Nate Parker's Past, His Present, And The Future Of "The Birth of A Nation"

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2016

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Actor Nate Parker is the center of a lot attention these days because of his upcoming movie The Birth of A Nation. Parker wrote, directed and stars as Nat Turner, leader of an historic 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. Last winter, Parker won a multi-million dollar distribution deal for the movie at the Sundance Film Festival. As the anticipation grows for the film's release, a chapter from Parker's college past has come under scrutiny. He was charged and later acquitted in a rape trial as a student-athlete at Penn State. Code Switch's Karen Grigsby Bates moderates a conversation about how Parker's past and his responses in the present may affect what some already consider an important motion picture. Karen is joined by Gillian White, senior associate editor at The Atlantic, Michael Arceneaux, a columnist for Complex magazine, and Goldie Taylor, an editor-at-large of The Daily Beast.

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0:00.0	Check out the MPR1 app for your phone.
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0:18.3	MPR-O-N-E.
0:19.7	It's good y'all.
0:23.7	I'm Gene Demby and this is Code Switch from MPR.
0:25.8	I'm here with my teammate Karen Krispy-Bates.
0:27.7	Hey Gene.
0:28.7	Hey KGB.
0:29.7	We are talking today about the news.
0:31.9	I'm sure a lot of you have heard about actor and director Nate Parker.
0:36.2	The rape charges filed against him on Black Man 17 years ago by a young white woman at his
0:40.9	college Penn State University.
0:42.7	And how people are talking about those charges today as Parker's film The Birth of a Nation
0:47.4	about Nat Turner's Slavery Billion heads to theaters with a whole lot of Oscar buzz.
0:51.7	A lot of Oscar buzz.
0:53.1	So in case you're not familiar with the ins and outs of this case, we're just going
0:56.4	to lay them out for you very quickly.
0:58.3	We can't cover every detail, but we can recommend an exhaustive rundown over at the Daily
	...

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