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Black History Month: A symphony of varied voices

Review by Robert Fleming

With the arrival of Black History Month comes the expectation of a host of African-American books, geared not only to that unique, highly creative community but to the general population as well. Mainstream publishers now understand that there is a large readership waiting for books that reflect African-American issues and concerns, so it is not unusual that the bookshelves are full of new volumes during the month of February. In the roundup that follows, we at BookPage have selected a precious few of the large collection of books currently available.

Fiction

Some African-American literary critics often lament the alleged lack of gifted young black novelists coming up, mistakenly comparing the young lions to legends such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. However, the emergence of such talents as R.M. Johnson, the author of the acclaimed The Harris Men, has quieted many of the naysayers. His latest novel, Father Found, chronicles the obsession of Zale Rowen, founder of Father Found, an organization that finds absent dads and forces them to fulfill their emotional and financial obligations. Zale's zeal for a social cause costs him dearly, bringing him to serious illness and crisis in this timely, disturbing novel that is certain to win Johnson much attention.

Venise Berry's All of Me follows her best-selling debut, So Good, with a humorous, insightful look at America's obsession with weight as Serpentine Williamson, a Chicago TV reporter blessed with the good life, learns the importance of self-esteem when everything she holds dear is threatened. This is Berry at her best, wry and knowing, using a new twist on the triumph-over-adversity motif.

While veteran novelist Kristin Lattany may be best known for her most popular book, The Landlord, her new work, Do unto Others offers us a different side of the author with the absorbing story of Zena and her husband Lucious, whose world is rocked by the entry of an unpredictable young African girl into their household. The novel is a scathing reminder of the futility of racism, the assumptions of Afrocentrism, and the occasional absurdity of political correctness.

The notion of May/December romance gets a fresh coat of paint in Patty Rice's novel Somethin' Extra, when Genie Gatlin, who specializes in safe married men, meets David Lewis, a man 30 years her senior. He shows her the full range of love and commitment, despite her fears and doubts. Rice writes with a candid, realistic view of amour that pulls very few punches.

Jeffrey Renard Allen's exceptional debut epic, Rails Under My Back, tells the complex story of the lives and loves of two brothers, Lucifer and John Jones, and their wives, Gracie and Sheila McShan. This multilayered, intricate fable delves deep into the themes of love, survival, responsibility, and trust, as the choices of the parents bear unforeseen consequences for their children. Sweeping, experimental, and rewarding.

Nonfiction

Call him an intellectual, call him an activist, Harvard University professor Cornel West is a man who defies category with an encyclopedic mind that is stumped by no topic or realm of study. His stand-out collection of social commentary, memoir, interviews, and essays, The Cornel West Reader, attests to his prowess as cultural analyst and academic philosopher-theologian with its astute observations on everything from Marxist theory and black sexuality to black-Jewish relations and rap.

A rare opportunity to enter the minds of three pivotal African-American leaders is presented by Dr. Sondra Kathryn Wilson, literary executor of the James Weldon's Johnson Papers and editor of In Search of Democracy: The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins 1920-1977. Every page of this collection of essays, reports, speeches, and editorials yields a wealth of information about this trio of extraordinary men.

Biographies of noted African Americans have become very popular in recent years, gaining both in quality and critical notice. Maverick social critic Michael Eric Dyson, currently Ida B. Wells-Barnett University professor and professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, has reinterpreted our common perceptions of civil rights Rev. Martin Luther King with his latest book, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. King, Dyson says, would have been a supporter of affirmative action, socialism, and a modest degree of separatism. In this controversial evaluation, the black spokesman was allegedly cynical about whites, believed America had spurned him, and suffered mightily from depression. This is a book destined to spark debate and a firestorm of criticism.

In the latest celebration of the genius of trumpeter Louis Armstrong, editor Thomas Brothers has sifted through the extensive archives of the master jazz horn man to compile Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words, an intriguing mix of letters, autobiographical sketches, magazine articles, and essays spanning Satchmo's long, eventful life. This assemblage reveals Armstrong to be a smart, clever wit, a master communicator, and a colorful human being with a heart as big as his musical sound.

