Depending on who you ask, the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth are either a powder keg led by far-right elites or a laboratory of new ideas. American and Confederate flags flutter from the windows of old, three-story mansions. Women in mink coats chat outside Neiman Marcus, clutching pamphlets from the John Birch Society between their jeweled fingers. Just off Main Street, past the Romanesque court house, Dallas's pristine brick and concrete give way to clusters of falling-down shacks with no running water, their foundations sinking into the floodplain. On a cracked and staple-pricked telephone pole in the Fort Worth Stockyards hangs a poster reading, "SAVE YOUR RACE. JOIN THE AMERICAN NATIONAL VANGUARD."

Not all are infatuated with these ideas of course. There are many Americans across the Metroplex opposed to the likes of Ted Dealey, whose ultra-conservative paper castigates Nixon and Kennedy as allies of socialism, communism, and the pope. There are many who march in opposition of the completely segregated school system, even as the powerful Baptist preacher W. A. Criswell snarls about the threat of the NAACP and CPUSA. Still, it is difficult to escape the atmosphere of white rage consuming this one-time headquarters of the KKK. Soon, the radicals here might do more than just talk. Someone might take matters into their own hands.