Perhaps some who watch will not appreciate that it was dealing with very recent history. The "nighriders" who figure in the film were a vigilante group formed to enforce, often by violence, the boycott by the tobacco plantation owners of Kentucky (Griffith's home state of course) and Tennesee of the American Tobacco Company, which had drastically reduced the prices they were willing to pay the farmers. The so-called Black Patch Wars (the tobacco growing area was known as the Black Patch) lasted from 1904-1909 and the boycott proved ultimately successful, forcing the ATP to back down and give in to the farmers' demands.
However reprehensible some of their actions, the ATP was operating a highly exploitative monopoly and the absurd prices they were offering would have completely ruined the tobacco farmers. If their use of violence is difficult to justify, their industrial action in itself was entirely justified. Although their activities bore a superficial resemblance to those of the Ku Klux Klan (Griffith portrays their get-up as identical), the nightriders were not in any way a racist organisation and were essentially combattants against, and not in favour of, oppression and privilege, It is, to say the least, interesting that Griffith should here be expressing support for the blackleg farmers and disapproval of the nightriders when, just four years later, he would notoriously sing the praises of the racist vigilantes of the 1860s, the Ku Klux Klan, in a film that was to a large degree directly responsible, if not for the re-founding of the Klan, at least for its immense popularity.
I believe it is the Irish actor William Butler who done play de "good" blackface n....r lackey.
The film is well made with a charming performance by Marion Sunshine but Griffith's putrid politics are frankly indefensible!
