Was the Edison thing really about race or religion or ethnicity? It looks to me like it was about Edison protecting the patents he thought he had on film technology. Many of the newer producers he was fighting against were Jewish, but so were some of the members of his patent trust.
Edison had a really bad habit of overprotecting every piece of intellectual property he had. Indeed, that’s why the very early movie industry was essentially controlled by Edison, and it wasn’t until the Hollywood studios were founded by eastern European Jewish filmmakers after 1910 to escape from Edison’s clutches that the modern longer-form movie started to appear.