Tom Rice, “White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan” (Indiana U. Press, 2016)

New Books in African American Studies · Jan 23, 2017 · 47m

There has been much discussion recently in the United States about the contentious recent presidential election. Along with the election results, there has also been an increased interest in the so-called “fake news” stories spread on social media as well as on the emergence of the “Alt Right” movement in the past few years. Many scholars and historians have begun to look to the past for comparisons and parallels to the current state of affairs. The Ku Klux Klan was reestablished in Atlanta in 1915, barely a week before the Atlanta premiere of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s paean to…