Credible and poignant history limning the dark side of America’s racial past.
From popular historian Packard (Victoria’s Daughters, 1998, etc.), a chronicle of the growth and decline of America’s infamous Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation.
Confronting the ugliness of Jim Crow, the author suggests, is an important first step toward understanding how entrenched racial attitudes function in America today. Packard attacks the foundation of these attitudes by reconstructing 19th-century biblical justifications for racially based slavery, then exposing the fallacies inherent in those arguments. Combined with a southern economic dependence on agriculture, Packard asserts, such shaky arguments were good enough to prompt uneasy acknowledgment of the “peculiar institution” in the North and enthusiastic acceptance in the South. He demonstrates how the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 inflamed racial hatreds that exploded after Reconstruction into the bitter oppression of American blacks. In his exploration of this era, Packard details some of the most wicked laws ever enacted in the US, as well as the appalling fact that the federal government practically sanctioned them following the Supreme Court’s 1896 pronouncement in Plessy v. Ferguson of “separate but equal.” Only after African-Americans performed admirably through two world wars, the author states, did the hypocrisy of Jim Crow racism become visible to America’s white majority. This newfound visibility, according to Packard, made possible the reversal of Jim Crow laws launched by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. White moderates’ rejection of Jim Crow also assisted the modern civil-rights movement in its effort to desegregate schools in the face of southern white hostility. The author concludes this powerful volume by describing the dramatic death knell of legalized Jim Crow, rung by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Credible and poignant history limning the dark side of America’s racial past.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26122-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
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
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