A fine work of investigative journalism and an essential addition to the history of the civil rights movement.
Fast-paced account of the slow path to justice in a series of racially motivated murder cases.
Mitchell, a former reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger who recently founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, arrived in 1986 to a city “bursting with New South pride and Old South prejudice,” one that, just a few years later, would be discomfited by the revival of interest in the “Mississippi Burning” case and like crimes of the 1950s and 1960s thanks to a movie by that name. Looking into that cold case, writes the author, “I had heard of people getting away with murder before, but I had never heard of twenty people getting away with murder at the same time”—those 20 people had carried out the killings of civil rights activists in the name of white supremacy. In a Mississippi where Emmett Till’s killers confessed to the crime but still walked free, an all-white jury had acquitted a notorious racist, Byron Beckwith, in the murder of Medgar Evers—and Beckwith didn’t pay a cent for his defense, the bill having been picked up by an eager “White Citizens’ Council.” Through dogged investigation, sifting through reams of evidence and interviewing those who were on the ground at the time, Mitchell helped inspire law enforcement officials decades after those events occurred to secure sufficient proof to convict killers who had been at liberty for most of their adult lives. Even though many of the civil rights killings have still gone unpunished, often because the perpetrators are dead, others were reckoned for, including the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls, one perpetrator having long publicly bragged of having helped “blow up a bunch of niggers back in Birmingham.” That might have flown in the last days of Jim Crow, but, writes Mitchell, times have changed even in the segregationist stronghold of Philadelphia, Mississippi: “The town that had once protected these killers now wanted to see them prosecuted.”
A fine work of investigative journalism and an essential addition to the history of the civil rights movement.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4513-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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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