The former New York Times columnist builds a thorough, damning indictment of America's retreat from racial integration. It's no surprise to hear that integration has failed. High rates of poverty, incarceration, and unemployment tell the statistical tale of black disadvantage. Polarized reactions to O.J. Simpson's acquittal and the 1994 Republican ascendancy—in a campaign fought in a racial code that attacked welfare and affirmative action—dramatize the lingering depth and breadth of racial division. What is surprising is how early the retreat began. Only two years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Wicker argues, whites realized integration was to be a national, not merely a southern, transformation. Unwilling to sacrifice or suffer inconveniences to benefit blacks, whites spurned Democratic racial liberalism by awarding Republicans major congressional gains in 1966 and by supporting the presidential bids of racist demagogue George Wallace. Wicker astutely identifies fear as a prime motivator of white backlash and patiently attacks the cultural myths and distortions that feed it. An unabashed liberal, the veteran journalist lays blame for political foot-dragging at the doorstep of Republican presidents who've ruled all but two terms since the 1960s. But he also skewers Democrats for abandoning black interests while taking African-American support for granted. Wicker expects neither party to address ``the continuing, the cancerous, the unconfronted American dilemma'' of race. He calls for a third party dedicated to providing opportunity for the poor, contending that only economic opportunity will bring social equality. Though he underplays the considerable roadblocks to third-party participation, he cites demographic trends that suggest growing minorities could constitute a plausible political force. Wicker's historical analysis of the social cost of continuing inequality is an invaluable corrective to conservative attacks on affirmative action and a sobering condemnation of America's unwillingness to do the right thing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-688-10629-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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