A best-selling history book solidified segregationist political control.

Evidence

We will never know just how many Americans read The Tragic Era, and then saw The Birth of a Nation again at their local theaters, and then pledged never to vote again for the Republican Party, never to miss a lynching bash, and never to consider desegregation—in short, never to do anything that might revive the specter of Blacks voting on a large scale and Whites being tortured. But there were many of them. More than any other book in the late 1920s, The Tragic Era helped the Democratic Party keep the segregationists in power for another generation. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 855

Categorization

• SEED: Bowers as a case study in how ‘objective’ historiography can function as racist propaganda — an angle on how historians’ framing power affects voting behavior.