For Americans who believe the modern civil-rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott, Gilmore ably readjusts the...
Gilmore (History/Yale Univ.; Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, 1996) reconstructs the battle of radical Southern activists against Jim Crow in the three decades preceding Brown v. Board of Education.
During the first half of the 20th century, the Communist Party attracted those determined to dismantle the South’s white regime. Its forthright commitment to racial equality far outstripped any declaration by the NAACP, the agenda of any regional commissions dedicated to racial harmony and the platforms of the Republican or Democratic parties. Gilmore’s wide-ranging research uncovers the fascinating story of how communists, socialists, liberals, legal and labor activists helped lay the groundwork for the mainstream civil-rights breakthroughs of the 1960s. Although she hobbles an already complex narrative with irritating academic tics—e.g., the tiresome use of “privilege” as a verb and, notwithstanding her concession that the Scottsboro defendants “were really boys,” her insistence on preciously denominating the case as the Scottsboro “Boys”—she offers colorful set pieces about the 1929 Gastonia, N.C., textile strike; the ill-conceived 1932 attempt to film in Moscow Black and White, a movie about working conditions in Birmingham, Ala.; the origin and ambiance of The Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill, N.C., a simultaneous hotbed and safe haven for radical thought; and the 1942 sit-ins by Howard University students in Washington, D.C., cafeterias. Famous names—A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Thurgood Marshall—dot the narrative, but this story’s charm lies in the sensitive mini-portraits of lesser-known recurring characters: Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first American-born black communist; Junius Scales, child of privilege turned communist; Frank Porter Graham, heroic UNC president; tortured professor Max Yergan; smarmy sociologist Howard Odum; and the narrative’s star, Pauli Murray, an utterly relentless, remarkable activist whose life by itself is worthy of book treatment.
For Americans who believe the modern civil-rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott, Gilmore ably readjusts the record.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06244-1
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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