With two competing books and a film on former boxing champion Rubin Hurricane Carter currently available, former New York Times reporter James Hirsch's Hurricane is one of the most engrossing takes on the ups and downs of the man who became an international cause celebre when wrongly convicted for the 1967 murder of three whites. Carter was later freed when evidence of police corruption was uncovered. Much care is taken in Hirsch's book to render Carter's spiritual and political transformation, as well as his lengthy legal battle.

Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research, has been a very busy man. First he, with Lynn Davis serving as his photographer, has produced a wonderful travel book on Africa's hidden past, Wonders of the African World, following his journey through 12 of the continent's most beautiful countries. A companion to a PBS TV special, the book gets much of its distinctive flavor from Gates's inspired narrative, which is accompanied by 66 photos, seven full-color maps, and over 130 illustrations. Definitely an item worth having for anyone wishing to know more about the mystery that is Africa.

Possibly Gates's greatest achievement comes in his editing, with an assist from fellow Harvard Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, of the landmark Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. For anyone wishing to learn more about Africa or America, this resource fills the bill with over 3,500 entries, hundreds of maps, tables, charts, and photographs. Every conceivable topic, from culture to politics, is covered in detail and expertly cross-referenced in this incredible fount of facts, figures, and general information.

The release of the splendid African Ceremonies by writer Angela Fisher and photographer Carol Beckwith has been the subject of much talk in recent weeks. A spectacular visual treat, the book redefines the coffee-table volume with its breathtaking images and sensitive text on the daily ritual of tribal culture. What the book says so skillfully is that no matter how different the external trappings of regional life may appear, the age-old rites of passage remain essentially the same. National Geographic, eat your heart out.

Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City.

With the arrival of Black History Month comes the expectation of a host of African-American books, geared not only to that unique, highly creative community but to the general population as well. Mainstream publishers now understand that there is a large readership waiting for books…

HistoryBlack History

Branch’s brilliant look at King continues

Review by Roger Bishop

The civil rights movement that began in the 1950s continued to grow in scope and intensity into the early 1960s. A series of non-violent protests in such places as Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma met with strong resistance but led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That legislation was crucial, but it was only part of a long and bitter struggle for full equality for all of our citizens. Although various groups and leaders emerged during this period, the charismatic and eloquent Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference stood, out and, among other honors, received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. In the outstanding second volume of his projected three volume narrative history of the civil rights movement, Pillar of Fire, Taylor Branch reminds us how divisive the issue was and how difficult the period. The first volume, Parting the Waters, which begins in 1954, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. A third volume, At Canaan's Edge, will follow. A project the author hoped to complete in one book over three years has now taken 15 years and two books.

Although King is the major figure in the book, Pillar of Fire is not a biography. Instead, Branch is interested in a broad overview of the move toward equal rights. This involves exploring the relationships between individuals and groups, the actions and reactions that led, in some cases, to good, and in others to suffering. He demonstrates that the movement was not monolithic and that often even King and his advisers could not agree on appropriate courses of action. We follow Malcolm X as he breaks from the Nation of Islam and develops his own approach to racial issues. Branch skillfully shows us the tense and often frustrating relationship between King and Robert and John Kennedy until the latter's death and later with Lyndon Johnson. And although the FBI was eventually able to solve some of the worst racial crimes of our time, the Bureau displayed strong animosity toward King and his objectives, and, unknown to him, had him under surveillance for a long period and taped many of his private conversations.

Branch relates the stories of brave and courageous individuals who were not public figures or government officials but put themselves at risk because they believed strongly in equal rights, and he conveys how powerful the resistance to change was and how violent. He relates such incidents as the Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls, and the murder of Medgar Evers. He discusses the Mississippi Summer program in 1964 that brought many students to a part of the country they had never seen before. He details the events leading up to and following the deaths that year of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

