The film was shot in 27 days.
The song in the teaser trailer is "Strange Fruit," recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Written in 1937 by poet, teacher, and activist Abel Meeropol under his pseudonym, Lewis Allan, the song was a protest against lynchings in general and specifically against the 1930 Marion, Indiana, lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp. "Strange Fruit," which became one of Holiday's signature songs, has also been recorded or sampled by many other well-known singers, including Nina Simone, Diana Ross, Tori Amos, Cassandra Wilson, and Ye.
This movie deliberately shares its title with D.W. Griffith's 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation (1915). That film, an adaptation of Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1902-1905 pro-Klan novels "The Leopard's Spots" and "The Clansman", was a runaway critical, commercial, and cultural success. It was also the subject of protests against its so-called virulently racist view of Blacks. Historians see the movie as a major impetus for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and a concomitant rise in lynchings and other racist violence during the early part of the 1900s. Protesting the film's racist views was an early action for the then-young National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Long into the 20th century, mainstream cinema scholars continued to praise the film as a landmark technical achievement in the history of motion pictures while minimizing or ignoring altogether its racist message. Spike Lee was so outraged that his New York University Film School professors taught The Birth of a Nation (1915) with no mention of its racist message or legacy that he made a student short film titled The Answer (1980) as a response. The film so offended many of his professors that Lee was nearly expelled from New York University until he was ultimately saved by a faculty vote.