Thomas Dixon Jr
| Thomas Dixon Jr. | |
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| Born | Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. January 11, 1864 Shelby, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Died | April 3, 1946 (aged 82) Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, playwright, minister, state legislator, lecturer |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Historical fiction |
| Literary movement | American Romanticism |
Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. (January 11, 1864 – April 3, 1946) was a Southern Baptist minister, playwright, lecturer, North Carolina state legislator, lawyer, author, white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan apologist. Dixon wrote two early 20th-century novels —The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden – 1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman (1905)— which glorified Ku Klux Klan (KKK) vigilante atrocities and romanticized Southern white opposition to racial equality reforms of the Reconstruction era. Film director D. W. Griffith gained fame for his adaptation of The Clansman for the screen in The Birth of a Nation (1915); the film stimulated the formation of the 20th-century version of the KKK.
Dixon was born in Shelby, North Carolina, the son of Thomas Jeremiah Frederick Dixon II and Amanda Elvira McAfee.
Dixon's father, Thomas J. F. Dixon senior, was a slave-owner, land-owner and Baptist minister of English and Scottish descent. Dixon Sr. had inherited slaves and property through his first wife's father.
In his adolescence Dixon helped out on the family farms, an experience that he hated, but that he later would say helped him to relate to the plight of the working man. Dixon grew up during Reconstruction following the Civil War. The government confiscation of farm land, coupled with what Dixon saw as the corruption of local politicians, the particular vengefulness of Federal troops and general lawlessness embittered the young Dixon, who became staunchly opposed to reform.
Dixon claimed that one of his earliest memories was of a widow of a Confederate soldier who had served under Dixon's uncle, Col. Leroy McAfee, had accused a black man of the rape of her daughter and sought the family's help. Dixon's mother had praised the KKK after it hanged and shot the alleged rapist in the town square. It was a moment that etched itself into Dixon's memory; he felt that the Klan's actions were justified, and that desperate times called for desperate measures.
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