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HistoryBlack History

Lynching: an all-American holocaust

Review by bookpagedev

No volume recounting the history of lynching could ever be fun to read. But Philip Dray’s book At the Hands of Persons Unknown is timely, impressively researched and written well the next best thing to enjoyable.

Although Dray goes back many centuries into history to demonstrate the inhumanity of the dominant culture against minority cultures, his book focuses on the years 1882 to 1962, coinciding with detailed archives at Tuskegee University, a predominately African-American college in Alabama. Researchers at Tuskegee relied mostly on newspapers and magazines to learn about lynchings, publishing a yearly tabulation that, Dray says, "came to be considered a definitive tally a kind of Dow Jones ticker of the nation’s most vicious form of intolerance." Dray, who teaches African-American history at New York City’s New School, learned about the Tuskegee archives in 1986. Before mining the archives’ awful riches, he says, "Like most people, I was aware that lynching had been an aberrational form of racial violence in the Deep South, and a means by which cattle rustlers and card cheats had sometimes received rough frontier justice." After seeing the extent of the archives’ holdings, Dray understood that lynchings were far less sporadic than he had realized. "A holocaust!" Dray heard himself saying.

That all-American holocaust is filled with flesh-and-blood human beings who transcend the horrifying statistics. The book is populated with victims, lawless lynchers and heroic outsiders like journalist Ida B. Wells and W.E.

B. Du Bois, both of whom valiantly crusaded to halt the practice. Given the near-extinction of lynchings by the mid-1960s, Dray’s by-definition depressing book ends with a hint of optimism. But as lynchings have waned, they still seem timely. Why? Partly because lynching is usually a manifestation of racism, and racism remains in 2002, and partly because every year hundreds of innocent individuals are convicted of crimes in U.S. courtrooms. Some of those wrongly convicted individuals end up on death row. That phenomenon cannot accurately be called lynching, but it is certainly lynching’s first cousin.

Steve Weinberg is a book author and magazine writer in Columbia, Missouri.

 

No volume recounting the history of lynching could ever be fun to read. But Philip Dray's book At the Hands of Persons Unknown is timely, impressively researched and written well the next best thing to enjoyable.

Although Dray goes back many…

HistoryBlack History

Recalling a painful era

Review by bookpagedev

Medgar Evers, Sovereignty Commission, Byron De La Beckwith, Ole Miss all conjure up images of Mississippi and its pivotal role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Two new books one by a black man and another by a white woman offer fascinating glimpses into the social structure of Mississippi at a time when it was at the center of historic change.

W. Ralph Eubanks, publishing director at the Library of Congress, discovered in 1998 that his parents’ names had been on a watch list developed by the infamous Sovereignty Commission, established by the Mississippi legislature in the 1950s as a means to preserve segregation. Intrigued, Eubanks began to explore how his parents were placed on the list. His search eventually led him to retrace his Mississippi childhood, a process described in the compelling new book, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past. A combination of memoir and political history, Eubanks’ book is by turns a charming remembrance of a rural boyhood and a chilling reminder of racism’s legacy.

Eubanks’ personal narrative about growing up in the segregated South turns conventional perception on its head. He actually had, to a large degree, an idyllic childhood on a farm outside Mount Olive, Mississippi. His sheltered world was shattered only when his class became the first to integrate the local school.

The search for the truth about his parents (placed on the watch list only because they were educated black people) leads Eubanks to his own reconciliation with the world he left behind a quarter of century before. Eventually, he answers his children’s questions about Mississippi by taking a family trip to the state and reconnecting them to the rural roots that are an integral part of his character.

While Eubanks was reading Faulkner, Peggy Morgan was living a Faulkner novel. Writer Carolyn Haines chronicles this Mississippi woman’s life in My Mother’s Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story (River City, $27.95, 368 pages, ISBN 1579660428). Like Ever Is a Long Time, this is a book about the search for truth and the courage to confront it. Poor, white and uneducated, Morgan grew up in a large family dominated by an abusive, alcoholic father. In the social strata of the old South, only blacks were lower than Morgan’s family. Haines, a former journalist who has written numerous novels, portrays Morgan’s struggles to overcome the abuse that followed her from childhood into her own marriage with Lloyd Morgan, which eventually ended in abandonment and disaster.

Morgan and her mother each held a secret related to the civil rights struggle. According to Morgan, her mother died carrying the knowledge of who killed Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Morgan herself had information about the murder of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was shot to death in his own driveway. It took more than 30 years for her to summon the courage to testify against Byron De La Beckwith, who was finally convicted of Evers’ murder in 1994.

Haines’ crisp, readable account is an inspiring look at one woman’s effort to conquer the pain and hatred that marked her youth. Read together, these two books provide a rich context for understanding the segregated South and the power that race held in creating its structure. J. Campbell Green is a Nashville businessman.

