White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Johnson became President in 1865, upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and he served until 1869. His Reconstruction policies prioritized keeping the former slave states within the fold, and he vetoed many of the Congressional acts that would have guaranteed rights for African Americans, making no secret of his racist views. Anderson is sharply critical of Johnson as a figure with the power to move the country forward after the Civil War, and who instead capitulated to the regressive demands of white rage. 

The Chicago Defender, owned by Robert S. Abbott, was the nation's foremost black newspaper in the early 20th century, and a driving force in the Great Migration. As a black-owned and black-operated paper, the Defender published well-reported and strongly-opinionated articles detailing the unfair working conditions and extrajudicial violence faced by blacks in the South, urging them to seek a better life in the industrial cities of the North. 

Sweet was a black physician who moved with his family into a white neighborhood in Detroit in 1925, during the Great Migration. His house was attacked and destroyed by a mob of more than three hundred white protestors, incensed that he had dared to move out of the designated black ghetto. The Sweets defended themselves and their property against the mob with guns, and one white man was killed. The resulting murder trial became a cause célèbre defended by the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, who argued that black people have the same right to self-defense as whites do. The story of this trial forms a large part of Chapter 2 of White Rage. 

Wallace was Governor of Alabama between 1963 and 1987, and he also ran for President in 1968 as an independent candidate. His platform was entirely based on segregation and returning to the Jim Crow era; he is known for a speech that concluded “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”