1
" The forty-fifth president of the United States is the son of a man, Fred C. Trump, who was arrested in New York one Memorial Day during the 1920s at a rally staged by the Ku Klux Klan. On May 31, 1927, in Queens, New York, about one thousand Klan marchers made their way through the borough's dense streets. They wore robes and hoods. The parade turned into a riot when the Klansmen attached a smaller Memorial Day march of Italian Americans. Whites beat up other whites because the second Klan, led by Protestants was anti-Catholic as well as anti-color. Fred C. Trump, age twenty-five, resident of the Jamaica section of Queens, was among seven arrested. The forty-fifth president, in his retirement, if he possessed the means of reading and writing, might himself produce a family history entitled "Life of a Klansman." The public awaits. "
― , Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
3
" In May 1896, the thoughtful justices of the high court, men who help to clarify national standards for everyone, determine that "repellent intimacy" is a persuasive argument. The law of quarantine is affirmed.
"We think the enforced separation of the races. . .neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws," writes associate justice Henry B. Brown in a 7-1 ruling. The main point, says Justice Brown, is that "legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts."
The encirclement is complete. Race quarantine becomes the custom in all the land. White supremacy is acclaimed in habit, in thought and in law. "
― , Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
7
" The past feels like a comfortable place to make moral judgments. It is comfortable because we underestimate the people who live in it. We regard them as less than we are—or in reverse, grander than we are—but always, not like what we are. The past is a place where we can enjoy moral judgment and feel superior to a roomful of unfortunate people, not so enlightened as us, who had the bad luck to live when and where they did. One value in spinning out the story of a plain man is to show how complex an ordinary person can be, or was; to show the multitudes a life contains. It is dreadful what this character, my unlikeable protagonist, does with himself and with others. What would it mean to say that his judgments are not different by much from our own? One value in writing this particular life is to refuse to let the past be a refuge, to decline to feel superior to it, to reject feeling good because you are better than the uncountable idiots who are conveniently dead. "
― , Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
