jane addams twenty years at hull house 1910

The enclosed Night Lettergram to Elsie M. Addams’ two decades working in inner-city Chicago ultimately inspired her to take a global approach to advocacy and she founded the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom in addition to serving as President of the Woman’s Peace Party. Originally conceived in 1889 as a space where women of privilege could share their knowledge in humanistic fields such as art, literature, and music with the less fortunate, Hull House rapidly transformed into a community support system where working women could learn practical job skills, obtain medical and legal services, and locate affordable housing. In her autobiography Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams recounts her domestic activism as the founder of the second and most innovative settlement house in the U.S.

Griffith’s unrelenting efforts to cloak the film in the mantle of historical “accuracy”-that “some of the elements of the plot are based on actual events.” This statement suggested how deeply the pro-Southern interpretation of Reconstruction had permeated popular understanding of that history, and Griffith was able to cite contemporary academic historians to support this view.Jane Addams’s global advocacy for women’s economic, educational, and social equality made her the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Though Addams abhorred the film’s portrayal of African Americans, she nonetheless conceded-perhaps intimidated by director D.W. Ten days after Birth opened in New York City, noted reformer and NAACP board member Jane Addams (founder of Hull House, the Chicago settlement house) was interviewed by the New York Post about the film. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to mount boycott of the film, but it failed to stir significant white opposition.

The film depicted the South, following the assassination of President Lincoln, as ruled by rapacious African Americans, who by the film’s end were heroically overthrown from power by the Ku Klux Klan. 'The Birth of a Nation, which opened in March 1915, was simultaneously a landmark in the history of American cinema and a landmark in American racism.

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Jane addams twenty years at hull house 1910