The author's meticulous accumulation of detail upon detail helps us to gain a greater appreciation for what King, as a political as well as spiritual strategist, with the help of many others, accomplished. I was led to reflect on what the late Alex Haley told me in a BookPage interview in 1988. Haley, who collaborated with Malcolm X on his autobiography also conducted what is considered to be one of the most incisive interviews that King ever gave. Haley told me: "The thing that has always intrigued me about Dr. King and Malcolm was how easily either of them might have been the other . . . Dr. King would have made a tremendous hustler. And Malcolm would have made a tremendous theologian. Both of them were great powers in their own way. And so to me always the intrigue has been the two men are a case of Ôbut for the grace of God . . . ' And as a matter of fact, not enough recognition is given to the fact that Malcolm was most helpful to Dr. King. The way Malcolm . . . scared people. And what it did was shake people enough so that when Dr. King came along, speaking of turning the other cheek and the Gandhi principles, he was a lot less threatening . . ." Branch's magnificent work is a must for anyone who wants to understand a turbulent time that helped change the attitudes and practices of this country.

The civil rights movement that began in the 1950s continued to grow in scope and intensity into the early 1960s. A series of non-violent protests in such places as Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma met with strong resistance but led to the passage of the…

NonfictionAudioBlack History

How the Word Is Passed

Review by Autumn Allen

Writer, poet and educator Clint Smith narrates the audio edition of How the Word Is Passed (10 hours), a timely reckoning with America’s past dependence on the cruel institution of chattel slavery. Smith brings the listener on a tour of locations with fraught ties to the transatlantic slave trade, from his hometown of New Orleans to Senegal. He reads his smooth, journalistic prose in a weighty, measured cadence. Listeners will find themselves paying closer attention and appreciating the author’s perspective even more because of how Smith’s narration lends gravity to his experiences and purpose to their telling.

Those who appreciate a good documentary will feel most at home with this audiobook. The content is heavy, at times nearly overwhelming, but Smith’s factual storytelling voice, with fitting but muted inflection throughout, models the courage and fortitude required to take it all in. This book is a generous gift to a nation struggling to define itself.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: From a Louisiana native to a D.C. high school teacher to a Harvard Ph.D. candidate to a staff writer for The Atlantic—Clint Smith shares the journey that led to his brilliant nonfiction debut.

Clint Smith’s narration of How the Word Is Passed models the courage and fortitude required to face this timely reckoning with America’s past.
NonfictionAudioBlack History

We Are Each Other’s Harvest

Review by Mari Carlson

The audiobook of Natalie Baszile’s We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy (13.5 hours) explores farming by Black Americans, past and present, through essays, interviews and poetry from farmers and historians, wordsmiths and activists. The expansive project, born out of Baszile’s extensive research for her 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, is bookended by the author’s own words about her family and her creative process. In between, we learn about the Black community’s enduring connection to the land despite slavery’s disenfranchisement and northern and urban migration, among other factors.

Tina Lifford, an actor in the TV adaptation of Queen Sugar as well as the series “Parenthood” and “South Central,” captures the book’s soulful tone through her deep voice, slow delivery and an array of accents. Her performance pays tribute to the Black community’s oral history tradition, which is referenced throughout the book. 

With rich descriptions of crops, recipes, family meals and current efforts to revitalize Black farming and land ownership, this audiobook inspires, empowers and enlightens through the spoken word.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the print version of We Are Each Other’s Harvest.

With rich descriptions of crops, recipes, family meals and more, this audiobook inspires, empowers and enlightens through spoken word.
NonfictionEssaysBlack History

Carry On

Review by Amy Scribner

When longtime Georgia Congressman John Lewis died from pancreatic cancer in 2020, President Obama said, “He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to its highest ideals.” This lovely book offers Lewis’ meditations on everything from love to public service and affirms that he indeed represented the best of our nation.

Carry On: Reflections for a New Generation is divided into short sections in which Lewis shares hard-earned wisdom from his years on the front lines of the civil rights battle. The son of a sharecropper, Lewis joined Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders as they protested segregation across the South. For someone who faced injustice, police brutality and racism, Lewis remained remarkably optimistic. “Yes, we were jailed, arrested, firebombed, bloodied,” he writes in a chapter on activism. “But we never felt hate, and even though it can be hard to hold back our anger, it is worth the effort because it works in the end. We changed America, and now the time has come for more change.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Actor Don Cheadle narrates the audiobook edition of Carry On.

