Things should have been settled. The weary delegates should have already chosen a presidential nominee, packed up their Welcome to New York souvenirs and returned home in time for the nation’s celebration of what it stood for. Just a few dozen miles to the south, it was celebrating a white-nationalist Independence Day with a hood-and-robe parade right down the Broadway of a beachside New Jersey city. The simultaneous events reflected the divide over what it meant to be an American. Instead of proudly asserting who we are, that distant summer day raised a question being debated over the July Fourth weekend a century later: Who are we?

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Organizations: Democratic National Convention, Ku Klux Klan Locations: New York, America, beachside New Jersey