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Popular Culture Review
innocent, assumes that the Panther gathering is a social occasion rather than a
serious political endeavor. Forrest’s statement trivializes the BPP, implying that
the Panthers were playing at revolution rather than engaging in a political
struggle for self-determination in the black community.
And a gendered reading of this scene in racial and historical context is
even more disturbing. In all too many ways, the assault on Jenny in the
Panthers’ lair, and Forrest’s violent redemption, is reminiscent of D.W.
Griffith’s Birth o f a Nation, In Griffith’s adaptation of the Thomas W. Dixon
novel The Clansman, the director presents post-Civil War Reconstruction as the
rape of the South by poor Southern white “scalaw ags,” Northern Yankee
“carpetbaggers,” and the emancipated former slaves, an interpretation later
embodied by Scarlett O’Hara as symbolic of the American South in Gone With
the Wind, According to Gerald R. Butters, Jr., in Black Manhood on the Silent
Screen, Birth o f a Nation suggests that “political power is a means to the
inevitable black male desire—the right to possess a white woman.”^' Feeling
empowered by the egalitarian doctrine of Congressional Reconstruction, black
union veteran Gus proposes marriage to the white Little Sister Cameron, who
flings herself off a cliff rather than succumb to his advances. Meanwhile, Silas
Lynch, the mulatto protege of carpetbagger Austin Stoneman (a character based
upon Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens), repays his benefactor by
kidnapping his daughter Elsie for the purpose of an interracial marriage. Elsie is
saved from this horrible fate through the intervention of Ku Klux Klan, led by
Elsie’s true love Ben Cameron. The heroic actions of the Klan, who are
portrayed as knights in shining armor, restore the white patriarchal order of the
South, as white women are safe and black voters are disenfranchised. In his
history of African-American images in film, Donald Bogle describes Griffith’s
Birth o f a Nation as the “most slanderous” anti-black film ever released.
Yet, almost eighty years after Birth o f a Nation, we find elements of
Griffith’s sexual and racial politics resurrected in the commercially successful
Forrest Gump, Jenny is not sexually assaulted by the Panthers, but her assailant
is a white who has enlisted in the black cause. Also, Jenny is assaulted in a place
which has clearly been established as a black space. As a white woman, Jenny
has a privileged position over that of her black sisters, but the Panthers in charge
make no move to protect her when she is attacked. However, just like the Klan
in Griffith’s film, Forrest is prepared to use violence in defense of white
womanhood. And it is interesting to note that Forrest Gump is named after the
Klan’s founder, former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. In fact,
when Forrest relates this fact to the audience, we see a brief clip from Birth o f a
Nation, On the surface, director Zemeckis appears to be saying that in the
modem South of Forrest Gump, the region and nation have finally repudiated
their racist past. But a closer reading of Forrest and Jenny’s encounter with the
Black Panthers indicates that Zemeckis has not departed so drastically from the
politics of Griffith. Both directors seem to fear a progressive racial liberation