Driving force
White-Supremacist Ideology
The belief system used to justify oppression across every era.
On the timeline
- December 24, 1865The Ku Klux Klan is founded
A terror organization forms in Tennessee to attack Black citizens and Reconstruction.
- September 4, 1875The "Mississippi Plan"
A coordinated Democratic campaign of fraud and massacre, beginning at Clinton, overthrows biracial government in Mississippi.
- March 27, 1876United States v. Cruikshank
The Supreme Court overturns the Colfax massacre convictions, ruling the Fourteenth Amendment does not reach private violence, disarming federal enforcement.
- February 8, 1915The Birth of a Nation
D.W. Griffith's film glorifies the Klan and fuels a violent revival.
Resources
America's racial order analyzed as a caste system.
A National Book Award history of racist ideas in America.
The only successful coup in U.S. history: white supremacists overthrew Wilmington's elected biracial government.
The roots of U.S. policing in slave patrols.
Whole towns violently expelled their Black residents and stayed white, the sundown-town legacy.
A whole Black Florida town erased in 1923, and nearly erased from memory.
An 18-month investigation into white-vigilante shootings of Black men after Katrina.
A landmark investigation documenting the theft of Black-owned land through violence and fraud.
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations, the links rarely drawn together.
- contradicts (incoming)·PersonPhillis Wheatley
Wheatley's published poetry was held up as living disproof of claims of Black inferiority.
- caused (incoming)·ThreadGreed, The Root
Foley's core claim: the idea of race was invented to justify and protect economic exploitation. Greed came first.
- enabled·ThreadChattel Slavery
The ideology that justified owning human beings.
- part of (incoming)·EventThe Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The study assumed Black lives were expendable for research.
- contradicts (incoming)·EventPhillis Wheatley Publishes First Book of Poetry by a Black American
Wheatley's published poems were paraded as living disproof of the era's claim that Africans could not reason or create.