Birth of a Movement

The Birth of a Movement is an informative and mostly accurate PBS documentary centering on a not so well known Boston based scholar and journalist who led an impassioned fight against the popular Griffith epic The Birth of a Nation at a time when the US civil rights struggle was just finding its footing.The accommodationist, compromising approach advocated by Booker T Washington was giving way to a more radical strategy argued for by W E B Du Bois, who had been a fellow Harvard graduate with the film,s subject (William Monroe Trotter) .After the film opened in Manhattan, Trotter tried to get Boston,s mayor Curley (later the hero of the Ford film The Last Hurrah) and a three member censorship board to cancel the Massachusetts premiere.In this aspect the documentary brings up the disturbing topic of the First Amendment and free expression even for offensive content.Talking heads give good context,especially when Vincent Brown tells us, "some of our greatest cultural products have also been some of our worst."