Thread by @jackhutton

“Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan’s ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in American history..”
Grant, Chernow

On Reconstruction: “Grant saw a double standard at work: the country tolerated terror by whites, but not by blacks. As he wrote after leaving office: “If a negro insurrection should arise in South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or if the negroes in either of these States .

”..should intimidate the whites from going to the polls . . . there would be no division of sentiment as to the duty of the President. It does seem the rule should work both ways.”
Grant, Ron Chernow

“After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.”