A well-researched history of frustrations, defiance, and bold dreams—good for movie buffs and civil rights historians alike.
A chronicle of the long struggle for Black Americans to matter in movies.
Drawing on interviews with directors, actors, producers, and screenwriters, as well as published and archival sources, journalist, biographer, and Guggenheim fellow Haygood creates an encyclopedic history of Blacks’ film presence, beginning with D.W. Griffith’s scandalous epic, The Birth of a Nation. Aired in Woodrow Wilson’s White House in 1915, the movie, based on a novel about the Ku Klux Klan, soon attracted more than 25 million viewers nationwide, inciting vociferous protests among Blacks. A few years later, the enterprising farmer Oscar Micheaux offered a stark counterpoint to Griffith’s movie when he filmed The Homesteader, based on his own life. Micheaux went on to produce many other movies, casting Paul Robeson in one and, in 1930, adding talking pictures. Other movies, though, depicted Blacks in the stereotypical roles—e.g., servants and maids—that would persist for decades; between 1903 and 1927, for example, nine films were made of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1939, Hattie McDaniel—who already had appeared in more than a dozen films—was cast as Mammy in Gone With the Wind and won an Oscar. Unfortunately, her career stagnated afterward for lack of roles. Haygood provides intriguing capsule biographies of each of his large cast of characters, including superstars Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Denzel Washington; directors Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles, Steve McQueen, Jordan Peele, and Spike Lee; and groundbreaking actors Lena Horne, Diana Sands, Diana Ross, and Cicely Tyson. Many were nominated for Oscars only to lose out to their White colleagues. Other episodes from the entertainment world include scandals that erupted over interracial love affairs; George Gershwin’s tireless efforts to stage Porgy and Bess; the advent of Black action heroes in the 1970s; and incremental visibility over the years. In 1949, four movies dealt with anti-Black racism; in 1977, Roots became “the most watched TV miniseries of all time.”
A well-researched history of frustrations, defiance, and bold dreams—good for movie buffs and civil rights historians alike.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65687-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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
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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