Hate Mail Quotes

“This apocalyptic spin on a small-town tragedy appeared to confuse and alarm many Todd Countians, including Michael's aunt Brenda. When I visited her a few days after the rally, she opened a trunk stuffed with literature that had begun turning up in her mail. "Some of this stuff is a little wild," she said, handing me no-Nazi newspapers, white supremacist screeds, and paranoid militia-style tracts. "South-Hating Liberals Are to Blame for This!" read the headline of one story on Michael's death. Another, in a newspaper called Confederate Underground, described Michael's assailants as "menacing black gangsters" and alleged that the cross-burnings following his death were a ploy by civil rights agitators to attract sympathy. A publication called "WAR: White Aryan Resistance" warned of a coming racial Armageddon.

Brenda closed the trunk and slipped a video of the Flag Day rally into her VCR. Midway through the tape, as the fiery speeches played again, Brenda began weeping. "I feel like my grandchildren will see another civil war," she said. "Between black and white, not North and South. People just can't seem to get along.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War