“You cannot understand the United States without grappling with race and the civil rights struggle,” writes Cobb. He’s...
A vade mecum for students of recent history, seeking to comprehend the last century’s ongoing struggle for civil rights for all citizens.
There are maps to the homes of the stars, rock-’n’-roll itineraries, compendia of haunted houses, but, until now, few historically minded guidebooks to the principal sites of the Civil Rights movement. Cobb, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a longtime journalist, provides a compelling atlas. He begins in Washington, D.C., noting that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. is “the only one of a black person in the [Capitol] rotunda,” while a handful of other African-Americans are represented elsewhere in the building. Not far away, he points out, is the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), purchased in 2002 courtesy of Oprah Winfrey, Don King and other big-ticket donors. The organization’s president, Dorothy I. Height, proudly observed of the building’s Pennsylvania Avenue address, “No American president will be inaugurated without getting past our house!” Outside the capital city, Cobb traces the origins of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation and the 1961 Freedom Rides. Elsewhere in southern Virginia, in Danville, the “Last Capital of the Confederacy,” he documents a 1963 protest broken by anti-insurrectionist slavery-era laws. He calls on Arthur Ashe’s statue in Richmond, alongside monuments to the chief rebel leaders. Traveling deeper into the South, he pays his respects to the veterans of lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, Raleigh and Durham, N.C.; honors the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, four young women who would now be in their 60s; and wonders why it is that Tennessee, so central in the movement’s history, “hardly comes to mind when the words civil rights struggle are uttered.”
“You cannot understand the United States without grappling with race and the civil rights struggle,” writes Cobb. He’s right, and his book makes a valuable contribution.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-439-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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