Able tribute to a boundary-smashing activist.
Compact, insightful biography seeks to restore the historical importance of the energetic, light-skinned NAACP secretary whose leadership laid the groundwork for the civil-rights movement.
As a result of forced sexual relations on both sides of his family, Walter White (1893–1955) was only 5/32nds black. Some historians have seen the blue-eyed, blond-haired activist as “a freak of nature who somehow used his fair skin to deceive both white and black America,” writes Dyja (The Moon in Our Hands, 2005, etc.). The author portrays White as a witty, ambitious man who had the courage and passion to challenge Jim Crow segregationist laws. Raised black but able to pass for white, he used this as a tool when he joined the NAACP in 1918 to investigate the growing number of lynchings in the South. Risking his own life numerous times, he lured lynchers into proudly confessing murder and torture to a man they thought was white. He wrote articles and gave incendiary talks to highlight his findings, using the mass media to gradually turn Americans against lynching. In New York, White was an early member of the Harlem Renaissance, though his literary success was limited; he wrote an anti-lynching novel (Fire in the Flint, 1924) and encouraged other writers to portray African-American life in all its complexity. He became secretary of the NAACP in 1931 and incessantly championed civil rights, making the cover of Time in 1938. He effectively blocked the Supreme Court nomination of John Parker, who supported black disenfranchisement; his relentless pressure resulted in Truman’s landmark 1948 executive orders ending discrimination in federal employment and requiring equal opportunity in the armed forces. His crowning legacy was the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated schooling. White’s 1949 marriage to a white woman gave ammunition to critics who diminished his role in African-American history by saying he never believed he was black, but Dyja successfully shows that he transcended narrow definitions of race and worked for humanity.
Able tribute to a boundary-smashing activist.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56663-766-4
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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