by Richard Gergel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 22, 2019
Civil rights history at its most compelling.
A federal judge from South Carolina examines a rarely mentioned 1946 race-based crime that profoundly altered officially sanctioned segregation of blacks in the white-dominated United States.
Gergel (In the Pursuit of the Tree of Life: A History of the Early Jews of Columbia, South Carolina, 1996) drew inspiration from a courageous predecessor judge who presided in the Charleston federal courthouse. However, the searing narrative does not open with the heroic judge, J. Waties Waring (1880-1968). Rather, the author opens in 1945, as roughly 900,000 black soldiers returned to the U.S. after serving their country in World War II. One of them, Isaac Woodard (1919-1992), was on a bus in rural South Carolina, planning to return to his family. The white bus driver perceived that Woodard, dressed in his military uniform, was acting disrespectfully, so he halted the bus and ejected him, handing him over to the racist local police chief, Lynwood Shull. Although unprovoked, Shull beat Woodard with a blackjack, with special force around his eyes. The wounds caused almost immediate blindness, and Woodard lay helpless in the local jail. Eventually, news of the beating reached civil rights activists, who made sure President Harry Truman heard about the brutality. That set in motion legal proceedings culminating in charges that were shocking at the time. At Truman’s insistence, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Shull. The case unfolded in the courtroom of Judge Waring, and an all-white jury quickly acquitted Shull. However, the obviously unjust verdict shook Waring to his emotional core, and he spent the remainder of his career writing rulings meant to promote fairness for blacks in his courtroom, working remotely with such allies as the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall. President Truman reacted to the beating of Woodard by ordering racial integration of the U.S. military despite massive resistance. Gergel is both an astute researcher and an engaging writer, bringing this significant story to vivid life.
Civil rights history at its most compelling.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-10789-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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