In addition to interviewing leading legal scholars and activists, like Angela Davis, DuVernay said she reviewed about 1,000 hours of archival
footage, including of images of lynchings, cellphone videos of
police abuse, and The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 D.W. Griffith film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan (and was screened at the
White House for President Woodrow Wilson).
The opening features a black &
white collage of archival
footage of arrests and intimidation of homosexuals and of
police raids of gay bars during less enlightened times, followed by a brief clip of an ashen fellow Supervisor Diane Feinstein announcing the murders of Milk and Moscone.