Status Updates From Not Even Past: The Stories ...

“The Klan reached the height of its influence not in the late 1860s, when it was initially formed, but in the decade following The Birth of a Nation, as the KKK spread northward and westward, radically expanding its power. Many of the Klan’s new rituals, such as the donning of white masks and the lighting of wooden crosses, were lifted directly from The Birth of a Nation and Dixon’s novels.”

“Confederate monuments sprang up like wildfire after Plessy v. Ferguson (which effectively legalized segregation) and the establishment of the NAACP, and again in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the civil rights movement.
Such monuments are not historical artifacts but didactic exercises.”

"These writers make us wonder, What if war and murder are always, inevitably, the same thing—sanctioned and unsanctioned versions of the same unspeakable crime? And what if the foremost historical legacy of the United States is not freedom but something far crueler: our endless appetite for violence and our equally endless ability to justify it?"

"(Nathaniel) Hawthorne notes, the war has yielded little in the way of emancipation, and it seemed unlikely to do so in the future: 'whoever may be benefited by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes . . . who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms'".

"The problems that gave rise to the war, MLK argued, were never resolved. ‘The rebellion against equality continued into the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century...contaminating every institution of our society’. Sit-ins, boycotts, legal suits, and registration drives sought to curb that long rebellion and carry the freedom movement of the 1860s into the 1960s."