The Helios Biblios Hour (book of the SUN) BIRTH OF A NATION 1915-2016

Birth Of A Nation evokes both the African heritage that the slave trade did so much to erase and the horrors of the internal slave trade. The movie dwells especially on the sadism that slavery made possible and that continued through Reconstruction and the era of Jim Crow.  It reminds viewers that long before whites such as D. W. Griffith invented and promulgated the myth of black men who raped white women, white men raped black women without fear of any consequences.Nina Simone’s barebones rendition of Strange Fruit is not the only allusion to the lynching that was so frighteningly common a century ago.  The shot of Cherry Turner’s swollen face after she has been raped resembles the 1955 pictures from Jetmagazine of Emmett Till’s disfigured corpse lying in an open casket after the 14-year-old was tortured and killed for whistling at a white woman.  The challenges that Nat Turner faced as he learned to read parallel the challenges facing poor black students squeezed into America’s resegregating schools get.(2)“Hogwash!” he exclaimed. “Christianity is finished and done with. Don’t you know that, Reverend? And don’t you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the prime mover, of this entire miserable catastrophe? Don’t you see the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned BIBLE.