“Your children will ask you what side you were on.”
That’s what Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis, said at a news conference Jan. 24 after the shooting death of 37-year-old Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE “officers.” Pretti, a white man, was protesting ICE actions focused largely on people of color who may or may not be American citizens.
Eleven days later, the current president of the United States posted on his Truth Social page a loathsome, racist image depicting his presidential predecessor, Barak Obama, and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. After scathing protests, the video was removed 12 hours later, but so far no apology has been offered by the nation’s chief executive, thus making Mayor Frey’s statement even more haunting than it was on Jan. 24.
Bill Leonard
Those events and Frey’s warning bring to mind The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, published in 1905, and written by Baptist pastor and 1883 Wake Forest College graduate Thomas Dixon, who began the novel thus:
How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment and a felon’s death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.
Dixon dedicated the book to “A Scotch-Irish leader of the South, My Uncle, Colonel Leroy McAtee, Grand Titan of the Ku Klux Klan.”
For Dixon, the KKK was an “invisible empire” that would preserve and protect the dominance and power of Aryan (white) Americans over against the 13th Amendment and the influx of nonwhite Asian, Hispanic and non-Protestant Catholic immigrants.
The novel gave voice to the Klan’s purpose for America as articulated by a character named Richard Cameron, identified as “a Southern aristocrat.” Of America, Cameron says:
The Republic is great, not by reason of the amount of dirt we possess, the size of our census roll, or our voting register — we are great because of the genius of the race of pioneer white freemen who settled this continent, dared the might of kings, and made a wilderness the home of Freedom. Our future depends on the purity of this racial stock.
As the book illustrates, the Klan soon unleashed its lynching-oriented attacks against post-Civil War Black Americans. In his now classic work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the late theologian James Cone wrote that the Klan “transformed itself into a vigilante group whose primary purpose was to redeem the South and thereby ensure that America remained a white man’s country.”
To help accomplish that aim, Klansmen, their faces hidden behind hoods or masks, utilized lynching as “an extra-legal punishment sanctioned by the community.”
“Does any of this sound strikingly familiar here and now?”
Cone added: “When KKK members were tried in courts, they could usually count on their neighbors and friends to find them ‘not guilty’ since all-white male juries almost never found white men guilty of lynching a Black man.”
Does any of this sound strikingly familiar here and now? In 2026, Americans are experiencing the rise of a “Visible Empire” currently personified in ICE agents based within the Department of Homeland Security. The conspicuous parallels are not lost on many of us.
In an Oct.10, 2025, article in the Milwaukee Independent, social commentator Thom Hartman wrote:
In this era, we call them Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents; during the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries they called themselves the Ku Klux Klan. They often operated with the blessing of both federal and state governments, often deputized and given badges and guns, and “enforced the law” while wearing their famous white hoods to conceal their individual identities.
ICE operates today with a level of anonymity, impunity and intimidation that closely parallels the Ku Klux Klan’s tactics as masked, semi-official enforcers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Both used legal or quasi-legal authority, masked identities and violent or coercive tactics to carry out their missions, all without individual accountability while targeting vulnerable minorities and subverting legal norms to do so.
Amid those comparisons, the despicable posting of a video of the Obamas on the very Truth Social account of the president of the United States inexcusably confirms the racist link between the Klan era and the present moment. These immediate realities transform Mayor Frey’s statement that “your children will ask you what side you were on” into a challenge for all Americans.
All this did not have to happen. Seventy-seven million Americans enabled it with their votes. In an editorial of Jan. 26, New York Times opinion writer David French was even more specific:
I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight.
So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.
In “the year of our Lord” 2026, the judgment of history (and our children) isn’t waiting until “That Great Gettin’ Up Morning.” It’s here and now.
Fare we well?
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce.