The story starts way back, during the time after the Civil War when at least three white groups were contending for control of the four million freed slaves. Abolitionists and other northern liberals wanted to educate the freedmen to "level all vestiges of the past," as Horace Mann Bond put it. If they had pre- vailed, American history would have been far different. But of course they could not prevail. Arrayed against them were southern conservatives and southern liberals, each with their own ideas, and they were strengthened by the uninterested, apathetic majority in the North.
