Horne believes Roof inherited the fear of murderous Blacks raping White women from a common historic narrative of White supremacy. Just before Roof started shooting, he told a participant in the Bible study:

"I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."

Horne considers this quote and sighs. "Raping our women...that's a quote that ricochets down through the centuries--that and fears of Black people rising up against White people...from the 1600s down to June 17, 2015."

Horne is writing a book on the major effect the Haitian Revolution had on Black and White people in the United States. By all accounts the slave rebellion against the French colony of Saint-Domingue was bloody. Horne says American newspapers were full of stories salaciously describing "marauding Blacks with sugar cane machetes hacking the White slave-owners to death," Whether these stories were believed or considered justified may have reflected the side of the color line on which the reader stood.

Either way, the revolt marked "a turning point in the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere," argues Horne. "White refugees with enslaved Africans in tow flooded into Norfolk and Savannah and other port cities." They brought with them stories of the alleged genocide of White Europeans. "This inspired both slave revolts and a dangerous cycle of slave owner brutality spiraling upwards until the whole system of slavery collapsed in on itself in the Civil War," says Horne.

The original incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan "was largely halted following federal legislation targeting Klan-perpetrated violence in the early 1870s," explained Professor David Cunningham for a PBS program. "The Klan's second -- and largest -- wave peaked in the 1920s, with KKK membership numbering in the millions."

In 1905 Thomas Dixon, Jr. wrote The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, later turned into the silent film The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The White Supremacist frame of Black men pillaging, raping, and murdering was returning to the mainstream.

Horne was interviewed for a commentary by author Berlet appearing in the August 2015 issue of the Washington Spectator

A discussion with Horne about his book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Origins of the United States of America, is at the Zinn Education Project."

Horne also was interviewd on the Democracy Now program in 2014.