New depth in the legacy of America’s struggle for equal rights.
Examination of a little-known civil-rights lawsuit brought in 1848 that, although rebuffed, anticipated the desegregation victory in Brown v. Board of Education more than a century later.
The Sarah Roberts case will be unfamiliar to most Americans, and all its principal participants, with the possible exception of abolitionist lawyer (and later Senator) Charles Sumner, have been largely forgotten. Sumner was enlisted by 25-year-old Robert Morris, the first black attorney to win a jury trial in the US, to provide experienced guidance in a suit brought against the City of Boston by Sarah and Benjamin Roberts on behalf of their daughter Sarah. The five-year-old Sarah, denied entry at the school closest to her home, was forced to walk past four other white-only schools on her way to Smith School, an overcrowded, under-resourced facility for blacks only. The case reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, where legendary Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, in ruling segregation legal under the Constitution, concocted the “separate but equal” concept that would later buttress the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision producing John Marshall Harlan’s prophetic lone dissent—“Our constitution is color-blind.” The Roberts family and their attorneys, however, wouldn’t quit pursuing legislation finally enacted in 1855 that outlawed segregation—though not de facto—in Massachusetts schools forever, producing a flood of racist vitriol from northern newspapers. Minister and novelist Stephen Kendrick (Night Watch, 2001) and NAACP Washington, DC, chapter president Paul Kendrick paint a carefully framed, evocative portrait of the middle-class black community that had been ensconced on Beacon Hill since Revolutionary times. It was this community that provided the majority of recruits to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry which, when decimated at the Civil War battle of Fort Wagner, near Charleston (subject of the popular 1989 film Glory), exploded the popular notion that blacks were inferior in combat.
New depth in the legacy of America’s struggle for equal rights.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-5018-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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