Commissioned by Vice News during the 2016 presidential campaign
From Vice: "Laurens, South Carolina, was named after the 18th century slave trader Henry Laurens, a Revolutionary War politician who was a partner in one of the largest slave-trading houses in North America.... During Reconstruction, the county of Laurens, like most of the Upcountry, was a locus of Klan activity aimed at suppressing the black Republican vote, and the town continued to be a hotbed of white nationalism for the next couple of centuries.... There's a belief here that any racial prejudice tamer than snarling dogs, fire hoses, and "Whites Only" signs isn't really racism, but something ingrained in a lost culture, something not malicious or active, but embedded, covert, and therefore forgivable. A belief that if a history of subjugation is tangled with a sanitized, whimsical idea of a time and place, then we should excuse all the viciousness that came with it." Read the story