Of interest as a visual record of ordinary places now exalted in history and memory.
An earnest photographic exploration of some key loci of the Southern civil rights movement and its aftermath.
“We are a country born of slavery followed by one hundred years of codified legal racism,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, in her stirring, too-brief foreword. She lands on a key point: the “ordinariness” of the images by Abranowicz, a commercial and travel photographer. Those photographs sometimes speak volumes, as with the juxtaposition of a literacy test imposed on Black voters in Alabama—one that few college-educated Whites would be able to pass—with a street view of the tiny house where a Mississippi minister working to register the voters once lived until being gunned down by an unknown assassin in 1955. That’s just one instance of the many recorded here of ordinary violence against Black people young and old during the time of Jim Crow and that continues to be inflicted on them today in so many forms—including the near-indentured work of the imprisoned population, an example of which Abranowicz locates in a Birmingham steel mill. The understated narrative arc suggests that, as one section title has it, there is hope for redemption. As Abranowicz notes, commenting on a photograph of a dirt road, Greenwood, Mississippi, was once a cotton center, then a “hotbed of voter-registration activity and protest in the 1960s,” and finally a place where a Black woman was elected mayor in 2006. A few errors creep into the text—e.g., Jefferson Davis was not alive in 1898 to dedicate what is correctly known as the Confederate Memorial Monument—and some of the photos are merely average. The best of them, though, depict people who continue the fight today, such as Florida lawyer Desmond Meade, who advocates against a modern “poll tax” imposed on ex-felons.
Of interest as a visual record of ordinary places now exalted in history and memory.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4773-2174-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
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
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