Medgar Evers, Sovereignty Commission, Byron De La Beckwith, Ole Miss all conjure up images of Mississippi and its pivotal role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Two new books one by a black man and another by a white woman offer fascinating glimpses…
HistoryBlack History

Slices of African-American life

Review by BookPage

Browsing through a copy of the encyclopedia-style volume African American Lives is an exercise that never fails to inform and entertain. Turn to the "M" section, for example, and the two-page biography of Malcolm X is followed by an entry on a lesser known figure, Annie Turnbo Malone, a determined Illinois businesswoman who made a multimillion-dollar fortune in the 1920s with a hair-care products company. These two subjects are among 600 profiled here from slaves to contemporary sports heroes in a volume that was meticulously researched and compiled. Each entry contains fascinating bits of information that add to our understanding of the importance of race and class in America. Edited by scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham and distilled from a forthcoming eight-volume set intended primarily for libraries, this readable collection is a mosaic that offers a unique portrait of the African-American experience.

 

Browsing through a copy of the encyclopedia-style volume African American Lives is an exercise that never fails to inform and entertain. Turn to the "M" section, for example, and the two-page biography of Malcolm X is followed by an entry on a lesser known figure, Annie Turnbo…
HistoryBlack History

A month full of milestones in Black History

Review by Arlene McKanic

This year marks the 77th anniversary of America's Black History celebration, a memorial that began in 1926 as Black History Week and has since expanded into a month-long tribute to African-American culture and heritage. The idea for this time of remembrance originated with Carter G. Woodson, a black scholar and Harvard graduate who chose February as a time for commemoration because two important figures in African-American history, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, celebrated birthdays during that month. The creation of the NAACP and the death of Malcolm X also occurred in February, making the time an especially appropriate one. Woodson would be pleased with the variety of titles published this year in honor of the celebration he initiated.

This Far By Faith: Stories From the African American Religious Experience, the companion volume to the PBS television series airing in June, explores the role of religion in black culture. Written by Emmy Award-winner Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize, and Quinton Dixie, the book blends research, interviews and input from noted contemporary religious figures with unforgettable photographs and archival material. The book contains fascinating tales of people on fire with faith, like Sojourner Truth, whose absolute trust in God allowed her to walk away from an unjust owner and campaign for the rights of women and African Americans. We read of the establishment of the storefront church as blacks migrated north, the indispensability of the largely Protestant church in the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the controversial Nation of Islam. This Far By Faith is a wonderfully comprehensive evaluation of the ways in which African Americans have worshiped, as well as a moving tribute to the life of the spirit.

The path to freedom

As Ann Hagedorn's novelistic Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad demonstrates, Harriet Tubman wasn't the only guide on the clandestine path to freedom. The book begins long before Tubman takes up her courageous, dangerous cause and focuses on the brave white abolitionists around the town of Ripley, Ohio, one of the railroad's first and most notorious stations. Hagedorn recounts in thrilling detail the risks these men and women took by helping desperate slaves escape to freedom. Reverend Elijah Lovejoy was the first white abolitionist to be murdered for the cause in 1837, but the book's real protagonist is John Rankin, who dedicated much of his life to the freeing of fugitive slaves and lived to see the Emancipation Proclamation. Tubman herself became active in the 1850s, joining courageous figures like John Parker as one of the few black conductors who actually went South to guide people out. Beyond the River is full of compelling stories of narrow escapes, near-misses, stunning acts of bravery and eventual vindication.

At the crossroads

The focus of Stephan Talty's provocative book Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History is the tumultuous intermingling between blacks and whites in this country a social phenomenon that gave rise to pioneers like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, who stepped into arenas previously restricted to whites and brought them to new levels of brilliance. Covering miscegenation, both literally and figuratively, from the years before the Civil War to contemporary times, the book is an insightful study of American cross-culturalization.

While the volume examines the impact of light-skinned entertainers such as Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, as well as sexy, silky-voiced crooners Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke and other black notables who used the blending of black and white to their own advantage, Mulatto America also documents the adaptation of black culture by whites a social appropriation that has given rise to modern icons like Eminem. Talty, a journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine and the Chicago Review, delivers an intelligent and accessible analysis of race in this country with Mulatto America.

Glimpses of history

Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle, with text by scholars Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, presents a vivid overview of the African-American experience from 1840 to the present. The visuals, edited by noted photographer Sophie Spencer-Wood, depict just about every aspect of black American life, with photos that range from early shots of slaves to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Divided into five sections, each with an introduction, the book includes class photos, pictures of lynchings, shots of literary lights like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and images of ordinary people working at ordinary jobs. We see the heroes of the Civil Rights movement, including Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after her arrest, and Martin Luther King Jr. posing with calm dignity for his mug shot. Tellingly enough, one of the last photos in this beautiful volume is of a bored-looking Condi Rice at a policy meeting with Colin Powell and President Bush. Freedom is a groundbreaking book.

Remembering the ladies

In Praise of Black Women by Simone Schwarz-Bart is the second entry in a four-volume series that pays homage to remarkable African-American females in history. Focusing on the slavery era, this generously illustrated book features folk tales, history and personal writings, and spans four centuries, beginning with the 1400s. From the Congo to the French West Indies, from Canada to Boston, In Praise of Black Women shares the stories of unforgettable figures like poet Phillis Wheatley; Anastasia, the patron saint of Brazil's black population; and escaped slave Ellen Craft. Full of rare photos and historical documents, this book is a wonderful tribute to the female spirit.

Arlene McKanic is a writer in Jamaica, New York.

