A fresh, well-documented study of the complex struggle for equality in education.
A historian of black education discovers an underground network of advocates and reformers.
Drawing on two years of interviews and more than 15 years of research, Walker (African-American Education Studies/Emory Univ.; Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South, 2009, etc.) focuses on the career of teacher, school principal, and Georgia state senator Horace Tate (1922-2002) to offer a new perspective on segregated schooling and education reform in the South. Before embarking on research for this book, Walker believed the “repeatedly told and almost universally accepted” story that “the NAACP protested injustice and crafted the successful Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case” that incited grass-roots movements, civil disobedience, and legal protests. Tate’s testimony, however, along with the massive amount of archival material he provided for her, revealed generations of black educators acting strategically and covertly to achieve change. While the NAACP served as the face of reform, the organization could not have succeeded without these behind-the-scenes players. Much of Tate’s career happened by accident: He attended Fort Valley State College, where by chance he took a part-time job as student chauffeur for the college’s president, Horace Mann Bond, a savvy administrator who “manipulated the levers needed” to solve problems. By observing Bond, Tate learned how to achieve goals by focusing on the weaknesses, psychology, and prejudices of his opponents. Tate’s first teaching job came by accident, too, when a principal, studying at Fort Valley, needed to hire a college graduate to teach in his high school. Through that position, Tate became a member of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association, an active and influential society of black educators (Tate eventually became executive secretary). When the principal was drafted into World War II, Tate took over as administrator. As he rose in the profession, he became involved in teacher training and designing innovative curricula that he kept “concealed from white eyes” who would object to an ambitious vision for black students.
A fresh, well-documented study of the complex struggle for equality in education.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-105-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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 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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