A thoughtful historical study of the entrenched symbolism of a dreaded bridge in Mississippi, a landmark that “fixed...
History of the most notorious sites in Mississippi for white-on-black violence, from 1918 to 1966.
A place of enormous symbolic power, the Shubuta bridge over the Chickasawhay River, in Clarke County, Mississippi, became the most heinous “monument to Jim Crow,” the site of numerous lynchings of African-Americans by white mobs. In this painstaking study spanning decades, Ward (History/Mississippi State Univ., Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965, 2011, etc.) delves into the specifics of the gruesome crimes and the crusading work by journalists and NAACP activists like Walter F. White to expose the lynchings in the South. Waves of violence between the white supremacists and the black Mississippians who had seen their promise of freedom betrayed after Reconstruction broke out during moments of crisis, as Ward notes, especially following three eras of global war. The first, in 1918, a quadruple hanging of two brothers and two sisters (both pregnant) from the bridge, followed the murder of the young women’s boss as an attempt at protecting their honor. White, a black man who could pass for white, went undercover in Shubuta to expose the lynchings, but he was unable to publish the terrible details in mainstream magazines. In October 1942, the bridge was again the site of a lynching, this time of two teenage boys. Ward sees the violence as a reflection of white wartime anxiety over the fear of losing control of black workers, who were fleeing to the North. The Mississippi violence prompted renewed attempts at anti-lynching legislation in Congress. Finally, in 1966, after successive civil rights bills, the small but growing presence of the NAACP in Clarke County helped crack the widespread fear of registering to vote “or joining up with anything smacking of civil rights.”
A thoughtful historical study of the entrenched symbolism of a dreaded bridge in Mississippi, a landmark that “fixed attention on Jim Crow’s brutal excesses and unresolved legacies.”Pub Date: May 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-937656-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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