This year marks the 77th anniversary of America's Black History celebration, a memorial that began in 1926 as Black History Week and has since expanded into a month-long tribute to African-American culture and heritage. The idea for this time of remembrance originated with Carter G.…

HistoryBlack History

Adam Hochschild

Interview by Alden Mudge

Adam Hochschild has the rare ability to take seemingly dull, dry or depressing events of history and turn them into a riveting narrative that both deepens a reader's understanding of the past and directly connects that past to the present. Hochschild did this in his critically acclaimed 1998 bestseller, King Leopold's Ghost, an astonishing account of King Leopold II of the Belgians' reign of terror in Africa at the beginning of the 20th century and the efforts to stop it. He does so again in his absorbing chronicle of the 50-year campaign to end the British slave trade, Bury the Chains.

"This story is really a writer's dream," Hochschild says during a call to his home in San Francisco. Hochshild was cofounder of the progressive Mother Jones magazine and now teaches writing in the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives with his wife of many years, the sociologist and writer Arlie Russell Hochschild. "It actually surprises me that there have not been more books for a popular audience on what is such an extraordinary drama."

Bury the Chains begins on May 22, 1787, when a group of men gathered in a London printing shop and launched "the first grassroots human rights campaign," which had the then-impossible goal of eliminating slavery. Why impossible? As Hochschild points out, "at the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of the people alive were in bondage of one kind or another." Not only that, slave labor was absolutely essential to the global trade in sugar, and sugar was to the British Empire then what oil is to the American economic empire now. A world without slavery was unthinkable to almost everyone. And yet on March 27, 1807, King George III signed a bill banning the entire British slave trade. And on August 1, 1838, "nearly 800,000 black men, women and children throughout the British Empire officially became free."

The long effort to ban slavery was not one steady upward climb to victory. There were frustrating periods of stasis or backsliding, when the movement seemed derailed, if not dead. The war with Napolean's France entirely stalled efforts year after year as the two global superpowers of the day battled for economic advantage ("war fever is always the enemy of social reform," Hochschild notes).

Hochschild uses these pauses in the course of events to great dramatic effect. He draws on the "fine, fine scholarly writing" of historians like David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher and biographer Ellen Gibson Wilson to move his narrative along the slave trade circuit – to Sierra Leone, for example, which was a central shipping point of the slave trade, and, strangely enough, the site of a visionary attempt to build a homeland for escaped American slaves promised their freedom by the British during the American Revolution (included among their numbers was one of George Washington's former slaves). Or to Haiti, site of a brutal, successful slave rebellion that helped loosen the grip of slavery in the British Empire and has had repercussions that resound to this day. All of this makes for fascinating, provocative reading.

But it is Hochschild's portraits of the persistent, sometimes eccentric, and no doubt frequently annoying activists who led this movement – or were arrayed against it – that makes Bury the Chains such a fascinating read. Hochschild says he originally intended to write a biography of John Newton, author of the song, "Amazing Grace," a former slave-ship captain turned preacher who, legend says, had a change of heart and became a champion of the antislavery movement. "I'm always intrigued by people who change sides," Hochschild says, "in either direction."

The problem was, the legend was not quite true. It wasn't until Newton was approached by a man named Thomas Clarkson that he lent his considerable prestige to the antislavery movement. The little-known Clarkson is in fact the singular hero of this account, and one of the great contributions of Bury the Chains is that it brings the achievements of the courageous, indefatigable and remarkably media-savvy Clarkson to a popular audience.

Other central figures were Olaudah Equiano, a former slave whose influential memoir was a bestseller of the day; the eccentric gadfly Granville Sharp, who invented a harp with a double row of strings, played in a family orchestra that sailed around England on a barge and brought a host of not-so-frivolous lawsuits against miscreant slave owners and slave-ship captains; and William Wilberforce, the era's most famous orator, a conservative member of Parliament who was persuaded to adopt the progressive antislavery cause, and through the purposeful re-editing of history by his two powerful sons was for years considered the most important personality in the movement. But perhaps the most fascinating portrait of all is of the profligate Duke of Clarence, an intemperate, boorish womanizer and a foe of the antislavery movement, who to the movement's consternation, became King William IV in 1830.

Throughout Bury the Chains, Hochschild maintains an awareness of how history is written and rewritten. " All countries have their comforting national myths," he says. That Wilberforce rather than Clarkson was for so long thought to be the central figure of the movement "fitted what most people in England wanted to think: that ending slavery was the work of noble, very religious and respectable people."

