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Histories of African‐American participation in American silent film often cite D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) as the defining moment in black cinematic representation. The film's myths of black inferiority and the sanctity of white nationhood seemed almost nostalgic at a moment of national growth and change, of which the new film technology was a part. At the same time, its images of black brutes lasciviously chasing innocent white women and a congressional hall filled with barefoot, chicken‐eating black coons solidified a number of myths that appealed to a young nation furiously attempting to define itself in the face of increasing immigration from abroad, the massive growth of urban industrial areas (and the attendant loss of an agrarian culture), and the threat of world war.

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