A scholarly history lays bare a horrific example of Depression-era racial terrorism in Maryland.
Chavis, director of African and African American studies at George Mason University, tells the neglected, true story of a Jim Crow–era lynching on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
On Dec. 4, 1931, Matthew Williams suffered the fate of so many other Black men in Jim Crow America. A mob, suspecting him of killing his White boss at a factory in Salisbury, Maryland, dragged him from his hospital bed, hanged him from a tree on the courthouse lawn, and set his body on fire. “In lynching Williams, the mob was terrorizing the entire Black community,” Chavis writes in a searing account of the lynching. Williams was one of four Black men targeted by racial terror on the Eastern Shore between 1929 and 1931 as the Great Depression inflamed racial tensions. The three others escaped bloodthirsty mobs, but Williams, straitjacketed on his hospital bed, was an easy target. Maryland’s attorney general conducted an investigation, but amid what Chavis calls “the system of silence” in Salisbury, a grand jury in March 1932 found “absolutely no evidence that can remotely connect anyone with the instigation or perpetration of the murder of Matthew Williams.” Chavis’ sophisticated analysis benefits from his unearthing of a report by Patsy Johnson, a boxer-turned–Pinkerton detective who, posing as a trainer of young fighters, went undercover in Salisbury and was told by the owner of the town gym that you couldn’t let Black residents “run wild” or they’d “run you out of town.” Another resident assured Johnson that prominent men of the community were behind the lynching, with the local police chief among those who dragged Williams from the hospital. Chavis’ scholarly narrative gets bogged down in the two chapters about Johnson's undercover activities. But the book effectively ties the lynching to present-day Salisbury and America as a whole, noting that the Black neighborhood of Georgetown “was all but erased after a highway was built through it” and that “the police are the 'inheritors of lynch mob terror.' ”
A scholarly history lays bare a horrific example of Depression-era racial terrorism in Maryland.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4292-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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