultural History Society of
Ontario and Elliott Gish and staff at the Halifax Central Library for their assistance. First epigraph: Quoted
in James W. St. G. Walker, Racial Discrimination in Canada: The Black Experience (Ottawa: The Canadian
Historical Association Historical Booklet No. 41, 1985), 4. Second epigraph: Robyn Maynard, Policing
Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2017), 4.

1. Cheryl Thompson, “Trudeau Survived. Now Stop Pretending Canada Is a Diverse Paradise,” New York
Times, October 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/opinion/trudeau-canada-election-
racism.html.

2. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J.
Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 109.

3. Historical records regarding audience size and total revenue are incomplete; some estimates suggest
that the film has been seen by more than two hundred million people worldwide and, adjusted for
inflation, remains the most profitable of all time. See Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a
Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Picture of All Time” (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 3, 287n1; and Williams, Playing the Race Card, 97.

4. Melvyn Stokes, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” in
The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2019), 76–106.

5. Greg Marquis, “A War within a War: Canadian Reactions to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,”
Histoire sociale/Social History 94 (2014): 421–42.

6. David K. Billings, “‘Birth of a Nation’ Draws Canadians,” Moving Picture World, October 9, 1915, 307.

7. Advertisements, Toronto Globe, September 16, 1915; and Toronto Star, September 11, 1915.

8. Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” 76.

9. E. R. Parkhurst, “Birth of a Nation,” Toronto Globe, September 21, 1915, 6; and “Theatres,” Toronto
Star, October 2, 1915, 7.

10. “Theatres,” Toronto Star, October 2, 1915, 7.

11. Billings, “Birth of a Nation,” 307.

12. “The Birth of a Nation,” Toronto Star, January 6, 1916, 10.

13. “Plans of Princess Unchanged by Fire,” Montreal Gazette, September 24, 1915, 4.

14. “Plans of Princess Unchanged by Fire,” 4; “Princess Theatre Burned in Montreal,” Toronto Globe,
September 24, 1915, 5; and “Colored People Against Film Play,” Montreal (Quebec) Gazette, Sep-
tember 23, 1915, 4.

15. Quoted in Pierre Hébert, Yves Lever, and Kenneth Landry, Dictionnaire de la censure au Québec:
Littérature et cinema (Québec: Éditions Fides, 2006), 84–85, my translation. See also “Stays Another
Week,” Montreal (Quebec) Gazette, October 1, 1915, 3; and “Picture for Third Week,” Montreal
(Quebec) Gazette, October 9, 1915, 14.

16. “B. S. Courtney Here with ‘Nation’ Film,” Moving Picture World, October 28, 1916, 590; and “‘Nation’
Film with Good Orchestra,” Moving Picture World, December 9, 1916, 1536.

17. See “Nation’s Film on Circuit,” Moving Picture World, October 30, 1915, 998; “Film Has Packed Empire
Theatre at Every Show,” Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Star, March 11, 1916, 5; and “Special Trains on
Dominion Atlantic Railway for ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Herald, January 24, 1917.

18. “Why Mae Marsh Is Popular,” Motography, May 12, 1917, 994.

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19. “Breezy Vacation Reading,” Toronto Star, August 1, 1918, 12.

20. “ʻBirth of a Nation’ Makes New Record,” Moving Picture World, January 26, 1918, 553.

21. Advertisement, Exhibitors Trade Review, December 13, 1924, 3; and Harry Kerry, “Are You Kicking
In or Cashing In? Tried and Proved Pictures Are Sure Money Gatherers,” Exhibitors Trade Review,
December 27, 1924, 121.

22. See Paul Moore, Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun (Albany: SUNY Press,
2008), 202.

23. Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939 (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1992), 82.

24. E. R. Parkhurst, “Birth of a Nation,” Toronto Globe, June 15, 1920, 9.

25. Paul Moore, “Nationalist Film-Going without Canadian-Made Films?,” in Early Cinema and the
“National,” ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2016), 159.

26. “Costly Photoplay at Ottawa Fair,” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, August 4, 1915, 7; and “Exhibition
Management Decides to Lower Price Admission to Night Show,” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, August
18, 1915, 2.

