At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

At a far pole from accountable public trust, or constitutional duty, Hoover corrupted the FBI to wage political war.

Many of the early Wilcox settlers brought from South Carolina the zeal of its famous “fire-eaters,” who championed slavery and secession toward the Civil War in an era when one isolated Unionist balefully observed that his state was “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

Together with Tet, the report left in near ruins both his war and his peace paths to advance freedom.

How long? Not long! Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long! Because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

“A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human, and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,”

By its visionary conception, and immense effect, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 rightfully joined the two great civil rights laws as a third enduring pillar of the freedom movement.

Over the next decade, a few journalists would regret their failure to expose firsthand evidence of Hoover’s penchant for spy vendettas above public service. (“I didn’t do my job,” recalled David Kraslow of the Los Angeles Times. “I should have blown the thing sky high, but I didn’t.”)

it may be said of the Reconstruction Era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow…a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man better than the black man.”