Jack Johnson and DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation

[APerno]

Jack Johnson was such a powerful icon for his day that his marriages drove a script change in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

In the original work, The Clansman, Dixon (the author) had a freed slave named Gus attack and brutally rape a 15 year old white girl named Marion Lenoir; distraught over the rape Marion then commits suicide by throwing herself off a cliff.

In 1914 (the year of the film’s production, not release) Griffith rewrote the script. Griffith realized that the fear of miscegenation (mixed blood) had become, to white supremacy, a far greater fear than black on white violence.

This fear was driven by Jack Johnson who in 1912 had his first white wife Etta Duryea commit suicide (shoot herself) when Johnson left her for another white women, Lucille Cameron. Lucille Cameron and Johnson were married the same year.

IMO Griffith saw an opportunity to play on the miscegenation fear Johnson was fostering by changing the character of ‘Gus’ from a brutal rapist to a clueless black man who thought he would be ‘allowed’ to fall in love and marry a white woman.

Instead of raping Flora Cameron (Griffith switched characters) Griffith’s ‘Gus’ confronts Flora in the woods, doesn't rape her, but instead proposes marriage. Flora (Cameron) now distraught by the thought that a black man would think her a candidate for marriage, commits suicide by throwing herself off a cliff. (Yes, it is a pretty weird film.)

It is pure coincidence that both Flora (Griffith’s character) and Lucille (Johnson’s second white wife) were both named Cameron. The Cameron family were already prominent characters in the original Dixon novel, which he wrote a decade before Lucille Cameron had become a publicly known person.

But on the other hand, it was Griffith’s decision in 1914 to write the original character Marion Lenoir (rape victim) out of the scene and replace her with the character Flora Cameron (marriage victim). One can only guess what Griffith was thinking.

Jack Johnson was such a powerful social figure that he drove the plot line of a film most historians call the first great epic film.

BTW It is a common mistake to think that Griffith changed the ‘rape’ to a ‘marriage proposal’ because of censorship. The film was in production in 1914 and the 'Fatty Arbuckle scandal' and subsequent Hays Code were still seven years in the future. In 1914 Griffith was functioning free of any censorship.

[BroughtonRulesRefuge]

- Interesting Perno, but I never saw the JJ connection to the film and you never made it by DWs own admission.

I get agitated over modern revisionists still fighting over the civil war when most of the records are well documented. DW interpreted history thru his own self as we all do, but being from Texas that fought off all Union excursions with as motley group of volunteers as ever existed in time, I know the mainstream story is lacking in balance.

Abe's assassination marked a century of deprivation of black and white in the south and marked the beginning of the national corruption and ham handed imposition of the Feds on everyone and the genocide of the western Indian.

Everyone should share the blame, but of course certain groups want to blame a specific group that never washes.

I've traveled this land in most all states and find folks to generally be agreeable even if historically ignorant.

For me the story that never gets told is most of the troops were conscripts with no connection to slavery, proverbial cannon fodder as the combined troops had about a 25% casualty rate all due to a fight with wealthy white Abolitionists and wealthy white plantation owners in the middle of slavery already dying as an economic business.

It didn't have to come to this but the poo stirrers are at it again. The political skunks swapped out stripes with the republican north now in charge of the south of the Mason-Dixon Line and confederate democrats in charge of the north, all still pitting the people against each other.

Is democracy failing when most don't bother to vote because nobody represents them? We're on the cusp, history in the making.

[Caractacus]

never even knew that DW Griffith was a Boxing fan.
(Marvin Hart must have been his favorite boxer I'm guessing)

[Caractacus]