Status Updates From American Nightmare

“[Clark’s] whiteness and his luck were one and the same—his whiteness, which always made him feel like a curse, a killer of dreams. But some dreams are really nightmares. And eventually, all luck turns bad.”

President Wilson won’t pass the anti-lynching bill

THE RED SUMMER OF 1919

A period of violent, white supremacist attacks, massacres, and lynchings

F*ck Woodrow Wilson

Clark says he doesn’t have time to read and Gloria (NAACP) says “Oh, but you must make it. It’s the only way to understand the world we live in.”

Clark suffering from combat tinnitus

As of 1919, no lyncher’s ever been brought to justice
And the President, Woodrow Wilson, is screening THE BIRTH OF A NATION in the White House, a violent epic that glorifies KKK as heroes of the South

“A rabbit’s got to know when to run and when to hide. If he can’t tell the difference, he’s nothing but stew.”


Clark’s nickname is Rabbit bc of how fast he ran on the football field

White men drew huge crowds for lynchings and then sold “souvenirs”

The victim’s hair, skin, fingers, bones.

NAACP’s mission, send Clark in to get details and names of men responsible for lynchings and run the stories in the press.

“Every time a Negro dies, we want the paper of record to print the kinds of gruesome stories the public simply can’t ignore.”

Clark almost blows his cover by standing in white train car when they call “Baltimore! Coloreds move to the last car!”

He smells the reek of gasoline from the night the mob came when he was 13. He’s like a soldier with PTSD

Whenever anyone assumed Clark’s light-skinned sister to be white she’d say, “I ain’t white. I’m what whiteness has done.”

“There are few places as lethal as the American South.”

The NAACP’s flag that hung from the 5th floor in NYC from the 70 Fifth Avenue building after lynchings that presses weren’t reporting read:

A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY

Clark sees a Klan notice in a NY sandwich shop

“Proof that the Nightmare’s testing the boundaries here in New York.”

Clark wanted to serve in France alongside his friends but army didn’t like his racial ambiguity - “We don’t send no question marks to the front lines!”

Clark now sees the NAACP’s mission to expose lynchings and the murderous men responsible his war

A common misconception is that Black people were safer up North but Clark realizes the Nightmare is creeping, making its way up there, too

“Fallen white soldiers come home in boxes. But Negro soldiers, they don’t come home at all.”

Army found Clark unfit to serve bc he appeared too white for the all-Negro regiment

All of his hometown friends went away to serve and didn’t come back

Clark refers to manifestations of racial terror as “the Nightmare”
In 1906, white mob terrorizes Atlanta. Clark is white-presenting

“…at the heart of his life has always been a paradox: his skin is light…lighter than most of the white men raging in the streets…And yet, with a gun in his hands, he is a Negro…Always, he’s known what side he’ll fight for. Die for.”