(CIVIL RIGHTS) Stop the Ku Klux Propaganda in New York

Sale 2598 - Lot 193

Price Realized: $ 1,125

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Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200

(CIVIL RIGHTS.) Stop the Ku Klux Propaganda in New York. Letterpress broadside, 13 3/4 x 9 inches; horizontal fold, 1 1/4-inch repaired chip along left margin. New York: NAACP, [May 1921]

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The film "Birth of a Nation" was screened at a New York theater on 6 May 1921. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was on hand to picket and distribute these fliers, which exposed the film as Ku Klux Klan propaganda. It details some recent Klan atrocities, and asks "Do you know that the Ku Klux Klan is not only anti-Negro but anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic? Are you going to allow Ku Klux Klan propaganda to be displayed in the movies in New York City?"

At the protest, 5 NAACP volunteers were convicted on trumped-up littering charges for distributing these fliers: Helen Curtis, widow of the former United States minister to Liberia; noted activist and NAACP founding member Kathryn Magnolia Johnson; World War One veteran (and future noted sociologist) Edward Franklin Frazier; veteran sailor Llewelyn Rollock (in uniform); and his sister-in-law Laura Jean Rollock, who had also served overseas in the YWCA. See Adriane Lentz-Smith, "Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I," page 213.

The charges were reversed six months later, as reported by James Weldon Johnson in the New York Age of 12 November 1921. He described the ruling as "a great victory . . . for all liberal and radical bodies in the city of New York."