When filmmaker D.W. Griffith released Birth of a Nation in 1915, the revolutionary film changed the way America thought about the movies and in many respects launched the modern film industry. But lesser known is the role Birth of a Nation had in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.

The short-lived period of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy was met with defiance, violence, and a growing sense of chaos and danger — and that powder keg exploded on Easter Sunday in 1873, when the residents of tiny Colfax, Louisiana went to war with each other.

After emancipation decimated the labor supply of a Nashville-area plantation, its struggling master offers a former slave the chance to return. The response he received is one for the history books.

In 1891, a mob of close to 20,000 gathered at the Henry Clay statue in downtown New Orleans to take the law into their own hands. One of the largest in history and led by a row of 100 men with shotguns, it marched to the Parish Prison to deliver its own brand of justice to 19 terrified Italians imprisoned there.  

In this episode, we join a busload of determined Civil Rights marchers as they venture into a Georgia County equally determined to preserve a 75-year history of racial purity. It's another dark-but-important story from Southern history.