A potent introduction to a nearly forgotten part of the civil rights movement and a personalized reminder of what it was...
A powerful memoir of the civil rights movement, specifically the dramatic struggle to integrate the schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia.
Little-remembered today is the story of the late-1950s closure of the Prince Edward public schools and the fate of its black children, who were either deprived of education or separated from their families and dispersed into other states. At a commemoration 50 years later, journalist Green and other participants were told how “the Prince Edward story is one of the most exciting pieces of American history, in part because the struggle of young people against discrimination resulted in a Supreme Court ruling.” That ruling was Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1964), which ordered the schools to integrate. Despite the ruling, however, another 22 years would pass before the county’s all-white academy was integrated. While local black students had contributed to Brown with their 1951 school strike, which they named their “Manhattan Project,” Green reminds us that their segregationist neighbors believed the integration would contribute to making “the people of America a mongrel nation.” Well before integration became an order, they were ready to padlock the schools and divert resources to their race-based replacement. In 2008, Green, a graduate of the whites-only academy, discovered that her grandfather had taken a lead role in the project from the beginning, in order “to maintain the purity of the white race” and avoid the raising of “half-black, half-white babies…nobody wants.” The author movingly chronicles her discovery of the truth about her background and her efforts to promote reconciliation and atonement. Her own experience in a racially mixed marriage provides a counterpoint.
A potent introduction to a nearly forgotten part of the civil rights movement and a personalized reminder of what it was truly about.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-226867-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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