When Loewen began his research in 1999, he thought he’d find just a handful of sundown towns and “recovering” sundown towns, as he calls them, in Illinois. Instead, he found hundreds, from neighborhoods on Chicago’s North Shore to suburbs in the center of the state to small towns in southern Illinois, such as Anna.

Unraveling Race

 
Would be easier to list the Presidents that were not racist.  Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama is about all I can come with.  There is no evidence that the Bush's were racist but of course I would not be surprised so I am not going to vouch for them.

You could argue that Grant was the most progressive on the issue given the times he lived in.

Plakas brought up the bigger national interest in the case, saying that “Defamation is where words are used as weapons … even more damaging than bullets can be from weapons. Once you are defamed there is no surgical procedure to fix it. That’s why the words are the weapons now, in our society at this time, because they cause permanent injury.”

“Why should we care about the Gibson’s? Why should the rest of the country care? What is it about this case that has generated such interest?”

“Because the Gibson family represents all of us and we are at a tipping point now,” Plakas told the jury. “This case is about fairness. It is about our youth’s education and its importance. You, as a jury, are helping your community right now, but you are also helping the national community.”

Plakas then looked over at Allyn W. Gibson, the 90-year-old who has been sitting behind the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ table since the first day in April, a walker in front of him and a brace around his neck, and the veteran attorney in his late sixties smiled and winked at “Grandpa” as he finished his opening statement.

“The school helped distribute a flyer that said, ‘A member of our community was assaulted by the owner of this establishment yesterday,’ “ Plakas said, looking directly at Mr. Gibson. “That is what the malice part of this is about.”

“Oberlin College apparently thinks Grandpa is able to assault somebody.”

“It’s kind of crazy,” he told the station. “You go over there and don’t have a gun pointed at you, and you come back home and the first thing that happens is you have a gun pointed at you.”

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman
Princeton University Press, 2017, 224 pp.

In September 1933, an important policy document known as the Prussian Memorandum began circulating among lawmakers and jurists of the Third Reich. The Nazi regime was still in its infancy; Hitler had been named chancellor just nine months prior, the result of a power-sharing arrangement with nationalist conservatives who thought they could control the mercurial Austrian. Following the Reichstag Fire in February of that year, Hitler had assumed emergency powers and within weeks usurped the authority of the parliament. By that critical autumn, the Third Reich had begun Nazifying the German legal code. The Prussian Memorandum that passed between Nazi legal hands was an early blueprint for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship and criminalized sexual relations between Germans and those thought to have impure blood. It was the foundational text of Nazi legal thinking. Incredibly, the Prussian Memorandum expressly cited the gold standard of racist lawmaking at the time: the United States of America. (...)