1915 - Movie Premiere

November 15, 1915 - Five thousand people crowd into the Academy of Music in downtown Charlotte. It is the premiere of the silent film Birth of a Nation. A 30-piece orchestra accompanies it. Based on a novel by Shelby's Thomas W. Dixon, the controversial D.W. Griffith movie glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and its role in the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War.