South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Martin Luther King glumly observed from Birmingham’s Thomas Jefferson Hotel that “white Alabamians are desperately grasping for a way to return to the old days of white supremacy.”

The Birth of a Nation became the country’s most popular film. The Klan, which by 1915 had become defunct, was relaunched. Its recruiters used the film to draw in millions of members. Five months later, Wilson virtually reenacted the plot of The Birth of a Nation by sending the marines to the black republic of Haiti to wrest control from the “unstab

Fong and Inouye proved to be, just as white supremacists feared, champions of civil rights. And had the segregationists gazed farther into the future, they would have been still more troubled by something else taking place in Hawai‘i at the time.

Seemingly contradictory calls to lock up and to save Black people dueled in legislatures around the country but also in the minds of Americans. Black leaders joined with Republicans from Nixon to Reagan, and with Democrats from Johnson to Bill Clinton, in calling for and largely receiving more police officers, tougher and mandatory sentencing, and