Thomas Dixon

The Victim Thomas Dixon

Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. (January 11, 1864 - April 3, 1946) was a Southern Baptist minister, playwright, lecturer, North Carolina state legislator, lawyer, and author. In popular literature, two early 20th-century novels by Dixon-The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden - 1865-1900 (1902) and The Clansman (1905)- romanticized white resistance in the south to the reforms of the Reconstruction era intended to make American blacks equal, hailing vigilante action by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). 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.