This rigorous account clearly shows that Isaiah Fountain suffered a fate he didn’t deserve.
A nonfiction book examines a miscarriage of justice that resulted in the execution of a Black man in Jim Crow–era Maryland.
Isaiah Fountain, a Black resident of Talbot County, Maryland, narrowly avoided being lynched by a local mob after he was charged in April 1919 with raping a 14-year-old White girl named Bertha Simpson. But the hangman’s noose caught up with him 15 months later, the culmination of an appalling miscarriage of Jim Crow justice on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that made him what Koper calls the “second victim” of the assault on Simpson. “Even having a solid and compelling alibi provided by three prominent and disinterested White citizens wasn’t enough to overcome the pervasive Jim Crow sentiment of the time,” the author observes in a book that provides a coherent and detailed picture of the case based largely on newspaper accounts. In the Jim Crow South, nothing was more likely to ignite White rage than allegations of a sexual assault of a White girl or woman by a Black man, as the cases of Emmett Till and the Scottsboro Boys graphically show. Fountain’s alibi put him in the town of Easton, where he had been looking for his wife, at the time Simpson was assaulted about seven miles away in the underbrush beside a rural road. The county sheriff appears to have concluded that Fountain's horse and buggy had not been at the crime scene and he was, therefore, not the assailant. But none of that mattered to State’s Attorney Charles Butler or the judge, William Adkins, who presided over a trial in which the outcome was preordained, with the jury returning a guilty verdict in nine minutes. That verdict was overturned on appeal, but a three-judge panel convicted Fountain in the retrial, shockingly fabricating its own timeline so that he “had the opportunity to commit the crime after all.” The book lacks the color and character development that would really bring the material alive. But Koper’s dogged dissection of the record includes the “lost” diary of a 16-year-old girl—“At 3:13 this morning…Fountain was hanged in Easton,” she wrote—and he leaves no doubt that the defendant “was denied the justice he deserved.”
This rigorous account clearly shows that Isaiah Fountain suffered a fate he didn’t deserve.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7359957-9-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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