We Were Illegal Quotes

“As I honed my research and found that my family had been in one of those feuds, I saw eerie parallels between what happened in Colorado County from 1871 to 1911 and the rise in vigilantism in Texas and around the US that began in the 2010s. I am not the only one to notice. During our first interview, I asked the historian James Kearney, whose story I will tell more of later, whether he saw parallels between that time and where we are now.

His reply was immediate: "Absolutely. Are you kidding me? You have all these unreconstructed Confederates, and they set out to dismantle all the Reconstruction programs one by one. It took them 40 years to do it. They won the Second Civil War. It's all a legacy of slavery, that certain human beings can control others."

And then a sentence I can't stop thinking about: "Slavery has disappeared, but the attitudes are still there. it's not a parallel—it's a continuation. It's just a new manifestation of the same old attitudes.”
― Jessica Goudeau, We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family's Mythmaking and Migration