This story is written in the past tense and breaks down the last one hundred years or so in American history as a way to offer some insights over how segregation and discrimination gain strength in this country.
The story begins by offering an excerpt of a writing ‘Blood at the Root’ which is a writing that talks about how two African men attacked two White women.
Later we discover that the identity of one of the women who was killed was Mae Crow, and one of the men who was the alleged murder was Ernest Knox.
AnD it is during this opening paragraph then where the nut graph of this article is found at.
By starting this story in this way then, it clues the reader a bit on how hate against non-whites (Blacks particularly as it relates to this story) may at times stem from the crimes that a few non-whites may had committed against white women.
Unfortunately however, my own belief on such a trend is that this is often an awful occurrence when the weight of a few crimes committed by a tiny amount of people end up harshly punishing a majority of other people from the same culture or ethnicity too.
Anyway, moving on, the story offers quotes by Du Bois as well as a way to offer some context of the climate and era of Blacks during the early twentieth century.
And since whites had a lot of unrest of Blacks just because of the new freedoms that they had after slavery had been abolished, many times horrific crimes that may had been committed by a few Blacks, were often used as justification to go on hunts or raids against any free Black persons.
This article also goes on to detail how the Ku Klux Klan did not receive recognition as a white supremacist terrorist organization until after 1915 when the film the birth of a nation was set out. Ironically enough the film idolized the KKK as defenders of White women in a way.
Before this time then, many Whites were just seen as mobs as raiders who targeted black families because of racial tensions and of the civil unrest that whites felt once Blacks were no longer slaves in America.
As for how this article is written out then, it goes over a sequence of events since the murder of Mae Crow in the first few paragraphs of this story, to describing more of the reactions of White people in later paragraphs, to a full-circle conclusion of how events such as the murder of Mae Crow spurred hatred of many African Americans post the abolishment of slavery.