A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

by Timothy Egan

Black innovators were the force behind a burst of cultural creativity, from the poetry of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance to the crossover dance craze of the Charleston to jazz, the soundtrack of the age—“the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” as Hughes called it. But daily life for millions was a reminder that the American promise was not for them.

This is still true. So many people profit off of Black culture but look sideways at it when it’s done BY Black people.

In his experience, you didn’t have to lead a man to hate, just show him the way and he’d do it on his own.

He dismissed the numerous stories of violence as the work of “a paper owned and controlled by a Jew,” and imposters trying to take down the Invisible Empire.

sounds familiar…

“Membership in a vast mysterious empire that ‘sees and hears all’ means a sort of mystic glorification of his petty self,” wrote John Moffatt Mecklin. “The appeal is irresistible.”

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction.

Good lord this is eerie

News accounts of the riot would give rise to a story that still lives, that the “Fighting Irish” nickname was forever set by the clash of Notre Dame against the Ku Klux Klan on May 17, 1924.

This is so badass

“It isn’t what I’ve done that counts. It’s what I refused to do.”

“They paid ten dollars to hate someone,” said a Denver judge, “and they were determined to get their money’s worth.”