This rigorous account clearly shows that Isaiah Fountain suffered a fate he didn’t deserve.
A nonfiction book examines a miscarriage of justice that resulted in the execution of a Black man in Jim Crow–era Maryland.
Isaiah Fountain, a Black resident of Talbot County, Maryland, narrowly avoided being lynched by a local mob after he was charged in April 1919 with raping a 14-year-old White girl named Bertha Simpson. But the hangman’s noose caught up with him 15 months later, the culmination of an appalling miscarriage of Jim Crow justice on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that made him what Koper calls the “second victim” of the assault on Simpson. “Even having a solid and compelling alibi provided by three prominent and disinterested White citizens wasn’t enough to overcome the pervasive Jim Crow sentiment of the time,” the author observes in a book that provides a coherent and detailed picture of the case based largely on newspaper accounts. In the Jim Crow South, nothing was more likely to ignite White rage than allegations of a sexual assault of a White girl or woman by a Black man, as the cases of Emmett Till and the Scottsboro Boys graphically show. Fountain’s alibi put him in the town of Easton, where he had been looking for his wife, at the time Simpson was assaulted about seven miles away in the underbrush beside a rural road. The county sheriff appears to have concluded that Fountain's horse and buggy had not been at the crime scene and he was, therefore, not the assailant. But none of that mattered to State’s Attorney Charles Butler or the judge, William Adkins, who presided over a trial in which the outcome was preordained, with the jury returning a guilty verdict in nine minutes. That verdict was overturned on appeal, but a three-judge panel convicted Fountain in the retrial, shockingly fabricating its own timeline so that he “had the opportunity to commit the crime after all.” The book lacks the color and character development that would really bring the material alive. But Koper’s dogged dissection of the record includes the “lost” diary of a 16-year-old girl—“At 3:13 this morning…Fountain was hanged in Easton,” she wrote—and he leaves no doubt that the defendant “was denied the justice he deserved.”
This rigorous account clearly shows that Isaiah Fountain suffered a fate he didn’t deserve.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7359957-9-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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 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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