I hope you have an enjoyable and happy Fourth!
One of my Jefferson’s favourite quotes:
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Nice quote but the mass of people did not include the enslaved folks
“I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward.
There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lay defeat and death.”
~Nelson Mandela from Long Walk to Freedom
Photo by Daniel Hoherd / Flickr, cc by-nc 2.0
life:
When it comes to hate groups in America, of course, the longest-lived and most readily identifiable remains the Ku Klux Klan, which has been operating at varying degrees of influence and strength for close to 150 years.
In May 1946, LIFE magazine ran a series of remarkable pictures from a Klan initiation in Georgia, at the start of the Second Klan era. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan Tries a Comeback,” the article noted that the KKK pledged initiates “in a mystic pageant on Georgia’s Stone Mountain.” The language that accompanied photographer Ed Clark’s pictures, meanwhile, made clear that, as newsworthy as the story of this particular initiation might have been, LIFE’s editors considered the figures in their white robes and hoods to be almost laughable — if their disgusting rhetoric and arcane, pseudo-mystic shenanigans weren’t so profoundly un-American. Read the excerpt here on LIFE.com
(Photo: Ed Clark—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Great history piece
