on the Hill still echoed in other parts of Texas. Playing in Lampasas, LaDainian was taken aback when opposing fans taunted him: “Nigger! Nigger!” 

For the white Tomlinsons, the false memory was more dangerous and delusional. A revived Ku Klux Klan, modeled after the white-berobed heroes of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 cinema classic The Birth of a Nation rather than the Reconstruction-era terror organization, became a major political force in the twenties. Half of all Anglo-Protestant men in Dallas are thought to have joined the KKK, whose “ enforcers turned the Trinity River bottoms . . . into an open-air torture chamber, abducting and bullwhipping suspected sex offenders, bootleggers, African-Americans, supposedly immoral women, and anyone else they felt violated their code.” 

Klan membership was a fanatically kept secret. But Chris’s research convinced him that his great-grandfather Robert E. Lee Tomlinson—Jim’s son—was almost certainly a Klansman in Marlin. Chris’s grandfather Tommy, a Texas A&M engineering graduate who moved to Dallas in 1923 and became a key figure in building the city’s landmark Highland Park Village shopping center, was also very likely a Klansman, or at least a fellow traveler: Tommy “considered anyone who was not a white Protestant like himself inferior” and “used racial and ethnic slurs casually against the people who worked for him.” 

But like many white Texans of his and earlier generations, Chris Tomlinson grew up believing he was heir to a chivalric tradition, the “Southern heritage” that remains a racist dog whistle throughout the old Confederacy today. While Dallas-area schools were dragging their feet on integration in the seventies, Tomlinson writes, “I told my friends at all-white Lake Highlands Elementary that I was descended from aristocracy. . . . I felt proud of my family’s slaveholding and Confederate past, not because I believed in slavery or racism, but because white Texans honored and celebrated that heritage. I learned in elementary school that the South’s cause was lawful and noble. . . . I learned the words to ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ but at school we sang ‘Dixie’ more often.”

Published fifty years after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, in July 1964, Tomlinson Hill is particularly timely, not only because of the progress we’ve made but because false memory continues to blind us to present realities. There’s an unsettling sense of déjà vu in how Texas’s current political leadership has lashed out so angrily and reflexively at our first black president—and has been lavishly rewarded for it by the aging, overwhelmingly white Republican primary voters who end up selecting most of our officeholders. Our leaders brazenly deny a racial bias in new voter ID laws, lately claiming they are intended only to disadvantage Democratic voters, when most of those voters are black or brown. In Texas today the color of one’s skin remains a powerful determinant of one’s educational and economic opportunities—as well as one’s likelihood of being injured or killed working long hours in arduous, low-paying jobs. Because we refuse to remember the tragic and often tawdry racial history that unfolded throughout Texas much as it did on Tomlinson Hill, we can’t see the ways in which we’re repeating it.