Bert Williams was a renown singer and comedian who began with minstrel entertainment which required that he appear in blackface. Indeed, playing such a role was how Williams earned a living. There is no evidence to suggest any different type of portrayal in his first Biograph movie. In any event, the film was quickly recalled. Bogle and Noble cited that as the reason why William’s film career ended.12 Klotman and Sampson, however, revealed a second release by Biograph, also starring Williams, in 1916. It was entitled A Natural Born Gambler.¹³ Griffith’s film may have been a genius prodigy to cinematography history, but the storyline was imbecilic and another reminder of America’s timeless racism. No disturbances are cited by either author with the release of that feature, and Sampson provided a publicity still from it in which the comedian appeared in the usual blackface.

In 1915, D. W. Griffith premiered The Birth of a Nation, a film to portray Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Clansman. He primarily used White actors in blackface to portray Blacks (except for actors like Neille Conley, AKA Madame Sul-Te-Wan). Hugh Gloster, Sterling Brown, and Robert Bone listed Dixon’s literary work as a classic example of the racist writing of many Southern propagandists.¹⁴ While Noble and Bogle agreed that the film treatment reached artistic and technical heights previously unattained by filmmakers, the content of the work, in their view, brought vicious anti-Black sentiment before the American public as never before.¹⁵ Gerald Mast offered actual documents which allowed the reader to make his/her own decision.¹⁶ Among the documents was a review of the film from the New York Times which essentially supported Noble and Bogle. The reviewer noted that The Clansman had had a short stage run almost a decade earlier and that Dixon had appeared at the film presentation, saying, “He would have allowed none but the son of a Confederate soldier to direct the film version of The Clansman.” In legal documents from the Boston branch of the NAACP, a number of the period’s prominent Americans of both races commented on the racist nature of the film. The associate editor of two religious publications gave a notarized statement in which he told of correspondence and meetings with Dixon during which the author frankly admitted the racist intent of his work. Whatever the motivations individually or collectively (of Griffith and Dixon), the impact of the film on the American public was substantial. Where African Americans were concerned, it would result in the first major effort on their part to produce and distribute Black films nationally as counter-propaganda.