Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X. Kendi

The Klan almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980, unleashing its gun-toting terrorism in more than one hundred towns to try to destroy the gains of the 1960s. Lynchings were still occurring—at least twelve were committed in Mississippi in 1980, twenty-eight Black youngsters were killed in Atlanta from 1979 to 1982, and random street-corner executions took place in Buffalo in 1980. But Klan violence and lynchings by private citizens paled in comparison to the terror being perpetrated by gangs of policemen across the nation, from strip-searches and sexual abuse of Black women to pistol-whipping of Black males. By the early 1980s, one study showed that for every White person killed by police officers, police killed twenty-two Black people.