Nuanced critique of a judicial ruling that, by design or not, upholds separation and supremacism.
Legal examination of the retrenchment that followed the Brown v. Board desegregation ruling.
Can there be desegregation in schooling without desegregation in housing, employment, and other aspects of society? Legal scholar Adams examines the Supreme Court’s 1974 rulings in the Milliken v. Bradley case, an outgrowth of lawsuits concerning Detroit public schools. A commentary on and reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, those rulings forged a distinction between de facto and de jure segregation: If Black people lived together in one community and white people lived together in another, wasn’t that just the way they chose to be, in that “the racial cast of Detroit’s neighborhoods was entirely voluntary?” Disingenuously, the Supreme Court, already beginning to drift rightward, answered yes, overlooking an observation from a decade earlier on the part of Lyndon Johnson: “Employment is often dependent on education, education on neighborhood schools and housing, housing on income, and income on employment.” Notes Adams, Justice Stephen Breyer opined years after the fact that Brown was exemplary of a better society in which we all lived together, but in Milliken, its preceding legal contests, played out in Detroit over years in the 1960s and early 1970s, presupposed that white people and Black people lived in separate neighborhoods by choice. The district court saw it differently: Whereas, as Adams notes, layer on layer of covenants kept Black people in the city but encouraged white flight to the suburbs, busing and other efforts to desegregate the schools were in force until the Supreme Court stepped in. In Adams’ view, closing this well-written and well-argued study, the court’s decision effectively upheld segregation and undid Brown, and the racial inequalities in public schooling continue unabated today.
Nuanced critique of a judicial ruling that, by design or not, upholds separation and supremacism.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780374250423
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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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