Hochschild, himself a veteran of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, strongly believes there are lessons to be learned from reading history. For today's activists, he points to three particular lessons from the experiences of the British antislavery movement: first is the importance of coalitions; the antislavery movement ultimately succeeded because it built an effective religious coalition of Quakers and Anglicans, he says. Second is the need to "ceaselessly search for different kinds of media to get a message across." Clarkson and others "placed a diagram of the close quarters of a slave ship in pubs all over England, and people were shocked and moved by this." And "the third, and most important thing I learned is to never give up. They were always facing very discouraging moments. But they never gave up."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Adam Hochschild has the rare ability to take seemingly dull, dry or depressing events of history and turn them into a riveting narrative that both deepens a reader's understanding of the past and directly connects that past to the present. Hochschild did this in his…

HistoryBlack History

Taylor Branch

Interview by Edward Morris

With the publication of At Canaan's Edge, historian Taylor Branch completes his massive Martin Luther King Jr. trilogy, an undertaking that began in 1989 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters and continued in 1999 with Pillar of Fire. This final volume chronicles King's crusades, virtually on a daily basis, from Feb. 8, 1965, when the civil rights leader returned to Alabama for the start of another perilous voter-registration push, to his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

During those three bloody years, the indomitable King kept up pressure for desegregation in the South, expanded the rights struggle to the North (notably into Chicago), clashed increasingly with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War, kept the black power factions at bay within his own camp, crisscrossed the country to raise funds, persevered in the face of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's dirty-tricks campaign against him and, to the end, remained an unshakable exemplar of nonviolent resistance. His moral clarity and physical stamina, as detailed here, were truly marvelous.

There's something to be said for Branch's stamina, too. He embarked on his study with the notion that it could be encompassed in a single book that could be finished within three years. "That was three times longer than I'd ever spent on another book," he tells BookPage from his publisher's office in New York. "I knew it was a big project, but obviously I didn't have any idea about the scope of it. The original proposal, written, I think, at the end of '81 or in early '82, defined it as pretty much what it turned out to be not a standard biography, but a narrative history of the era."

Through much of At Canaan's Edge, Branch has us peering over King's shoulder as he attends to the minutiae of organizing marches, placating contentious staff members and urging Johnson to put the weight and resources of the federal government behind the drive for racial equality. To achieve this level of intimacy, the author relied on a variety of inside sources. "Some of [the details] came from [FBI] wiretap records which are dated right down to the minute," he explains. "Those were very helpful in knowing exactly when things were said. But, also, there were a lot of different biographical records that were pretty detailed as far as what [King's] schedule was. Speakers tend to keep better diaries and better itineraries. Sifting through the reams of FBI transcripts was an ordeal," Branch says. "All you have to do is go to the FBI headquarters and be willing to sit in the basement in a windowless room and endure their security procedures, which are pretty rough. If you want to go to the bathroom, you have to ask for a security escort to come and take you to and from to make sure you're not flushing some document down the toilet."

Because relatively few of Johnson's White House tapes had been transcribed when Branch was conducting his research, he had an assistant go to the Johnson Library and screen for relevant material before applying his own ears to the task. Even at a distance of 40 years, it is painful to witness the widening chasm between King and Johnson over the war in Vietnam. Both were men of great promise. Like King, Johnson had a genuine, even passionate, concern for the downtrodden and disenfranchised. But while King pushed on as an idealist, the president bogged down as the political pragmatist who concluded he could not abandon a destructive war he didn't really believe in. We view Johnson's tragic decline with the same chilling fascination with which we watch King's approaching death.

A lesser thorn in King's side was the charismatic Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the concept of black power and increasingly argued for militant rather than nonviolent resistance. As the media-stirring concept caught hold, particularly among younger and more urban blacks, King found it harder to engage adherents to his approach. Branch interviewed Carmichael in the mid-1980s, after he had moved to Africa and changed his name to Kwame Ture. "[He] was very argumentative and ideological," Branch recalls. "To my mind, he'd lost a lot of his charm, although I enjoyed talking to him. He had less historical perspective on himself than anybody else I interviewed. He was completely blind to the notion that he didn't have a coherent philosophy. It was kind of left wing, but not left wing with Marx or any other white leader. It was kind of all black, but then the all-black parties in Africa his mentors over there all turned corrupt. So there was nothing inherently stable or inspiring about a society built around blackness. He was kind of trapped." Carmichael died in Africa in 1998.

Compounding the troubles suffered by the civil rights and peace movements during the last year of King's life, Branch contends, was Israel's dazzling triumph in the Six-Day War. "A lot of utopian processing of thought of what is possible through politics was spearheaded by Jewish intellectuals and had been for a century since the Civil War," Branch says. "After the Six-Day War, a lot of that got diverted into national security. National security policy has proven vital to Israel. I think it became pretty seductive. You had a lot of Jewish intellectual thought going into reconciling Jewish heritage with military policy on the part of the United States."

In the book, Branch observes that, "The Six-Day War accelerated an ideology of progress projected through rather than against the established power of the United States, allied with Israel as the strong model democracy of the Middle East. Black power served as a foil of squandered potential."

The centrality of nonviolence to democracy fascinates Branch. "As I was studying the civil rights era," he says, "one of the things that dawned on me . . . was that I wasn't just studying race relations and I wasn't just studying the interaction of religion and race in politics, but that I was studying democracy in its bare new bones. I have been pondering some project to try to foster more civic dialogue in America about what democracy is."

Branch says he hasn't settled on a topic for his next book. "But," he adds, "I know it will be short."

Edward Morris is a writer in Nashville.

With the publication of At Canaan's Edge, historian Taylor Branch completes his massive Martin Luther King Jr. trilogy, an undertaking that began in 1989 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters and continued in 1999 with Pillar of Fire. This final volume chronicles King's crusades,…

NonfictionSportsBlack History

Andrew Maraniss

Interview by Keith Herrell

The author of a new book on Perry Wallace, who broke the color barrier in SEC basketball in the 1960s, explains why he decided to tell Wallace’s little-known story.

