Nat Turner’s slave revolt has come into public interest and an important part of history is being learned by many, a part we should all know about.

This is massively thanks to Nate Parkers ‘The Birth of a Nation’, a movie touted to tell the true history of Nat’s revolt. A revolt led by a preacher against his masters, against white people. One that led to the death of over 250 people (200 of them African-American).

On that level, Nate has done a great thing.

However, the story of the revolt and all the players is a fascinating one, one that no matter how you told it, is full of intense and important moments in history.

However, some are accusing Nate’s telling of making it into a Hollywood story, changing important details, pushing important characters into unimportant roles.

Leslie M. Alexander wrote an article in The Nation where she discusses the inaccuracies of the historical telling in the movie and also the downplaying roles of women. How Nate made the story a triumphant tale of heroic men and missed out the heroins.

She writes:

The Birth of a Nation claims to tell the true story of Nat Turner, leader of the bloodiest slave rebellion in United States history. A film on Turner is long overdue, and as a professional historian of the black experience in the nineteenth century, I have anxiously awaited one. I was especially encouraged by September’s issue of Vanity Fair, in which Parker stated that he had become “obsessed with the idea of telling Nat Turner’s story” and that he sought to create “historical fidelity in his depiction of the leader of the rebellion.”

Nearly everything in the movie is a complete fabrication.
After attending an advance screening of the film, however, I now know that Parker failed miserably in his mission. Contrary to his promises of “historical fidelity,” Parker created a deeply flawed, historically inaccurate movie that exploits and distorts Nat Turner’s story and the history of slavery in America. Nearly everything in the movie—ranging from Turner’s relationship with his family, to his life as a slave, and even the rebellion itself—is a complete fabrication. Certainly the film contains sprinklings of historical fact, but the bulk of Parker’s story about the rebellion is fictitious: Nat Turner did not murder his owner, nor did he kill a slave patroller. Turner’s rebellion was not betrayed by a young boy, or by anyone else involved in the revolt. To the contrary, the rebels fought until the bitter end. The shootout depicted in Jerusalem, Virginia, never happened, because the rebels were stopped by the militia before they ever reached Jerusalem.

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