Lewis devotes much of the book to the current expression of our nation’s racism. He compares the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin to the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and urges his fellow Americans to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement.

There are lighter chapters, too, in which Lewis writes about art, sports, clothes and books. He loved comic books as a kid, and a favorite hobby as an adult was frequenting flea markets searching for old books. These chapters read like someone shooting the breeze with an old friend. He recalls telling Congressman Elijah Cummings, for whom he was often mistaken, that he was going to get a tattoo on the back of his head so people would stop confusing them.

Carry On is a bittersweet book, coming so soon on the heels of Lewis’ death, but a beautiful reminder of finding hope and joy in the simplest things. “Happiness is being at home after a long day, playing with and feeding my cats,” Lewis writes. “I’m a happy person.”

This lovely book offers John Lewis’ meditations on everything from love to public service. It’s a beautiful reminder that he represented the best of our nation.
NonfictionBlack HistoryAmerican History

How the Word Is Passed

Review by Alden Mudge

Clint Smith's gifts as both a poet and a scholar make How the Word Is Passed a richly provocative read about places where the story of American slavery lives on. This vital book originated in poetic meditations on the memorials of the Confederacy after Smith’s hometown of New Orleans removed many of those statues in 2017.

Smith began visiting some of the sites where enslaved people once lived and worked. He took the guided tour at Monticello that focuses on Jefferson’s relationship to slavery. He traveled to New York City to visit the African Burial Ground National Monument. He toured Louisiana’s notorious state prison at Angola, where formerly enslaved people were often held on the flimsiest of charges and forced to labor in its vast agricultural fields as part of the post-Reconstruction effort “to funnel Black people into the convict leasing system.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: From a Louisiana native to a D.C. high school teacher to a Harvard Ph.D. candidate to a staff writer for The Atlantic—Clint Smith shares the journey that led to his brilliant nonfiction debut.

At each stop, Smith’s vivid descriptions of the landscape and his response to the site give readers a visceral sense of place. He also reports on his conversations with tour guides, employees and other visitors. At Monticello, one person shares her journey of learning and unlearning history. It’s quite moving.

But at other locations, the guides and visitors are less willing to acknowledge slavery’s continuing impact on our country or the intentional romanticization of the Confederacy. At Angola, there’s almost no acknowledgment that the land was worked by enslaved people as a plantation before it was converted into a state prison for mostly Black prisoners. The reader feels “the prickled heat” Smith experiences as the only Black person attending a Memorial Day event hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia. There, Smith is an open, polite, somewhat nervous listener. Even in print, he doesn’t call out the people he speaks with. But ever the educator and poet, he lets the Confederate states’ own avowals destroy the animating myth of the Lost Cause.

Smith has an appreciation of nuance. He wields few cudgels here. And yet, How the Word Is Passed succeeds in making the essential distinction between history and nostalgia.

Clint Smith's gifts as both a poet and a scholar make How the Word Is Passed a richly provocative read.
NonfictionMemoirBlack History

Buses Are a Comin’

Review by Priscilla Kipp

“In every era, it takes a bus of change to lead the way. . . . Thankfully, a change bus is always a comin’.” So says Charles Person in his inspiring account of the 1961 Freedom Ride, Buses Are a Comin’. Person began taking notes when he got on his change bus at age 18. He would later lose those notes during a savage beating by a white mob in Birmingham, Alabama, but he still recalls it all vividly now that he’s in his 80s.

Growing up in the Bottom, a poor Black neighborhood in Atlanta, Person was unaware of racism’s reach. But when he was refused admission to Georgia Tech in 1960, despite an outstanding academic record that was good enough for MIT, he grew enraged. His grandfather prodded, “Do something!” But what could a teenager do?

Soon he knew. As a freshman at Morehouse College, Person witnessed his classmates’ participation in nonviolent sit-ins at Atlanta stores that refused service to Black people. He joined in, was arrested and served 10 days in solitary confinement because he sang protest songs too loudly. 