27. “As Good as New York,” St. John (New Brunswick) Standard, April 19, 1916; and “The Birth of a
Nation,” Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Saturday Press and Prairie Farm, March 4, 1916, 6.

28. Michael Hammond, “‘A Soul Stirring Appeal to Every Briton’: The Reception of ‘The Birth of a Nation’
in Britain (1915–1916),” Film History 11, no. 3 (1999): 353–70; Stokes, “Transnational and Historical
Perspectives”; “Birth of a Nation,” Victoria (British Columbia) Colonist, November 19, 1916; and “Win-
nipeg Censors Pass ‘Nation’ after Making Weird ‘Cut,’” Motion Picture News, November 20, 1915, 71.

29. “An Appeal for Recruits,” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, September 14, 1915.

30. “Military Night at the Opera House,” St. John (New Brunswick) Standard, March 3, 1916.

31. “Military Men Invited to View ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Windsor (Ontario) Evening Record, October 12,
1916, 10.

32. Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” 91–92.

33. Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870–1955
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 15.

34. Cheryl Thompson, “Locating ‘Dixie’ in Newspaper Discourse and Theatrical Performance in Toronto,
1880s to 1920s,” Canadian Review of American Studies 49, no. 2 (2019): 208, 210.

35. Hammond, “A Soul Stirring Appeal,” 357.

36. See Melissa Shaw, “‘Most Anxious to Serve Their King and Country’: Black Canadians’ Fight to Enlist
in WWI and Emerging Race Consciousness in Ontario, 1914–1919,” Histoire sociale/Social History
49, no. 100 (2016): 543–80.

37. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 107–8.

38. See Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives.”

39. “Winnipeg Censors Pass ‘Nation’ after Making Weird ‘Cut,’” 71.

40. “A Stirring Performance,” Moving Picture World, December 18, 1915, 2228.

41. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 100.

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42. Marquis, “War within a War,” 432.

43. “Film Masterpiece Shown at Arena,” 2.

44. Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003), 27.

45. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 16.

46. Mathieu, 14.

47. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2001), 104.

48. “Objects to Pictures ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, September 10, 1915, 14.

49. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ as Played in Ottawa, Ont,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), September
18, 1915, 1.

50. Remler, “That Photo Film Have It Cut Out It Is Unnecessary,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario),
September 18, 1915, 1–2.

51. “Dixon’s Play a Scene of Skilful Treachery,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), September 18,
1915, 4.

52. Shaw, “Fight to Enlist,” 549.

53. “Held Mass Meeting to Prohibit Play Birth of a Nation,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario),
December 4, 1915, 2.

54. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

55. “Contributions to the Anti-Lynching Fund,” Crisis 13, no. 1 (1916): 16; and “Dixon’s Play a Scene of
Skilful Treachery,” 4.

56. See Stephen Weinberger, “‘The Birth of a Nation’ and the Making of the NAACP,” Journal of American
Studies 45, no. 1 (2011): 92; and Stokes, A History, 229–30.

57. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Causes a Furore,” Ottawa (Ontario) Citizen, September 24, 1915, 5.

58. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Causes a Furore,” 5.

59. “Negro Residents Protest,” Vancouver (British Columbia) World, December 18, 1915, 15.

60. “Skilful Treachery,” 4. See “‘Birth of a Nation’ Barred in Halifax,” Chicago Defender, May 13, 1916; and
“Colored Citizens Making Protest,” Winnipeg (Manitoba) Free Press, November 12, 1915, 7.

61. Mathieu, North of the Color Line.

62. “Colored Citizens Making Protest,” 7; and E. J. Henry, “A Protest,” Winnipeg (Manitoba) Tribune,
November 13, 1915, 4.

63. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

64. “Protest Against Film,” Montreal Gazette, September 21, 1915; and Hébert, Lever, and Landry, Dic-
tionnaire de la censure au Québec, 83–84, my translation.

65. “A Censor’s Range of Vision,” Ottawa (Ontario) Citizen, October 6, 1915, 12.

66. For example, see Arthur Lennig, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Film
History 16, no. 2 (2004): 117–41.

67. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

68. C. A. Stewart, “The Lesson a Clergyman Draws from the Photo Play,” Montreal Gazette, October 5,
1915, 2.

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69. See Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility
of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

70. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 101.

71. “Colored Clergyman Defends Film Play,” Vancouver (British Columbia) World, December 20, 1915;
and “Film Passed by Alderman,” Vancouver (British Columbia) World, December 24, 1915.

72. “Will Not Be Shown in Halifax,” Moncton (New Brunswick) Times, April 6, 1916, 6; minutes of Halifax
Board of Control, March 20, 1916, Halifax Municipal Archives; and “Protest Against ‘The Birth of a
Nation,’” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Herald, March 21, 1916.

73. “Colored Citizens of Halifax Object to ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Moncton (New Brunswick) Times,
March 30, 1916, 8; and “Will Not Be Shown in Halifax,” 6.

74. Advertisement, Pictou (Nova Scotia) Advocate, April 8, 1916, 5; Eastern Chronicle (Pictou, NS), April
7, 1916, 4; and Eastern Chronicle (Pictou, NS), April 11, 1916, 1. Thanks to John MacLeod and Anne
Williams at Nova Scotia Archives for their assistance with this reference.

75. Frederick F. Sully, “Election Now Safe, ‘Nation’ Film Can Show,” Moving Picture World, January 20,
1917, 397.

76. “The Birth of a Nation,” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Evening Mail, January 18, 1917.

77. “The Birth of a Nation,” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Evening Mail, January 18, 1917.

78. Everett, Returning the Gaze, 90; “Bluenose Censor Sees Show in Moncton,” Moncton (New Brunswick)
Transcript, March 30, 1916, 2; and “Film Masterpiece Shown at Arena,” 2.

79. “Film Masterpiece Shown at Arena,” 2.

80. D. W. Griffith, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (Los Angeles: self-pub., 1916), 3.

81. David Rylance, “Breech Birth: The Receptions to D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Australasian
Journal of American Studies 24, no. 2 (2005): 16.

82. “A Censor’s Range of Vision,” 12.

83. “Colored Men Protest Against Film Drama,” Toronto Daily Star, September 14, 1915, 3; “Ex-Controller
after Film,” Toronto Daily Star, September 18, 1915, 5; and “Hearst Sends Inspector,” Toronto Daily
Star, September 20, 1915, 2.

84. William James, “[Forty Thousand Feet of Rejected Film Destroyed by Ontario Censor Board]
(1916),” YouTube video, 1:14, posted by Library and Archives Canada, October 1, 2015, https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=bEyKLtdzg_g. Original available at Library and Archives Canada, William
James, Sr. fonds, 1974–0144, IDC 130532.

85. Jacob Smith, “Failed to Notice Clause in Contract,” Moving Picture World, December 11, 1915, 2044;
and “Cancellation of Film Heads Off Legal Struggle,” Windsor (Ontario) Star, December 3, 1915, 6.

86. “Fight Is Ours,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), December 4, 1915.

87. “Negroes Ask Recensor of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” London (Ontario) Advertiser, October 10, 1916, 5; and
“Military Men Invited To View ‘Birth of a Nation,’” 10.

88. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Not Objectionable,” Toronto Star, September 15, 1915, 2.

89. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Not Objectionable,” 2.

90. “The Birth of a Nation,” Calgary (Alberta) Herald, December 7, 1915, 7.

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91. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

92. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24, 188. Michael Hammond draws this connection in “‘A Soul
Stirring Appeal to Every Briton.’”

93. William Gregory, “Reply to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Says Southerner in Canada of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’”
London (Ontario) Advertiser, November 2, 1915, 6.

94. Gregory, “Reply to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’” 6.

95. “Birth of Nation Beyond Promises,” Toronto World, September 21, 1915, 7.

96. See Field, Uplift Cinema, 151–84.

97. Additional examples of such defenses are recorded in Marquis, “War within a War,” 440; and Stokes,
“Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” 77–78

98. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Not Objectionable,” 2.

