D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent-film epic The Birth of a Nation remained as controversial at the end of the twentieth century as at the beginning, largely because of its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and of white ascendancy in the defeated South during the Reconstruction period following the American Civil War. Galvanized by the film's depiction of the newly freed slaves as brutal and ignorant, civil-rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) picketed the film in many cities when it was released and protested again when the Library of Congress added the classic to the National Film Registry in 1992 (though a year later the Library excluded the film from an exhibit of 54 early film works). Still, The Birth of a Nation is highly regarded as a cinematographic triumph, a benchmark that helped define...