A thoughtfully argued memoir that shows—as if proof were needed—that “the struggle to make equality for all people a...
An architect of the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education suit recalls a long life spent fighting for equal treatment under the law.
Born in 1917 in Florida, Carter was taken as an infant to New Jersey. For all the supposed advancement above the Mason-Dixon line, he writes, “I am more alienated from whites than are black southerners of my generation.” Surely, by this account, he has many reasons to be alienated. New Jersey schools were segregated in fact as well as in law; when he was in high school, Carter recalls, the state Supreme Court ruled that public school facilities had to be made available to all students; and when he reported this to his teachers, he was immediately threatened with expulsion. As the first black graduate law student at Columbia, Carter met with his professors’ certainty that he “was not up to the task” merely by virtue of his ethnicity. And in the Army during WWII, Carter was accused of being a troublemaker, demoted from junior officer ranking and made eligible for draft as an enlisted man, though his demotion was later adjusted to an honorable discharge disqualifying him from further service. “Without the army experience,” Carter writes, “I might have discounted the impact of race and believed falsely that a black man could rise or fall based on his own talents.” Carter’s years of service as assistant to NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall, as the organization’s general counsel and, later, as a federal judge, did much to convince him otherwise. There are useful revelations here. For one, while Brown v. Board proved to be critically important in ending school segregation, Carter reveals that the NAACP had been preparing cases throughout the former Confederacy, finally choosing Kansas because “we might get a ruling in our favor, or a different kind of analysis of the problem than we could expect from the Deep South.”
A thoughtfully argued memoir that shows—as if proof were needed—that “the struggle to make equality for all people a fundamental tenet in our society continues.”Pub Date: May 12, 2005
ISBN: 1-56584-830-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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