99. Paul McEwan comments on this reversal in “Lawyers, Bibliographies, and the Klan: Griffith’s
Resources in the Censorship Battle over The Birth of a Nation in Ohio,” Film History 20, no. 3 (2008):
359.

100. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 39–40.

101. Quoted in Agnes Calliste, “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Carib-
bean, 1900–1932,” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 4 (1993–94): 136.

102. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 42; and Maynard, Policing Black Lives, 36.

103. See James W. St. G. Walker, “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (Waterloo,
ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 127.

104. Remler, “Photo Film,” 1–2.

105. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

106. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 106–10.

107. See Barrington Walker, Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 116.

108. See Maynard, Policing Black Lives; and Emily Murphy, The Black Candle (Toronto: Thomas Allen,
1922).

109. Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999); and James Pitsula, Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in
1920s Saskatchewan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013).

110. Backhouse, Colour-Coded, 173–225.

111. Backhouse, 222.

112. Kate Foster quoted in Richard Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2000), 153.

113. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity. See also Eve Haque, Multiculturalism
within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2012); and Katherine McKittrick, “Wait Canada Anticipate Black,” CLR James Journal
20, no. 1 (2014): 243–49.

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114. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity, 144.

115. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 115–17.

116. Walcott, Black Like Who?, 33.

117. Walcott, 33.

118. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 100–142.

119. Shaw, “Fight to Enlist.”

Sasha Crawford-Holland is a PhD student and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in
the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
Sasha’s writing on the politics of media is published in Television & New Media,
Synoptique, and American Quarterly, and received Screen’s Annette Kuhn Essay
Award for best debut article.

Reproduced with permission of copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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All important details are included in chronological order in the summary and
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Some critical information is missing or incorrectly ordered in the summary and/or inaccurately reflected in the response.

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Style and Conventions

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Focus

Summary is clear and concise; response includes a thesis that is relevant to the reading; target audience
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Paragraph Development

Paragraphs are connected to a main idea (thesis) and cohere as distinct units; topic sentences are used to maintain focus and connect logically to each other; audience profile is either incorporated into the response
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separate
paragraph

audience

Development

Points are

Points are

Points are only

There is no

and Support of

supported with

occassionally

supported with vague

support for

ideas

specific

supported with

examples; ideas are not

claims; ideas are

examples. Ideas

specific examples;

fully explained or

not clearly

are explained

ideas are not

supported; there are

explained; no

fully. Necessary

always fully

problems with logic and

acknowledgement

context is

explained; there are

connection between

of audience

provided for

problems with the

argument and evidence;

reader

way quotations and

audience needs/interests

comprehension.

praphrases are

are occassionally

Quotation,

integrated;

addressed

paraphrase, and

audience

summary are

needs/interests are

used effectively;

addressed most of

audience needs

the time.

are addressed

Organization

A clear principle

There is a vague

The organization of the

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and Structure

of organization

principle of

assignment is unclear or

oganization of the

is maintained.

organization; parts

confusing.

assignment

Assignment

are not always

structure

clearly connected.

maximizes the

overall purpose.

Transitions and

Details in both

Ideas are in logical

Ideas are in random

Ideas are not

Connections

the summary

order but not

order and not always

connected

and the response

always clearly

logically connected;

logically in any

are logical and

connected with

transitions are only

way; transitions

clearly

appropriate

used occassionally

are not used

connected;

transitions

and/or inappropriately

between

transitions are

sentences or

always used

paragraphs

effectively

between

sentences and

paragraphs

Documentation

APA format is

APA format is used

APA is not consistently

There are no

Style and

used correctly

correctly most of

used in the assignment;

citations used in

Conventions

throughout the

the time; there may

there are problems with

this assignment;

assignment;

be problems with

the way source

there is no

References are

the way citations

information is cited

bibliography

cited in-text and

are integrated

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in a correctly

and/or cited both

this will result in

formatted

in-text and in the

a failing grade).

bibliography

bibliography

included at the

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Grammar and

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>10 grammatical or

Multiple grammar

Punctuation

and punctuation

punctuation

punctuation errors

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correctly

correctly most of

errors; >15

throughout

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