The Role Of Lynching In Birth Of A Nation By Ida B. Wells

Lynching’s role was played in terms of race, class, and gender in New South Capitalism in that it nearly exclusively was targeted towards one group: black males who were a threatening rising class having gained freedom and as well by acquiring value in property. Lynching was a defense to an established White Male status quo. Ida B. Wells and her writings address these issues as an African American watching this occur. Wells calls it needless bloodshed, meant to both repress her people from rising, and to preserve White ego and self image; an image that was threatening to come apart as blacks began edging into perceived ‘White only territory’. “Birth of a Nation” addressed these same issues from the eyes of White men who executed the lynchings.
It was a system that can be viewed from the ‘Train Model’: White women and children would sit fixed in first class, as they were near the top by way of their Whiteness (an ideal to be protected, especially when one was a ‘Virginal White Southern Woman) - with the Mammies and Uncle Civil Servants who catered to them there to emphasize this White purity. Black men and women, however high in status, would be in the smoking car just behind first class so that their ‘unsavory nature’ would not sully the frontmost car. The white man would move about all cabins as he pleased as he was master of all by virtue of both his Whiteness and his gender. The White Man was unable to be tarnished, for he sat too high above all else (Lapsley). When blacks became ‘uppity’, Whites had to ‘force their hand’ and lynch anyone in their way. The Black man would serve to fuel the train by raking in the coals to move it forward by way of convict leasing, or by lynching he would be both figuratively and sometimes literally burned in order to fuel the train with his own self. The train would not, and could not stop as far as true White Southerners were concerned- and they certainly wouldn’t stain themselves to keep things going for their Whiteness was too pristine to mar with the soot- anyone who did would be thrown
When the unloyal Black is given power, all falls into chaos. When the Black renegade Gus proposes to sweet White Flora Cameron, the only way for her to preserve her purity is to throw herself off a cliff. Quote the film: “For her who had learned the stern lesson of honor we should not grieve that she found sweeter the opal gates of death”. (Gus is later lynched for his transgression.) Further, when the mulatto Silas Lynch takes over in the film, kidnapping white Elsie Stoneman to become Queen of his ‘Black Empire”, we see the corruption more literally. Outside the window of Lynch’s office, we see everything literally fall apart at the hands of the Blacks who overrun the town. All is not saved until the Ku Klux Klan, waving the banner of a white handkerchief stained with the blood of virtuous Flora Cameron come to save the day and put Blacks ‘back in their place’. As seen, to Whites lynching played a role of preservation of a White supremacist system where the White upper class male ruled, White female virginity needed protecting, and Blacks needed to be saved from themselves. It painted White lynch mobs as formerly victimized heroes rather than