Why did you want to write Strong Inside?
Perry Wallace is a fascinating, brilliant person who overcame tremendously painful and challenging obstacles to make history—and yet most people have never heard of him. It’s as if nobody knew the story of Jackie Robinson. So it was an incredible opportunity to get to tell this story. It’s one I’ve wanted to tell since 1989, when I was a sophomore at Vanderbilt and wrote a paper about Wallace for a black history class.

A lot of research went into this book. How long did you work on it?
Eight years. My first interview was with Perry’s coach at Vanderbilt, Roy Skinner, in the fall of 2006. I spent several years just doing interviews and research before I began writing.

What do you admire most about Perry Wallace?
There are so many things to admire about Perry—his perseverance, his character, his desire to always do the right thing—but what I admire most about him is his intellect. Spending the last eight years talking to him has been an incredible education for me on everything from human nature to race relations to parenting.

You were born too late to see Wallace play high school or college basketball. Of all the games you describe in the book, which one would you have liked to have seen in person?
I would travel back to Oxford, Mississippi, on February 9, 1968, to see his game against Ole Miss, the first time an African American had ever played a basketball game there. By all accounts, the abuse he took from the crowd was as bad that night as any of his career—but Perry played one of his best games, completely dominating in the second half.

How hard was it for you to come to terms with the day-to-day segregation and racial attitudes of the South in the 1960s?
It was important for me to place Perry Wallace’s story in the context of the place and times in which he operated. He grew up in Nashville at the height of the civil rights movement and as a 12-year-old would sneak downtown to watch the sit-ins at the lunch counters. In college, he met Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer and Stokely Carmichael when they passed through town. Perry’s story is as much a civil rights story as a basketball one.

Did you get any suggestions from your father [journalist and author David Maraniss] about writing this book?
The best advice came through years of osmosis: just reading his great writing ever since I was a little kid. I used to spread The Washington Post over the dining room table, and our sheepdog Maggie would jump up on the table and finish my cereal while I read the paper. Rest of the family was still asleep, I guess.

Put yourself in Wallace’s shoes. Knowing what you do now, would you have attended Vanderbilt and broken the color line in the SEC?
I don’t know that Perry would do it all over again knowing what he knows. And as strong a man as he is mentally and physically, if he has those doubts, there’s no way I could do it.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Strong Inside.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The author of a new book on Perry Wallace, who broke the color barrier in SEC basketball in the 1960s, explains why he decided to tell Wallace’s little-known story.
LiteratureEssaysBlack History

Emily Bernard

Interview by Vanessa Willoughby

Author, professor and academic Emily Bernard answers questions about storytelling, her writing process and the real-life experiences behind the essays in her latest collection, Black Is the Body.

In your introduction to Black Is the Body, you quote the author Zora Neale Hurston. Did her artistic legacy inform or shape the overall narrative of your collection? And if not, who are some of the writers that helped solidify your vision?
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, excited and inspired me when I first read them many years ago. Throughout her career, Hurston was writing against the grain and defying expectations of what a woman writer—what a woman in general—was supposed to be doing. Their Eyes Were Watching God looks like a love story, but it is really about a woman learning to tell the story of her life. I read it when I was very young, and the deep lesson of that book didn’t occur to me until much later. I didn’t realize how much and how precisely Their Eyes had influenced me and shaped what I was going for in my own book until almost the very end of writing the final draft. What I love about Zora Neale Hurston is her ability and willingness to surprise, which is something she does a lot in her autobiography. Good writing, I think, should surprise the reader. When we get what we expect, we don’t have a chance to consider life in a different way, which is what all meaningful stories should enable us to do.

As both a writer and a reader, how does the act of storytelling provide freedom or resolution from trauma—both personal and generational?
As a child, I watched my mother, who was a poet, use writing as a way to remember, understand and master the past. For me, writing is freedom. Freedom from pain, rage and memories that haunt me. Writing enables me to discover resources of strength that I didn’t even know I had.

I don’t believe that storytelling really provides relief from trauma. I used to think it did. I actually thought writing “Scar Tissue” would dilute, if not completely obliterate, the trauma that I describe in the essay. Years after its publication, however, I was in yet another emergency room facing down another bout of adhesions in my bowel. It had been 10 years since the last hospitalization; I truly thought that I had written myself well. I was wrong. So, I no longer think that writing can provide absolute liberation from pain. What it can do is enable a person to learn to live with pain and transform it into something meaningful.

In the essay “Scar Tissue,” you write, “If my story is about pain, it’s also about rage. Rage is a physical condition.” How does rage, in the aftermath of a tragedy or violent situation, form a lasting scar in either the physical or emotional sense?
Rage is a symptom of helplessness. It’s normal, it’s predictable, it’s human, but it’s not productive in the long run. It can overtake you if you’re not careful and corrode you to the core. Rage helped guide me to the writing of “Scar Tissue,” it’s true. But in the end, I consider the essay a kind of love letter to the entire experience of being a victim of random violence. It is my attempt to honor the rage and offer it a civilized, humane place to live. Writing is a means of confronting rage with love.

