If racism is a virus in American culture, we have seen attempts to eradicate it before. The federal government under President Grant’s Attorney General, Amos Ackerman—a reformed slave-owner himself—stomped on the virus of the Ku Klux Klan in the the early 1870s. He “flattened the curve” of their domestic terrorism. Yet, after Ackerman was pushed out for zealously prosecuting the Republican railroad robber barons, no one continued Ackerman’s efforts. Consequently the virus of pro-Confederacy, anti-Black violence, often supported by state and local government was allowed to fester through the 1870s, through the turn of the century.

Pushed back, but never eradicated, anti-Black violence rebounded through the 1910s, celebrated by erecting monuments to the defeated Confederacy–monuments that sprung up from Texas to Virginia. Then a second major outbreak of violence pushed African Americans off their own land in the 1920s-40s and into the cities of Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Buffalo, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Gary, and many others. Neglect of the poor, rural, and largely minority parts of the United States was de facto government policy for over eighty years. Neglect, though less malignant now, continues into the twenty-first century. It’s still like that in Lowndes County, Alabama, even when it was made de jure illegal in DC.