A timely contribution to the literature of civil rights.
The murder of young Emmett Till in 1955 stands today as a byword for racist injustice. How it became so is the subject of this well-conceived work of social history.
Gorn (Chair, American Urban History/Loyola Univ. Chicago; Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy Number One, 2009, etc.) begins his account with the end of Till’s life—that is, with the gruesome murder in which the young black man was mutilated and tossed into a Mississippi river, his body weighted down with a part from a cotton gin. “We could tell by looking at it that it was a colored person,” said a white farmer who recovered the body. Infamously, Till, visiting from Chicago, was killed for supposedly flirting with a white woman. It was one of countless lynchings, made public in good measure because Till’s mother demanded an open casket, saying, “let the people see what they did to my boy.” The woman’s husband was implicated in a tale of justice and injustice that Gorn examines from many angles: the conduct of the investigation; the reverberations of the Till case in the civil rights movement that was then gathering force, especially as reported by the black press; and, today, how the memory of the Till case is presented in history books, museum exhibits, and the like. As the author documents, the proceedings made a textbook example of Southern apartheid, with a sheriff on the stand lying (he maintained that the body was black because it was sunburned, for instance) and with white supremacists defiantly proclaiming that Till was to be just the first of countless victims. Combing archives and libraries, Gorn assembles a solid case study in how an isolated legal case spread nationally and internationally—and in how, today, the once-exultant supremacist claim that no white would ever go to jail for killing a black person in Mississippi has since been disproven, though racism is far from disappearing.
A timely contribution to the literature of civil rights.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-932512-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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