A scholarly history lays bare a horrific example of Depression-era racial terrorism in Maryland.
Chavis, director of African and African American studies at George Mason University, tells the neglected, true story of a Jim Crow–era lynching on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
On Dec. 4, 1931, Matthew Williams suffered the fate of so many other Black men in Jim Crow America. A mob, suspecting him of killing his White boss at a factory in Salisbury, Maryland, dragged him from his hospital bed, hanged him from a tree on the courthouse lawn, and set his body on fire. “In lynching Williams, the mob was terrorizing the entire Black community,” Chavis writes in a searing account of the lynching. Williams was one of four Black men targeted by racial terror on the Eastern Shore between 1929 and 1931 as the Great Depression inflamed racial tensions. The three others escaped bloodthirsty mobs, but Williams, straitjacketed on his hospital bed, was an easy target. Maryland’s attorney general conducted an investigation, but amid what Chavis calls “the system of silence” in Salisbury, a grand jury in March 1932 found “absolutely no evidence that can remotely connect anyone with the instigation or perpetration of the murder of Matthew Williams.” Chavis’ sophisticated analysis benefits from his unearthing of a report by Patsy Johnson, a boxer-turned–Pinkerton detective who, posing as a trainer of young fighters, went undercover in Salisbury and was told by the owner of the town gym that you couldn’t let Black residents “run wild” or they’d “run you out of town.” Another resident assured Johnson that prominent men of the community were behind the lynching, with the local police chief among those who dragged Williams from the hospital. Chavis’ scholarly narrative gets bogged down in the two chapters about Johnson's undercover activities. But the book effectively ties the lynching to present-day Salisbury and America as a whole, noting that the Black neighborhood of Georgetown “was all but erased after a highway was built through it” and that “the police are the 'inheritors of lynch mob terror.' ”
A scholarly history lays bare a horrific example of Depression-era racial terrorism in Maryland.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4292-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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