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 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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