Birth of a Nation opens in Boston.

Based on Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman, the film is screened without the deletions promised by director D.W. Griffith at the Tremont Theatre. Some 2,000 people protest outside the theater, while some 200 Boston police try to maintain order and arrest William Monroe Trotter and 10 others. The Boston Globe later writes, “As a racial demonstration probably nothing like it has been seen in Boston since the Civil War.” The next day, some 2,300 people, most of them African-American, attend an “Indignation Rally” at Faneuil Hall. Speakers include Michael Jordan of the Irish National League, who declares, “I would be untrue to the Irish race if I did not come here to join in this protest with you.”