Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers

October 14, 1921

On October 14, 1921, the Baltimore Afro-American published an article by E. Franklin Frazier regarding Birth of a Nation. The twenty-seven-year-old Frazier saw the film while he was in Denmark on an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship. The next year he started teaching at Morehouse College and went on to become one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century. Frazier’s article in the Afro-American described the experience of seeing D. W. Griffith’s racist epic film in a Scandinavian country. “Just as the Negro in America has learned that the Race Problem is bound by no section but extends as far as the Negro pursues the way, the Negro abroad finds the Problem pursuing him from land to land,” Frazier wrote. “Mechanical inventions and ease of communication permit the venom of American Race Prejudice to circle the globe and revive the primitive passions of civilized men against the Negro.”

 

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