By the spring of 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was recruiting people for nonviolent tests of two recent Supreme Court decisions prohibiting segregation on interstate buses and trains. Person applied, after assuring his parents he would be safe, and received nonviolence training in Washington, D.C. He admired his cohorts, including a young John Lewis, but was skeptical of their concerns about the trouble they might encounter en route. Before embarking on two weeks of Trailways and Greyhound bus rides to New Orleans, they were encouraged to write their wills. Person declined.

What happened on that trip almost killed these 13 riders, but their horrifying experiences brought global attention to the escalating U.S. civil rights movement. Four hundred more Freedom Riders would join them that summer, and the South would be forever changed. Person tells it all in riveting detail, with help from his friend, historian Richard Rooker.

And why tell this story now? Person writes, “Nothing will change if you, my reader, my friend, my fellow American, do not take Papa’s advice and ‘do something.’ What change needs to happen? Get on the bus. Make it happen.”

A bus ride to New Orleans in 1961 almost killed 13 Freedom Riders, but changed the South forever.
NonfictionBlack History

We Are Each Other’s Harvest

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy is a tribute, an education, a family album and a celebration of Black farmers past, present—and hopefully future.

Author Natalie Baszile’s interest in foods’ origins deepened when she learned that her great-great-grandfather, who was once enslaved, became a successful farmer after emancipation. The older generations of her family, she realized, “cherished their connection to the soil and understood the value in owning and taking care of land.”

Curiosity fully piqued, Baszile left her job at her father’s business to write her much-lauded novel, Queen Sugar, about a Black woman in Los Angeles who inherits her father’s Louisiana sugar cane farm. But before Baszile could do justice to the fictional farming family she was creating, she had much to learn. Her years of research into Black farming history and its tools, techniques and culture culminated in the 2014 publication of her novel (which Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey adapted into an award-winning TV show) and her evolution into a passionate advocate for Black farmers.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: The audiobook for We Are Each Other’s Harvest inspires, empowers and enlightens through spoken word.

We Are Each Other’s Harvest amplifies Black farmers’ role in American history and honors their perseverance despite numerous obstacles. Many of these obstacles stem from systemic racism within policies and practices across a range of institutions, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to myriad banks and realtors nationwide. These challenges have accumulated over time, as professor of ethnic studies Analena Hope Hassberg explains in the book’s introduction, and as a result, Black farmers now cultivate less than half of 1% of U.S. farmland due to the gradual loss of massive amounts of land.

But Baszile’s profiles of the Black farmers she met during her travels around the U.S. offer hope. She shares fascinating stories about family farms in North Carolina, Louisiana and California—as well as individuals forging new paths, like a classically trained chef who’s honing her food-preservation and wool-spinning skills at a farm school in Alaska. Quotations from the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Booker T. Washington and Barack Obama, as well as poems by Ross Gay, Lucille Clifton and more, round out this abundant volume. We Are Each Other’s Harvest offers moving, edifying food for thought and will whet your appetite for action.

We Are Each Other’s Harvest is a tribute, an education, a family album and a celebration of Black farmers past, present—and hopefully future.
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

Hot, Hot Chicken

Review by Matt Gifford

If you’ve been following Nashville’s meteoric rise to It City status, you’ve surely heard about its famous hot chicken—fried chicken smothered with enough cayenne pepper to make your ears smoke. As the legend goes, in the early 20th century, a jilted lover overspiced Thornton Prince III’s chicken to punish him for his ramblin’ ways. This revenge backfired, however, because Prince loved the taste and eventually founded a successful restaurant based on the recipe, which his family still operates today.

Native Nashvillians and tourists alike have come to know and love this delicacy over the last decade, but members of Music City’s Black community have been braving the spice for generations. No matter when you learned about this iconic fare, Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story will enlighten you about its complex past.

This isn’t a recipe book, nor is it merely a culinary history of the spicy dish. In Hot, Hot Chicken, Martin traces Prince’s lineage back to the Civil War, illustrating the experiences of Black people in antebellum Tennessee along the way. She outlines how Prince’s grandparents were likely enslaved at a plantation south of Nashville. Pre-Emancipation records are spotty, and many details have been lost to time, but they may have lived in the Black refugee camps that formed on the outskirts of the city during the Civil War. Records of African Americans became more detailed after the war and show that the Princes went on to become sharecroppers and house servants, washing white Nashvillians’ clothes before becoming fledgling restaurateurs.