Many of your essays touch upon pain—what it means to sit with it and also deal with it head-on. If pain can be weaponized against a victim, how can it be used as a tool on behalf of the victim to seek justice?
One thing I wanted to explore over the course of writing this book is how pain can be utilized, maybe not so much in a search for justice (which is ultimately so subjective) but in a search for truth. As for me, I was satisfied with what happened to the man who stabbed me, but I know that other victims felt that he should have suffered more. Personally, I felt acutely aware that there would never be true vindication because the damage caused by his knife could never be corrected, not really. I did not feel triumphant at his sentencing; I did not feel angry at him. I still don’t. He was sick; 25 years later, that still feels to me like the beginning and the end of the part of the story that involves him. My own pain is my own story. Ultimately, the degree to which it defines me is something I cannot control. Above all, I believe it is important not to let pain shame or silence you.

Your essay “Teaching the N-Word” is a powerful recollection of your attempts to get your all-white honors class at the University of Vermont to say the word in question and the complicated social politics surrounding the word. When responding to Sarah, a student who refuses to say the word, you tell the class, “I’d just like to remind you all that just because a person refuses to say ‘nigger,’ that doesn’t mean that person is not racist.” How does the concept of “wokeness” or “being woke”  contribute to racial politics? What does it reveal about our current political landscape and the way in which America handles race?
I am suspicious of handy terms like “woke” which, like “diversity,” looks like an answer to a problem—the problem of racism—when in fact there is no easy solution. Racism is durable; like a cancer, it adapts to its environment and changes shape over time. Language can’t cure a sickness; racism won’t be eradicated by a term like woke or any term at all. I like that the term has gotten people to aspire to be alive to the problem, but I think there is a huge possibility that becoming fluent in the language of wokeness can lead a person to a sense of self-satisfaction that does nothing toward actual social justice. In so far as wokeness seems to suggest a state of being, it is the polar opposite of action, which is the only way change can be achieved. True and lasting change happens incrementally, through the mundane, puny choices that we make every day.

“Teaching the N-Word” is a study in ambivalence, which is why I tell it in fragments. The spaces in between the episodes are there to give the reader room to imagine and insert their own experiences. Even though the books and articles I bring into class make it impossible to ignore the “n-word,” I am impressed by the students who have a philosophy about why they won’t say it, Sarah in particular. It looks like I want the students to say the word out loud, and maybe I do, but I desperately do not want them to do that at the same time. So much is going on inside of me that I cannot share with the class because I worry it will conflict with the linear aim of teaching, which is to make sure my students have something concrete to take away at the end of class. In my writing, I feel free to tell stories rather than give lectures. Readers will use them how they see fit.

In the essay “Interstates,” food is mentioned as both a way to access familial memories and a way to unite people across different cultures. If there was one dish specific to your family that represents you, what would it be? Why?
I am a little sheepish about answering this question since I still don’t cook well. When I do cook, I wind up serving meals that have no personality. I don’t as much make meals as put a bunch of different ingredients together. Despite my distant relationship with cooking, it is in kitchens and around dining tables that I have experienced heartiest and most intimate relationships of my life. I miss my mother every day, but most piercingly around the holidays. I miss her Thanksgivings; I miss watching her prepare squash casserole with onions and sour cream, and green beans with bacon and almonds. For New Year’s Eve, she would create the Caribbean meals my father grew up with, like ambrosia with Cool Whip and souse, which is pickled pig’s feet. These days, my daughters and I agree that my husband’s broccoli cavatelli brings us all to the table faster than any other meal he prepares for us.

A combination of guilt and stubbornness sends me back to the kitchen periodically, despite my culinary insecurities. The problem is, when I get close to mastering a dish, my husband comes around with his kitchen magic and turns it into something a million times better than what I could come up with.

The title essay, “Black Is the Body,” begins with the line, “My brown daughters became black when they were six years old.” Can you tell me a bit more about what that line means to you? Looking back at your own personal history, was there ever a similar moment for you?
That line captures, for me, what it means to raise my daughters and witness the profound and yet utterly mundane process of their growing up. Writing that essay was a way of accounting for the experience of watching them truly become their own people, making sense of the world in their own language. Eavesdropping as they revealed to each other their growing understanding of what race meant left me feeling exhilarated and sad at the same time. I felt I hadn’t done my job to guide them into the world of race. I had left them to figure it out on their own. But the lessons my elders tried to share with me during my childhood I rejected out of hand immediately, if only because I didn’t want to be told how to understand myself; it was as if they were trying to tell me how to feel about my own body. In the end, in not doing my job maybe I’ve done my job, at least as I see it, which is to allow them the space to define themselves.

The essay “Her Glory” discusses the politics of black hair and what it means to have so-called “good hair.” How does the concept of “good hair” relate to respectability politics and the policing of the black, female body?
It floors me, how many stories are contained on the tops of our heads, particularly when it comes to women, and even more particularly for black women. “Good hair” is a shorthand that I try to avoid using because of the way that it seems to condone an unforgiving standard of beauty. It is a concept that menaced me during my adolescence, another way I knew my body was being evaluated by others. Regrettably, as I got older, I started to make direct connections between the way I put my hair together and the way I thought others would perceive me as a black woman. I’ve recently begun getting my hair braided in cornrows, and it’s a completely liberating experience, more than I expected it to be. For me, it’s a way of turning my back of the burden of respectability politicking.

