A brilliant and thought-provoking study of Black literacy in America.
Chronicling the history of Black reading and writing.
This important history argues that the teaching of reading to people of African ancestry, from the antebellum period onward, has been perceived as a great threat to entrenched political and social power. It tells the story of men and women who risked their lives to learn—to read and write. In the process, they sought to educate their peers to make them participants in American democracy. Figures such as Denmark Vesey, Daniel Payne, Susie King Taylor, and Charlotte Forten come alive in the author’s vivid prose. This book shows them to be as important in the history of Black freedom as more familiar writers such as Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass. Douglass famously wrote that if you teach a Black man “how to read, there will be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, builds on Douglass’ observation to show that the fight for freedom is the fight for literacy—whether that fight went on in the plantations of the 1830s, the schoolrooms of the Reconstruction era, or the courts of the 20th century. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education takes on a new meaning in the context of the fight for Black people to go to school, not just to be socially integrated but to be as literate and powerful as all Americans. The author concludes: “Though it is a functional skill, literacy is more than that. Enslaved and freed people’s literacy journeys are journeys of becoming—becoming whatever it was they hoped and dreamed to be and had the capacity to be. They are stories of people taking full ownership of their personal destiny.” In our own time, when voters are again subjected to tests of reading and identity, when books are being banned, and when access to truth is challenged by disinformation, the stories of the brave men and women in this book stand out as moral lessons for the modern reader.
A brilliant and thought-provoking study of Black literacy in America.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780300272826
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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