Alongside the Princes’ family history, Martin draws on her meticulous research to demonstrate what life was like for other Black people in Nashville during the Reconstruction, Jim Crow and civil rights eras through today. As she progresses through the city’s past, she explains how city planners isolated Black citizens in bleak slums without plumbing or electricity. White landlords exploited the people living in these neighborhoods, but entrepreneurs such as Prince and his brother found a way out of poverty by preparing and selling food.

As Martin scours a historical record designed to exclude Black Americans, she admirably pieces together tales from individuals known and unknown. Her tone is both ebullient and reverent as she unearths the lives of Black people across the South, handling their history with care. Hot, Hot Chicken is an eye-opening, ingenious history that makes Nashville come alive in ways that transcend its downtown honky tonks—and will leave you with a newfound respect for the sizzling food on your plate.

Hot, Hot Chicken is an eye-opening, ingenious history that makes Nashville come alive in ways that transcend its downtown honky tonks.
NonfictionBlack HistoryBiography

The Three Mothers

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

In The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, Anna Malaika Tubbs tells three stories that are often overlooked but deeply important to civil rights history. Tubbs explores the lives of “the women before the men,” as she calls them: Alberta King, Louise Little and Berdis Baldwin. Though each woman came from a different part of the U.S. and the Caribbean, faced diverse social and economic challenges and had divergent interests and ambitions, Tubbs knew that, because the women were so close in age (by some accounts their birthdays are only six years apart), she would find common ground among these women's lives that superseded their connections to famous men.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Anna Malaika Tubbs reveals how becoming a mother herself shaped her vision for The Three Mothers.

Tubbs intentionally chose the mothers of leaders whose lives have been well documented so she could focus on the women’s lives instead. In this way, The Three Mothers offers space for Tubbs, a debut author, to weave biography and social commentary with the complex history of Black women living in the 20th century. Tubbs also makes room for moments of discovery that help us better understand how each of these civil rights icons' social activism and artistic endeavors were shaped by their mothers’ shining examples. For instance, Alberta King’s radical maternal tenderness set the groundwork for how her son would view himself as a “mother” birthing a dream of racial equality. We also learn how Louise Little’s childhood love of dictionaries would lead her incarcerated son, Malcolm, on a quest for knowledge that would reroute his early delinquency, and how Berdis Baldwin would pass on her gift of both the written and spoken word to her oldest son, James.

As Tubbs explained in an interview for BookPage, there is a troubling binary between motherhood and intellectual labor, and her writing about three women whose sons’ lives were shaped by their mothers (and not vice versa) is an attempt to turn that binary on its head. The Three Mothers does just that, expanding conversations about King, Malcolm X and Baldwin beyond what these men gave the world to include what the world gave them through the lives of three intelligent, ambitious, trailblazing women.

The Three Mothers expands conversations about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin beyond what these men gave the world to include what the world gave them through the lives of their intelligent, ambitious, trailblazing mothers.

NonfictionHistoryBlack History

White Fright

Review by Catherine Hollis

America’s current struggle with racist police violence, voter suppression and white supremacy has deep and bloody roots in our national history. In order to understand the divisive United States of today, we must examine how the legacy of slavery and segregation continues to shape our nation. Jane Dailey’s White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History contributes to this scholarship through the lens of white anxiety about interracial relationships.

A noted historian of race in America, Dailey grounds this book with a clear narrative voice as she reviews the legal cases that institutionalized segregation in the American South. From Reconstruction after the Civil War to the 1960s civil rights movement, this history has been marked by legal restrictions on interracial sex and marriage occasioned by the sexual panic Dailey terms “white fright,” in a nod to the idea of “white flight.”

Beginning in the late 19th century, voting restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests were used in the American South to suppress the African American vote. This allowed for the passage of the so-called Jim Crow laws, legal machinations that institutionalized racial segregation under the false claim of “separate but equal” and were accompanied by white supremacist mob rule and the tragic violence of lynching. Dailey shows how inflammatory narratives of sexual predation underpinned these assaults on Black lives, while also revealing how white women were then held to notions of racial “purity.”

