Advertised on the (scarce) front cover label as “An Answer to ‘The Birth of a Nation’” and published in the same year Griffiths’ film was released, THE PROBLEM is perhaps the earliest artistic response to that film. Its status as an explicit answer is attested only by the fragile original dust jacket — not noted, and perhaps never seen, by many scholars of the period. Contemporary with NAACP protests, preceding John Noble’s answer film “The Birth of a Race” by three years, and Oscar Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates” by five, Gilmore’s novel — a star-crossed romance of mislaid identity, set against the heroism of black soldiers in the Spanish-American War — offers a comprehensive thematic rebuke to the violently segregationist message of that film and of the novel that inspired it, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman.

Few of the author’s biographical details are known. Gilmore (ca. 1870-1930), a Rochester native and Philadelphia resident, was also the author of the self-published “Masonic and Other Poems” (1908) and includes three more of his poems in this volume: among them, “Everywoman,” a sentimental allegory. Gilmore is known to have submitted at least one story (rejected) to W.E.B. duBois’s The Crisis, whose literary editor, Jessie Fauset, wrote briefly and dismissively in 1916 that THE PROBLEM had “the usual difficulty that we are too near realities to write beautifully about them.” Gilmore was also a playwright; copyright records indicate that he issued THE PROBLEM as “a military drama in four acts,” also in 1915. No records of performance or publication were located for the dramatic version.

THE PROBLEM leavens its high melodrama with a sternly didactic historical catalogue of African-American military prowess, from Crispus Attucks through the individual battles of the Civil War: “It was a negro soldier who hauled down the Confederate flag, and it was negro soldiers who assisted in quenching the fires which had been started when the Confederates evacuated the city, thus saving the helpless citizens…much loss and suffering.” The plot turns on the love affair between Sergeant Henderson, a black soldier, and Freda, the pinnacle of Southern womanhood, a foundling believed to be white.

The novel is replete with classical and literary allusions both subtle and unsubtle: In a pivotal scene, the wounded Henderson confesses his love for Freda, infuriating her eavesdropping white foster brother, who fumes: “Can this woman, whom I loved in my childhood, be as Desdemona, that loved Othello for his brave deeds?” Grant reverses Dixon’s/Griffiths’ racist tropes: while Sergeant Henderson is a gentleman by nature and disciplined by training, his thwarted white rival devolves into animalistic savagery when a woman of his class dares to prefer another: “like a wild animal held in leash”, his civilized veneer is no match for his “hot Southern temperament.”

Gilmore represents traditional hierarchies of gender and class without apparent subversion: Freda is virtuous, which is to say weak, docile, and dutiful; non-American ethnicities are gently disparaged; military imperialism is unchallenged. But the novel’s conservatism is as ironic as it is conventional: outfitting the heroine with the unearthly purity of Dixon and Griffiths’ ideal of white womanhood gives Gilmore’s “Answer” its sharpest edge.

The novel is discussed at considerable length in Jennifer James’ A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II; James notes the coinciding date of the novel and the release of Birth of a Nation, but makes no mention of the author’s deliberate connection between the two — a connection only noted on the label of the rare original dust jacket. The novel’s specific qualities as a direct and intentional response to the film are not reproduced or noted in later reprints and have therefore not received critical attention, if indeed they are known.

A fine copy of a rich and historically important novel by an undeservedly obscure author, in active dialogue with perhaps the most notoriously racist cultural production of the twentieth century.

$3,000