How do you practice the concept of self-care as a black woman, a writer and an academic?
I think I’m pretty bad at self-care, and I admire others who practice it well. I tend to run headlong into scary things, the same way I do in “Scar Tissue.” I can’t seem to help myself. It is the goal of my life to find a balance, to practice recklessness in a smart and safe way. Writing allows me to lean into fear and pain in a way that is productive and enriching, not only for myself but for other people, or at least I hope so.

What is one major misconception about being a writer that you wish people would understand?
There is no magic to writing, only labor. Well, there’s always magic involved in anything that comes about as the result of love, but just like true love, there are no shortcuts on the road to good writing. It takes time.

Writing is rewriting. It’s a simple lesson, and it’s a lesson that I have to keep relearning every time to sit down to write anything. It is only after I get sentences down on the page that a story begins to emerge, and only then after I’ve made my way through multiple drafts. For me, the terror and anguish that accompany almost every writing effort diminish only after I’ve put in the work. The good news is that if you stick with it, the labor itself can turn out to be the most satisfying part of all.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Black Is the Body.

Author photo by Stephanie Seguino

Author, professor and academic Emily Bernard answers questions about storytelling, her writing process and the real-life experiences behind the essays in her latest collection, Black Is the Body.

NonfictionBlack HistoryBiography

Anna Malaika Tubbs

Interview by Destiny O. Birdsong

For Anna Malaika Tubbs, finding the inspiration to write her first book was a numbers game. After watching Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama about Black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA during the space race, Tubbs left the movie theater feeling both enraged and inspired. “I wanted to do something where I helped this issue of uncovering more ‘hidden figures,’ ” she says from her home in Stockton, California. She wanted to write about women who “were there right in front of us that we just weren’t paying more attention to, or who were intentionally being kept from us.”

With a background in sociology and gender studies, Tubbs was well positioned for the task. But she also knew that, in order to entice readers, she would need more than her sharp research skills; she would need a hook. So she turned to Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin and Malcolm X, three of the most brilliant leaders of the 20th century. Then she looked at their mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin and Louise Little, respectively. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Three Mothers.

When Tubbs learned that these women had been born roughly six years apart (though some accounts of their birth years vary) and that their sons were born within five years of one another, she knew she had uncovered an important connective thread. She followed it, and the result is The Three Mothers, a book that maps how misogynoir (the unique intersection of racism and misogyny experienced by Black women) shaped the lives of three young civil rights activists long before they raised sons who would become leaders in the movement. The Three Mothers discusses Louise’s work with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Alberta’s family history of faith-based activism and Berdis’ early years as a poet and spoken-word artist. As such, the book is part biography, part history and part running social commentary on the events of the past century. People might pick it up because they are interested in these iconic men, but what they will discover is an extensive and rewarding history of 20th-­century Black women.

Tubbs intentionally wrote The Three Mothers in language that is counterintuitive to her academic training. After countless days in special collections archives, poring over newspaper clippings, letters and interviews, Tubbs wanted to create something accessible to those outside the ivory tower, where emerging scholars are often encouraged to make their work “as elitist and complicated and boring as possible,” as she puts it. Because the activism of King, Baldwin, Malcolm X and their mothers was intended to benefit all people, Tubbs considered it unreasonable to write a text that was accessible to only a few. “I’m just not willing to play that part,” she says. 

In fact, The Three Mothers is the first step down what Tubbs calls the “public intellectual path” she has always wanted to take, sharing knowledge with people both within and outside the academy. With its conversational style and anecdotal imaginings of moments for which firsthand information is scarce, The Three Mothers tells a captivating story of women traumatized by the nation they and their sons would ultimately help transform.

In addition to shedding light on the lives of Alberta, Berdis and Louise, Tubbs also illuminates Black motherhood in general. Tubbs, who became a mother herself while writing the book, intimately understands what an undervalued vocation motherhood can be. Tubbs is the partner of Stockton’s first Black mayor, Michael Tubbs, and people often congratulate her high-­profile husband on the birth of “his” son while saying little to acknowledge the roles that she or her mother-in-law have played in the mayor’s personal and political success. Tubbs suspects this is because many people still assume that Black motherhood is neither an intellectually rigorous nor actively anti-racist endeavor, but she hopes her book can change that. “Black motherhood is about creation, liberation and thinking about the possibilities of the world that we can be a part of,” she says. “So many times our kids are painted as not human, and of course we see them as the most incredible humans in the world. Therefore, we have to change the world to see it the way we do.”

"Black women hold the truth and the key to the future."

