Early on in Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Devil in the Grove, there’s a scene where Thurgood Marshall, at the time a lawyer for the NAACP, is followed and eventually flagged down by a convoy of cars in Tennessee, driven by a mix of white civilians and local highway patrolmen. These eight men know who Marshall is. They know he’s scored important court victories for African-Americans. And so they have tracked him. Stalked him. Waited for him. They have planned for him.

Marshall is accused of drunk driving (he is sober), pushed into a sedan, and driven deep into the countryside and down a dirt road to Duck River, where another group of men are waiting to lynch him. On that night in 1946, the only thing that saves Marshall is his three colleagues who were in the car with him when he was apprehended—including white reporter Harry Raymond—who follow the caravan to the river and kick up enough of a fuss that the lynching party can’t do its dirty work without attracting extra scrutiny.

Now, that story is terrifying for a lot of reasons. It goes without saying that Marshall’s narrow escape was a rarity when, according to the Tuskegee Institute, nearly 5,000 people were lynched between the years of 1882 and 1951. And King’s book details a white supremacist culture that was relentless in its pursuit and persecution of black people. Juries were conveyed in secret and in haste to hang black suspects before the NAACP could get wind of it. Local sheriffs and deputies would spend all night chaining black suspects to pipes and beating them with rubber hoses. Notoriously monstrous Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall personally oversaw the jail transfer of two (falsely accused) black prisoners so that he could pretend to have car trouble, and then shoot both men in the dead of night, killing one and wounding the other.

The book is an appalling document of institutionalized American racism but also of the EFFORT put into that racism. It takes effort to stalk a lawyer and game plan his execution. It takes effort to furiously goad the judicial system into executing people before justice can arrive on the scene. It takes effort to create an entire infrastructure of suppression around a group of minorities who just want to be left alone. It's as if the racists involved in the book lived for no other purpose. It is an effort that is not only horrifying, but inexplicable. Why? Why would anyone put so much time and effort into hatred when they can just stay home and have a beer?

This weekend, James Alex Fields drove his car into a group of protestors in Charlottesville. And whether or not Fields acted on impulse or if he woke up that morning intent on using his car as a deadly weapon, it’s terrifying to think of what he was willing to do in the name of white supremacy. This is a man who deliberately disregarded his future and was willing to face jail time and personal ruin, all so he could murder another person whose only crime, in Fields’ eyes, was wanting to declare that Nazis are bad people.

Fields was not alone in deeming all this sacrifice to be worth his hatred. Those neo-Nazis who marched on the UVA campus the night prior? They had to organize. They had to buy their rinky-dink Tiki torches at the Home Depot. They had to be willing to disregard the prospect of being fired by their bosses at the hot dog stand the following day. They put work into their hatred, because it meant just that much to them.