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[[File:TheBirthofaNation.jpg|thumbnail|left|300px|This promotional poster from the 1915 film Birth of a Nation shows the “uniform” of the Ku Klux Klan and the revered status, as knights saving the South, the film gives the group. (IMDB)]]__NOTOC__

In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson watched The Birth of a Nation, a film by D. W. Griffith that falsified the reality of the post–Civil War Reconstruction period by presenting blacks as attempting to dominate southern whites and sexually force themselves on white women. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), in violently oppressing blacks, was ultimately portrayed by the production as the savior of the South’s white female nobility. After that private screening of the film at the White House, Wilson reportedly stated, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”<ref>The Birth of a Nation, dir. D. W. Griffith (David W. Griffith Corp., 1915).</ref>