An indispensable addition to the literature of social justice and civil rights.
Searing indictment of the all-encompassing violence of Jim Crow and a persuasive case for long-overdue reparations.
The post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, writes Burnham, “blurred the lines between formal law and informal enforcement.” Every White citizen of a Jim Crow state was effectively deputized to enforce racially discriminatory laws and customs, even to the point of murdering a supposed offender, a common practice of the police as well. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, offers a vast roster of cases that highlight this formal/informal system of oppression. For example, bus drivers throughout the South had carte blanche to commit violence on any Black rider who dared insist on his or her dignity, while Black men were routinely lynched for responding the wrong way to a police officer—to say nothing of being in a White neighborhood without apparent reason. Most of the author’s illuminating and disturbing examples come from the mid-20th-century because abundant federal records exist (even if state and community records have been suppressed) and because living descendants of Jim Crow victims can often be found to corroborate official and civilian crimes against them. These include a Black man hanged for alleged sexual assault; a Black woman driven from her city to the friendlier climes of Detroit after a botched abortion procedure; a Black soldier killed for demanding equal treatment, one of countless Black service members who agitated for voting rights and equal employment even as they “continued to protest Jim Crow transportation and police brutality.” Burnham closes with a closely argued case for paying reparations to the descendants of victims. “Such a program is both practicable and politically feasible because the beneficiaries constitute a finite group,” she writes, adding, “Material reparation should be a part of a larger program of redress, including public educational initiatives and memory projects like memorial markers.”
An indispensable addition to the literature of social justice and civil rights.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 9780393867855
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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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