Released in 1915, D.W. Griffith’s seminal film The Birth of a Nation marked a turning point in the history of American racial propaganda. Positioning infantilized depictions of white femininity against hyper-sexualized depictions of Black masculinity, the film envisions a predator-prey dynamic between Flora and Gus, two characters that act as cardboard stand-ins for one-dimensional representations of white womanhood and Black manhood. Using The Birth of a Nation as a pivotal text through which to ground its analysis, this essay navigates the history of rhetorical and physical violence inflicted upon Black men in alleged defense of white womanhood. I argue that the archetype of the hypersexual, animalistic Black male rapist serves as a post-hoc justification for the legacy of sexual violence perpetrated against Black enslaved women by white slaveholding men. Fueled by a manufactured terror of forced miscegenation, the myth of the “bestial Black man” emerges as a revisionist history of the Reconstruction era that weaponizes hetero-patriarchal ideals of white femininity to dually demoralize black men and heroize white men. Appearing in many different forms throughout the history of American racial propaganda - from the rapacious blackface characters of early Hollywood to the image of the “superpredator” that dominated the news media of the 1990s - the myth of the monstrous, sexually depraved Black man emerges as a foundational trope of racial fear mongering in American history.