An engaging and sensitive exploration of America's detour from the promise of equal protection.
A triple biography illuminates the birth of the Jim Crow era.
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only railway car in New Orleans. Plessy could and often did pass for white; his arrest had been arranged to create a perfect Supreme Court test case of Louisiana's segregationist Separate Car Act. The result was catastrophe. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) held in sweeping terms that "separate but equal" services were acceptable under the federal Constitution, cementing segregation in public and private facilities across the South for another 60 years. The appeal was directed by Albion Tourgée, a famous New York lawyer and civil rights crusader. The court's opinion was written by Henry Billings Brown of Michigan; the sole dissenter was John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky. Longtime Washington Post senior editor Luxenberg (Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret, 2009) investigates the multiplicity of American racial attitudes in the latter half of the 19th century through biographies of these three men, and he carries it off in style. Throughout this period, Americans in all regions grappled with questions involving relations between the races, including distinctions between social and political equality and the difficulties of determining a person's race. The author's subjects well encapsulate his theme. Tourgée was a northern firebrand who lived for years in Reconstruction-era North Carolina, facing down the Ku Klux Klan. Harlan's views evolved from his slave-state origins to a vision of limited racial equality. Brown remained subject to the pervasive casual racism that informed the nation's progress from slavery to apartheid in the service of the comfort of the white majority. Luxenberg brilliantly tackles a difficult task, presenting his solidly researched work clearly and with a restrained objectivity. The racial conflicts and conundrums emerge organically from the colorful stories of each of the principals, with the tragic ending always in view.
An engaging and sensitive exploration of America's detour from the promise of equal protection.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-23937-9
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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