Uses personal accounts unearthed from oral histories, congressional documents, and diaries, to unveil the creation of the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, and its spread across the American South.

A note to the reader -- "Bottom rail top" -- "Boys, let us get up a club" -- "I was killed at Chickamauga" -- "Worms would have been eating me now -- "They say a man ought not to vote" -- "I am going to die on this land" -- "A whole race trying to go to school" -- "They must have somebody to guide them" -- "Forced by force, to use force" -- "The sacredness of the human person" -- Epilogue : "it tuck a long time" -- Civil rights time line.