Civil rights history at its most compelling.
A federal judge from South Carolina examines a rarely mentioned 1946 race-based crime that profoundly altered officially sanctioned segregation of blacks in the white-dominated United States.
Gergel (In the Pursuit of the Tree of Life: A History of the Early Jews of Columbia, South Carolina, 1996) drew inspiration from a courageous predecessor judge who presided in the Charleston federal courthouse. However, the searing narrative does not open with the heroic judge, J. Waties Waring (1880-1968). Rather, the author opens in 1945, as roughly 900,000 black soldiers returned to the U.S. after serving their country in World War II. One of them, Isaac Woodard (1919-1992), was on a bus in rural South Carolina, planning to return to his family. The white bus driver perceived that Woodard, dressed in his military uniform, was acting disrespectfully, so he halted the bus and ejected him, handing him over to the racist local police chief, Lynwood Shull. Although unprovoked, Shull beat Woodard with a blackjack, with special force around his eyes. The wounds caused almost immediate blindness, and Woodard lay helpless in the local jail. Eventually, news of the beating reached civil rights activists, who made sure President Harry Truman heard about the brutality. That set in motion legal proceedings culminating in charges that were shocking at the time. At Truman’s insistence, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Shull. The case unfolded in the courtroom of Judge Waring, and an all-white jury quickly acquitted Shull. However, the obviously unjust verdict shook Waring to his emotional core, and he spent the remainder of his career writing rulings meant to promote fairness for blacks in his courtroom, working remotely with such allies as the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall. President Truman reacted to the beating of Woodard by ordering racial integration of the U.S. military despite massive resistance. Gergel is both an astute researcher and an engaging writer, bringing this significant story to vivid life.
Civil rights history at its most compelling.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-10789-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
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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