A welcome study of racial justice and injustice.
A historical examination of rape trials in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow, with Maya Angelou as an important witness.
“The very first reported case heard in the Territory of Arkansas was a rape case,” writes legal historian Stern. That took place in 1820, occasioning a sentence of castration, commutation by the territorial governor, and an inconclusive series of laws that started with the death penalty for any convicted rapist and quickly devolved into two laws: a Black man would be put to death, but a white man would be sentenced for “not less than one year.” Fast-forward a century, and Jim Crow laws saw to it that Black people indeed died if convicted of rape—assuming they weren’t lynched first, lynching having been an important instrument of “keeping the Black population under control.” Stern looks closely at two contemporaneous cases, the one with Black defendants and the other with whites; the outcome was predictable, and even if the whites were imprisoned, it was in a comparative country club. Within this discussion emerges, both in testimonial and as moral compass, the writer Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson and raised in southwestern Arkansas in a town, as Stern writes, that “was an exceedingly dangerous place for Black people, especially Black men accused of rape.” Marguerite, raped as a young girl, knew sexual violence firsthand, yet she labored under a double shadow, since “Black activists”—men, mostly—“understandably shied from highlighting cases of Black men raping Black women or girls.” Even so, as Stern notes, Black women opened up that discussion, becoming agents for social change that would motivate Marguerite, now Maya, to become a pioneering feminist and to record her experiences in her writings, creating “something new, and newly vulnerable.”
A welcome study of racial justice and injustice.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780300273571
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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