Leopard's spots is famous for being one of the most racist novels of all times. When I heard of it I added to my queue so that I could try to see from inside someone else's head. Due to the recent political climate, I moved it to the front of the queue because I wasn't certain how much longer reading a book like this would be legal.

I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed the book. It was odd, I actually kept forgetting that he KKK were the protagonists. The idea that they actually justified the lynching of a black man, simply because he asked permission to kiss a white woman in the first "book" or that the red shirts beat another black man to death for brushing against a white woman, and that they seem to honestly feel this is entirely justified is flabbergasting.

That being said the story actually had me turning the page. The author claims the first "book" of the three contained within this work (the whole work is the first in a larger trilogy) is entirely true. After reconstruction the Republican Party gains complete control of the North Carolina government when former slaves get the vote. If you look past the race portion it actually becomes a universal story. Of how government corrupts. Of how those that have been oppressed so often reply to oppressions of themselves to oppressing others when they have power.

The second and third portions the author seems to agree are entirely fictional. Particularly the second "book" is focused on a romance between a rising member of the Democratic Party who had been orphaned in the first book, and the southern belle of an old guard member of the Party.

Unfortunately the conclusion was given away by simply reading the table of contents, so you may enjoy it better if you skip the table of contents. ( )

The sub-title says it all for this book. The Leopard's Spots is the first of the so-called Clansman Triology written by Dixon at the outset of the 20th century. This first of the threesome tells the story of Hambright, North Carolina, during the Reconstruction Period and on through the end of the 19th century. In Dixon's telling, the Ku Klux Klan was composed of patriotic sons of the South whose sole aim was to protect democracy from the Negro* hordes and the dastardly betrayal of the carpetbaggers and scalawags come to let loose anarchy and hell as revenge for the war years. The war, of course, had not been fought to defend slavery, but only to defend each state's freedom to live as they saw fit. If only the great statesman Lincoln had lived! He would have been able to keep these bloodsuckers and their henchmen at bay! As the years progress, the story of North Carolina remains one of the pure and lofty Anglo-Saxons trying to protect their civilization and their ballot boxes from the Mulatto curse and the white bloodsuckers who use the Negro vote as a tool to rob the state's coffers dry.

All of this is bad enough. There's some historical germ to most of it. But what makes the narrative particularly horrible to read is the author's philosophical take-away: One drop of Negro blood makes a Negro. Once you have a Negro, you have an inferior being. And the problem with education Negroes and giving them equal social status is that there is no logical end to it but inter-marriage. Or as the protagonist says at one point: "You can't ask a man to dinner and forbid him the right to court your daughter." And the issue here, of course, is that "one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro." So you see the problem. The races cannot, therefore, live together equally. One must be master and the other subordinant. That's just nature. Therefore, we must take away the Black man's right to vote and keep it away from him forever. That's just the way it's got to be. And so forth.

As the book ends, our hero has triumphantly swept to the governorship of North Carolina with both legs firmly planted upon this platform. He has also just won the One True Love of his life. (About a third of the plot deals with this entirely over-wrought, at least by contemporary standards, romance).

So, you know, all-in-all, ugh! I felt extremely slimed while reading this book, but i pushed my way through it for its historical value. People thought this way for a long, long time. Some people still think this way. In an online biography of Dixon I found, I learned that he was very, very popular as a lecturer throughout the early part of the 20th century, although he died broke in 1939. The attitudes in this book do go a long way to explaining the hard-line segregationist policies of too many Americans as the Civil Rights battles were being fought out.

By the way, The Clansman, which is the second book of the trilogy, was made into the infamous movie, "Birth of a Nation."

I'm glad I read this book, sort of, though I don't recommend for anyone except those with a strong historical curiosity and a strong stomach.

* I used the term "negro" in this review in order to give at least some flavor of the tone of this novel. Most of the time, "negro" was not the word used. ( )