100 years ago in Spokane: City leaders say they couldn’t stop showing of racist film; Group says Mount Spokane should be national park

From our archives,

100 years ago

Two Spokane city commissioners attended a meeting of Spokane’s “colored people” and answered some sharp questions about the movie “The Birth of a Nation.”

Many in Spokane’s black community had opposed the showing of this D.W. Griffith epic because of its depiction of black people.

Both commissioners said there was no legal way they could have stopped the movie in Spokane. They said that similar attempts to bar the movie in New York, Boston and Chicago had failed.

Several people in the audience insisted that the commissioners should have tried harder to ban the movie. One person asked a commissioner “point blank” whether he would have acted again as he did.

“I have no regrets,” he replied.

The other commissioner told the audience that “colored people ought not to have taken the film so seriously because it was a caricature and exaggerated.”

From the parks beat: The secretary of the Spokane Good Roads Association launched an ambitious campaign. He wanted Mount Spokane to be made a national park.

He called it a “splendid piece of country, beautiful from a scenic point of view, accessible to hosts of people on the Transcontinental National Parks highway, and easy to obtain.”