An illuminating contribution to the history of racism in America, White Fright reveals how white anxieties around gender and sexuality shaped the Black experience of social injustice.

In order to understand the divisive United States of today, we must examine how the legacy of slavery and segregation continues to shape our nation. Jane Dailey’s White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History contributes to this conversation through the lens of white anxiety about interracial relationships.
NonfictionBlack HistoryAmerican History

The Kidnapping Club

Review by Deborah Mason

Urbane and bustling, New York City is often considered the epitome of “Northern-ness.” However, in the decades before the Civil War, the city’s interests were very much in line with those of Southern cotton farmers. Through its finance, insurance and shipping industries, New York probably profited from slave labor more than any other city in the country. The city would do almost anything to appease the Southern states, even if it meant sending its own citizens into slavery.

The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells is an eye-opening history of antebellum New York. Wells, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, meticulously details two of New York City’s dirtiest secrets: the city’s illicit backing of the illegal transatlantic slave trade and the Kidnapping Club that helped reinforce it. From the 1830s until the start of the Civil War, and with the support of the city’s judiciary, vigilantes in the Kidnapping Club as well as the police abducted Black New Yorkers on the pretext that they were escaped slaves. With little or no due process, hundreds of men, women and even children were snatched, jailed and then sent south. The broader effects of New York’s illegal slave trade were even more horrific, resulting in the abduction, enslavement and frequently death of hundreds of thousands of West Africans.

There are many villains in this thoroughly researched and fascinating history, including police officers Tobias Boudinot and Daniel Nash, Judge Richard Riker and Mayor Fernando Woods. Yet The Kidnapping Club is more than a story of villainy. It’s also a history of heroes, including David Ruggles, a Black abolitionist who put his body between the victims and their snatchers; Elizabeth Jenkins, who fought against segregated transportation over a century before Rosa Parks; and James McCune Smith, an abolitionist and the first African American to hold a medical degree.

Most important of all, The Kidnapping Club restores the names of the abducted: Ben, Hester Jane Carr, Isaac Wright, Frances Shields, John Dickerson and countless others whose lives were destroyed and humanity erased— until now.

Urbane and bustling, New York City is often considered the epitome of “Northern-ness.” However, in the decades before the Civil War, the city’s interests were very much in line with those of Southern cotton farmers. Through its finance, insurance and shipping industries, New York probably…

NonfictionBlack HistoryAmerican History

South to Freedom

Review by Roger Bishop

In the conventional understanding of American history, enslaved people fled north to “free” states or to Canada. And many did—between 30,000 and 100,000 people. But others, probably no more than 3,000 or 5,000 people, went south to Mexico. Although a relatively small group, their collective story had strategic and political significance out of proportion to their numbers. Historian Alice L. Baumgartner details the reasons why in her deeply researched and eloquently argued South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Her book shows that “enslaved people who escaped to Mexico . . . contributed to the outbreak of a major sectional controversy over the future” of slavery in the U.S.

Baumgartner focuses on a complex series of events between Mexico and the U.S. in the early 19th century until 1867, often related to property rights and individual freedom, including the Texas Revolution, the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War. American slaveholders relentlessly pushed for the expansion of slavery through their elected officials, while Mexico gradually restricted and then abolished slavery in 1837. Complicating matters even more, the Mexican government had 49 presidents, including some dictators, between 1824 and 1857.

Many individuals on all sides are portrayed here, but the most compelling stories are those of enslaved people who, at considerable risk, escaped for what they hoped would be a better life in Mexico. Sadly, not all of them found improved conditions. They had few options for work or military service, but they did have the opportunity to choose.

Baumgartner’s fast-paced yet detailed exploration is consistently illuminating and offers a new way to understand the past. It is a must-read for anyone seeking a fuller awareness of our history.

In the conventional understanding of American history, enslaved people fled north to “free” states or to Canada. And many did—between 30,000 and 100,000 people. But others, probably no more than 3,000 or 5,000 people, went south to Mexico. Although a relatively small group, their collective…

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