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See Also

See Also in
Notorious Lives

David Duke

Julius Evola

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche

Arthur de Gobineau

George Lincoln Rockwell

William Joseph Simmons

Gerald L. K. Smith

Benjamin Tillman.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Thomas Dixon, Jr.

by Scot M. Guenter

American author and Baptist preacher

Cause of notoriety: Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman was adapted in 1915 to become director D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a silent-film blockbuster with racist overtones.

Active: 1880’s-1930’s

Locale: North Carolina and New York, New York

Early Life

Thomas Dixon (DIHK-suhn), Jr., was born as the Civil War drew to a close, the third of five children, to a Baptist minister and farmer who had married the daughter of a wealthy South Carolina planter. The family fell on hard times at the war’s end, and as Dixon’s father struggled to make ends meet, opening a hardware store and then turning to farming again, he found solace by actively participating in the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist vigilante organization of hooded men who saw themselves as guardians of Southern honor and opposed those who worked for African American advancements during Reconstruction. Dixon’s favorite uncle, Colonel Lee Roy McAfee, was also a leading member of the Klan. These early experiences with the KKK presumably influenced Dixon’s later literary career.

Dixon, a bright student, had earned his master’s degree at Wake Forest College before he reached the age of twenty. He then went to Johns Hopkins University to do graduate work in history and politics. There, he befriended fellow student Woodrow Wilson, who would later become the president of the United States. Dixon left graduate school to try various careers—first, he toured as a thespian in a Shakespearean troupe; next, he returned to North Carolina, where he took a seat in the state legislature and was awarded a law degree from Greensboro Law School in 1886. He left politics as he left the stage and, following in his father’s footsteps, was ordained a Baptist minister in October, 1886.

Dixon was a charismatic public speaker who took strong positions on current political and social concerns. A series of pastoral appointments led to his six years’ service at the Twenty-third Street Church in New York, where his congregation included such influential Americans as John D. Rockefeller. He then left the Baptists and started his own nondenominational People’s Church in New York City in 1895.

Writing and Speaking Career

By 1899, Dixon had tired of the ministry, so he resigned his position at the People’s Church and began a popular four-year speaking tour of the country on the topic of Christianity’s relevance for modern society, which reached up to five million Americans. Incensed by the image of the South conveyed in the popular novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Dixon wrote a trilogy of novels intended to show Reconstruction from his perspective: white culture being imperiled by the bestial nature and impulses of African Americans and the way in which the KKK arose to confront that challenge. These books—The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902), The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907)—were all best sellers, and their popularity afforded Dixon increasing status in the literary field.

Cover page of Dixon’s The Clansman.

ph_0111326676-Dixon.jpg

With this success, Dixon decided to devote himself to correcting what he called “social evils” through literature. He wrote seventeen more novels, though none of them garnered the acclaim of his first trilogy. A second trilogy—The One Woman: A Story of Modern Utopia (1903), Comrades: A Story of Social Adventure in California (1909), and The Root of Evil (1911)—attacked socialism. In later books, Dixon warned against other “causes”: the emancipation of women in The Foolish Virgin: A Romance of Today (1915), pacifism in The Fall of a Nation: A Sequel to “The Birth of a Nation” (1916), and miscegenation in The Flaming Sword (1939). In the latter work, Dixon criticized the calls for social justice by African American leaders W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson.

Impact

The racist attitude of Thomas Dixon, Jr., toward African Americans had the greatest impact when D. W. Griffith transformed The Clansman into the epic silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915). This film was highly influential: It received great critical acclaim and suggested the new possibilities for epic storytelling through cinema. President Woodrow Wilson happily commended the film following a publicized private viewing at the White House, and millions of average Americans flocked to see it on the big screen; it generated huge commercial success. Embedded in the film is the same racist story conveyed in the novel: The members of the KKK are portrayed as chivalrous defenders of white womanhood against the ever-looming onslaught of lustful African American men, who are unable to control their animal urges.

The years following the film saw an upturn in the number of race riots and lynching reports throughout the country. Moreover, during the 1920’s, the KKK would be reborn on a significant national level as a racist vigilante force dedicated to promoting and protecting the interests of white Protestant Americans. Dixon recognized the suggestive power of the new film medium and produced five Hollywood motion pictures himself based on some of his works from the period between 1915 and 1919, but none was critically or financially successful.

Further Reading

1 

Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. 1905. Reprint. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970. This reprint makes Dixon’s original work accessible to the modern reader.

2 

Eby, Carl. “Slouching Toward Beastliness: Richard Wright’s Anatomy of Thomas Dixon.” African American Review 35 (Fall, 2001): 439-458. Eby summarizes how Dixon propagated the myth of black men as beasts and then evaluates how author Richard Wright parodied this notion in his groundbreaking novel Native Son, first published in 1940.

3 

Gilman, Susan. Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. This scholarly work traces the development and popularity of a literary subgenre, the “race melodrama,” from the period of Reconstruction through World War I. The author discusses strong connections between this emergent format and an interest in secret ritual and the occult. Dixon’s Klan trilogy receives much attention in the first half of the book as it epitomizes the integration of the two themes.

4 

Lang, Robert, ed. The Birth of a Nation. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. This script of the classic film includes supplementary contextualizing writings, including Dixon’s personal response to The Boston Globe criticism of the film’s explicit racial hatred.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Guenter, Scot M. "Thomas Dixon, Jr.." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1163.
APA 7th
Guenter, S. M. (2007). Thomas Dixon, Jr.. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Guenter, Scot M. "Thomas Dixon, Jr.." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.