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WHY NOT EVERY MAN?

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN THE QUEST FOR THE DREAM

Less fluent, but also broader, than Fergus M. Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan (p. 94).

An overview of African-American resistance to injustice from the early days of slavery to the heyday of the civil rights movement and beyond.

The quest for civil rights has occupied African-Americans from the first generations in captivity, independent scholars Hendrick and Hendrick show. Most, the authors insist, “attempted to escape bondage without doing bodily harm to anyone,” and though violent slave rebellions exercised contemporary observers and still figure in the history textbooks, nonviolent civil disobedience was more common an instrument of resistance. African-Americans, too, were important actors in the various Northern abolition movements of the three decades preceding the Civil War. Frederick Douglass, for one, began as a follower of William Lloyd Garrison, but later broke with that movement as he came to believe that armed conflict was necessary to achieve emancipation. An early form of protest was the boycotting of goods produced by slave labor, such as cotton, sugar and tobacco; this same form of protest became a hallmark of Mohandas Gandhi’s later satyagraha movement in South Africa and India, which would come full circle when adopted in the 1950s by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Hendricks’ long detour into Gandhi’s life and work is a distraction, well-covered and well-known as these matters are, but their continued attention to the nonviolent aspect of the struggle is welcome, particularly as its practitioners remained resolute in the most trying of circumstances, such as the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activities in the early-20th century and the corresponding wave of lynchings throughout the South—3,745, the authors record, in the U.S. between 1889 and 1932. The specter of lynching closes the book, as the authors consider the 1998 murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, a town, they write, that even today seems never to have heard of desegregation.

Less fluent, but also broader, than Fergus M. Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan (p. 94).

Pub Date: May 20, 2005

ISBN: 1-56663-609-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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TOMBSTONE

THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL

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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