![]() When Twitter suspended his account, Yiannopoulos denounced it as “cowardly” and declared himself a martyr for the cause of free speech. Last year, Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter for his role in a campaign of racist, sexist harassment directed at Leslie Jones, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member. Five days before PBS broadcast its documentary (in which I appear as a commentator), a version of Trotter’s dilemma played out at the University of California, Berkeley, when the campus erupted in violence on the day of a planned speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart editor and gleefully acerbic provocateur nominally distinct from the so-called alt-right. The current debates regarding free speech tend to center as much on the rights of those making offensive statements as those potentially affected by what is being said. ![]() No film as egregiously racist as “Birth of a Nation” would be released so widely, and treated as a mainstream hit, today. It would be tempting to think of Trotter’s concerns as particular to that era. Griffith found the protests against his film to be a form of intolerance. He chose the latter approach, appealing unsuccessfully to Boston’s political leadership to have the film banned as obscene. Trotter found himself caught between the First Amendment ideals that allowed him to publish his newspaper, the Guardian, and fighting against the distribution of Griffith’s film and, by extension, the racial terrorism that it facilitated. ![]() It was screened in the White House, reportedly to accolades from Woodrow Wilson himself. “Birth of a Nation” was not simply the first blockbuster in American cinematic history its racialist propaganda inspired a rebirth of the K.K.K., which had all but died out prior to the film’s release. The pivotal conflict of his career, however, was his attempt to prevent Griffith’s ode to the Ku Klux Klan from being shown in the city. ![]() Washington culminated in his incitement of a riot when Washington attempted to give an address in Boston. Trotter’s contempt for the accommodationist response to Southern racism championed by, among others, Booker T. Du Bois, was a Boston native and graduate of Harvard University, and an uncompromising advocate for racial equality, if a bit of a loose cannon. Griffith, the filmmaker responsible for the racist classic “Birth of a Nation.” Trotter, a contemporary of W. Last week, PBS broadcast “Birth of a Movement,” a film about the battle between William Monroe Trotter, a firebrand African-American publisher born a few years after the end of the Civil War, and D. ![]()
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