This is illustrated time and time again in The Three Mothers as Tubbs explores how each woman worked to make her son see himself differently from the world’s harsh perceptions. For instance, Louise would reteach school lessons to Malcolm and his siblings to incorporate multiple languages and Afro-diasporic history. When a frightened young King and his father were harassed by white store clerks and policemen, Alberta would comfort her son but remind him that his father’s refusal to be treated like a second-class citizen was the right thing to do. And when a young Baldwin and his siblings were terrorized by his stepfather, Berdis stepped in, continually reminding her son that family solidarity and the fair treatment of others were important in spite of the abuse. In each of the book’s eight sections, Tubbs makes clear that, without these mothers’ instruction, none of the men born to them could have been the leaders they ultimately became.

Though Tubbs is both excited and anxious about this spring—she will defend her doctoral dissertation and launch her debut book within weeks of each other—she feels that now is the perfect time for her work to enter the world, and she has high hopes for The Three Mothers. “I want it to be that declaration that Black women hold the truth and the key to the future. People are quite open to that idea, maybe for the first time,” she says, citing the recent inauguration of the first Black woman U.S. vice president as proof that the conversation is ripe for change. 

There’s no doubt that The Three Mothers will be at the forefront of that changing conversation about Black womanhood, perhaps leaving readers as inspired and determined as Tubbs was when she walked out of the movie theater nearly five years ago.

 

Author photo credit, Anna Maliaka Tubbs

The Three Mothers maps how misogynoir shaped the lives of three young civil rights activists long before they raised sons who would become leaders in the movement.
NonfictionBlack HistoryAmerican History

Clint Smith

Interview by Alden Mudge

Clint Smith, whose spellbinding How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America is a must-read, grew up in New Orleans. He remembers frequently passing the city’s Robert E. Lee monument, riding along Jefferson Davis Parkway and attending a middle school named for Robert Mills Lusher, another leader of the Confederacy. 

Speaking by phone from Washington, D.C., Smith tells me that when his hometown removed Confederate statues and memorials in 2017, he began wondering, “What does it mean that I grew up in a city, a majority Black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people? How does that happen, and what does the process of reckoning with that look like?”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of How the Word Is Passed.

By that moment in 2017, Smith had given up his lifelong quest to become a professional soccer player (he was good but not quite good enough) and turned to literature, writing and performing slam poetry “just as obsessively as 15-year-old me stayed up until 3 a.m. watching second division [soccer] teams from the Netherlands on cable TV.” He had also published an award-winning book of poetry and taught high school English, and he assumed he would teach for the next 30 years. “I loved talking about literature with teenagers,” he says.

But Smith’s teaching experiences had raised larger questions about the role of education in our society. He began reading widely about the philosophy and practice of education by writers who were “thinking about using the classroom to help students understand that the world is a social construction,” he says. “It can be deconstructed and reconstructed into something new. The essence of that is that you don’t have to accept the world as an inevitability. It can be transformed.”

Pursuing this interest further, Smith entered a multidisciplinary Ph.D. program at Harvard. During graduate school, he freelanced for The New Yorker, the New Republic and the Atlantic (where he’s now a staff writer) as a way to distill the history and theory he was learning in the classroom into a more approachable format.

“You don’t have to accept the world as an inevitability. It can be transformed.”

After New Orleans removed its Confederate statues in 2017, Smith began writing a series of daily poems to explore issues around “growing up surrounded by Confederate iconography,” he says. He eventually decided the subject needed something lengthier and wrote two prose chapters, but he was unsatisfied with the results. Then a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, which Smith details in the brilliantly prismatic first chapter of his book, presented him with the format for How the Word Is Passed: Talk to people. Respectfully, interestedly. And do enough research to contextualize their stories and delineate the difference between history and nostalgia.

“When I went to Monticello in the summer of 2018, I had never done a lot of reporting,” Smith says. “I’m not someone who walks up to strangers and asks them questions. That’s not a part of my natural ethos. But I did that at Monticello, and it transformed what I hoped the book could do. My own ideas about what these people and places meant had to be in conversation with what these people and places meant to other people.”

Some visitors he talked to were astonished, sometimes disheartened, to learn of the moral inconsistencies of Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who, like so many of the Founding Fathers, owned enslaved people. Recent scholarship has revealed that Jefferson fathered children with enslaved women, most notably Sally Hemings, and kept his children enslaved. In fact, Smith found his book’s title in the oral history of Hemings’ descendants. 

“Slavery existed for a hundred years longer in this country than it has not existed. We forget that sometimes.”

In recent years, Monticello has made an effort to tell the stories of the people Jefferson owned alongside the story of Jefferson himself. But not all the historical sites of enslavement that Smith visited for his book—Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, Blandford Cemetery for Confederate veterans in Virginia, the African Burial Ground in New York City, the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal and others—probe their complicated histories as much as Monticello does. Smith’s fascinating, nuanced book illuminates this struggle to acknowledge and reckon with these histories on both individual and societal levels.

“My grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved,” Smith says. “My grandmother’s grandfather was born right after emancipation. The history that we tell ourselves was a long time ago wasn’t in fact that long ago. Slavery existed for a hundred years longer in this country than it has not existed. We forget that sometimes. We forget how much it shaped this country. We forget the extent to which that past is still with us.”

 

Author photo credit © Carletta Girma

Clint Smith, whose spellbinding debut nonfiction book is a must-read, shares his thoughts on reckoning with Confederate landmarks and locations where Black people were enslaved.

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