Chattanooga, Tennessee, was the setting for an incident that became, in the troubled yet hopeful years of the Reconstruction era (stretching from the end of the Civil War in April 1865 to the 1870s), all too common in the Southern United States. The hooded henchmen of the Ku Klux Klan, one of several white terrorist groups that roamed the South during this period, trying to control blacks and their sympathizers through fear, severely beat a black man named Andrew Flowers. The attack was spurred by Flowers's recent election as justice of the peace (a kind of judge who can hear minor cases in towns and counties). One of many victims of such violence, Flowers later recalled that his attackers had "said they had nothing in particular against me, that they didn't dispute I was a very good...