That period includes the internment of 110000 Japanese Americans in War Relocation Camps without any kind of due process. Land of the free, unless your parents were born in the wrong country.
Well, that depends on whether he meant when we gave black people the right to vote on paper (after the Civil War) or when black people effectively got the right to vote (1965). I assumed he meant the latter ;-)
Actually, right after the Civil War, I've read that things were pretty different - I know there were a lot of blacks who moved into Indiana and were accepted quite warmly by the people here, up into the 1880's and the Klan really got underway.
By 1930, of course, the KKK had a significant political presence in Indiana, and at this point, white rural Hoosiers hate blacks with the best of them, but I was surprised to learn that that attitude came well after the end of the Civil War.
There was no Klan in the 1880's. There was a Klan from the end of the war until the 1870's but that was a disorganized vigilante group and it was suppressed by state governments. Around 1915, Birth of a Nation came out and people started romanticizing the Klan and it reformed. For a good 35 years though, there was no Klan of which to speak. That's not to say there weren't other groups which filled the same niche in that time period, but the Klan itself didn't exist.
