• The Ground Breaking by Scott Ellsworth *** (of 4)

    September 14, 2024

    Scott Ellsworth answers a question I’ve pondered ever since I first learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. How come I had never heard of it before? Beginning the day after the flames died out, white Tulsans did everything they could to bury the evidence. Police gathered up photographs and hid them. Government investigations and after-action reports from the National Guard vanished. Bodies of the dead were buried in unmarked mass graves. Newspaper accounts were cut and taken out of library archives. By tacit agreement, white Tulsans refused to discuss it. Black survivors, like Holocaust survivors after them, were too traumatized to tell their children.

    Before the 9/11 attacks, the Tulsa race massacre of African Americans by a vigilante white mob was the worst attack on Americans in the country’s history (only if you overlook the decimation of Native American populations.)

    Ellsworth, is a white, very professional historian, opens the book with an impartial account of events based on credible evidence. His description is in contrast to white apologists who insist that deaths were minimal and roughly equal between Blacks and whites. Angry African Americans suggest that the invasion of the Greenwood District of Tusla was a pre-meditated land grab. Ellsworth lays out what can be said with certainty based on surviving testimonies and documents.

    The events were perpetrated by a riled up mob that ran out of control. Think about January 6 and the U.S. Capitol and shudder.

    Much of the book is dedicated to Ellsworth’s tireless search for mass graves of murdered African Americans purportedly dumped right after the riot. For more than two decades, Ellsworth scoured stories and archives, cajoled governments, and sought assistance from archaeologists to help him search and eventually dig through potential locations. Ellsworth is a strong proponent of the idea of paying reparations to the offspring of families whose lives and livelihoods were snuffed out by an unapologetic white Tulsa.

    His contribution was to find the bodies of some of those who had been disappeared so their remains could be returned and reburied with dignity. His other contribution was to write this book.

    The first person was identified on July 12, 2024, following the exhumation of African Americans from a mass grave in Tulsa, Oklahoma. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/tulsa-massacre-oklahoma-mass-grave-cl-daniel-rcna161599

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  • Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah **** (of 4)

    August 7, 2024

    Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx are two of the greatest all-star fighters in history. Each woman has risen through the ranks of prisoners competing for their freedom. They have signed contracts to be contestants in for-profit showdowns arranged for regular broadcasts. Fans wear uniforms with their idol’s names. They follow every social media posting and watch special profiles of their heroes. They send fan mail and scream their heads off during matches. They weep over losses and glumly trudge to work when their heroes fail them. Televised fighting matches end when an opponent is killed.

    Adjei-Brenyah holds tight reins on prose that indicts America’s system of incarceration and its failed acts of correction. He brings to light a system that overwhelmingly and disproportionately jails people of color. He never excuses criminal behavior, but also clarifies that solitary confinement, tasing, and beatings by guards does not repair broken individuals, nor do the slightest toward preventing future crimes. He does it all by humanizing all-star fighters like Loretta and Hurricane who are dehumanized by their required acquiescence to their guards every request and who must live every moment under watch.

    Chain Gang is also an indictment of American football without once mentioning the sport. America’s most popular sport is akin to gladiatorial combat in Ancient Rome’s coliseum. A majority of players are black. All will be injured. Many will suffer irreversible brain injury and die early. The harder they hit one another the louder we scream in ecstasy. Chain Gang is an important read.

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  • Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley *** (of 4)

    July 12, 2024

    Joe King Oliver is, no, was, a NYC cop. He was sent to Rikers after being framed for molesting a perp. Now, a dozen years later, still suffering flashbacks and PTSD from his time in the hole, he is trying to put his life back together. He is working as a private investigator when a client asks him to take on the case of a cop-killer on death row. Cop-killers don’t get let off, especially those who admit to doing the shooting. Except, the man on death row is an African American who worked hard to lift up NYC’s most down and out. Now calling himself A Free Man (formerly Leonard Compton), A Free Man ran up against a crooked ring of police who were extorting junkies and prostitutes. The cops hunted down our do-gooders associates and came after A Free Man, guns blazing.

    Joe Oliver now has two cases involving unknown crooked cops: A Free Man and his own hunt for the guys who framed him. He prowls the streets of the city expounding the philosophy of a well-read, self-taught, working class Black man making him one of the most interesting characters to ever interrogate the line between right and wrong. Race and class are given the attention they deserve. New Yorkers, who are honest with themselves, are always measuring and assessing. At times the circuities of Oliver’s attempts to uncover the bad cops who framed him and the bad cops that went after A Free Man are too tangled to follow, but stick with Oliver. His observational skills about life in the city, and about life in general, are magnificent.

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  • Rough Crossings by Simon Schama *** (of 4)

    March 25, 2024

    How did we not know this?

    In the 1760s, a court case in England suggested that any person of African descent living in Great Britain was a free man. Enslaved Africans in America knew about the court ruling. Moreover, they were well aware that Jefferson’s paragraph in the Declaration of Independence had been deleted. Jefferson, though a slave-owner himself, recognized that the hypocrisy of a declaration calling for freedom, equality, and the removal of the tyranny by unjust overseers could not be squared with the maintenance of American slavery. The Declaration of Independence would not be ratified by southern states so long as Jefferson’s paragraph endured and the issue of slavery was postponed until a later date.

    Nonetheless, enslaved Blacks reasoned that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. By the thousands, African Americans fled to British lines, and many Blacks fought against Americans. Perhaps as many as one-fourth of all enslaved Africans escaped plantations, only to find they had backed the losing side.

    After the war, as southerners sought to reclaim their lost “property,” Blacks did their utmost to make their way to Great Britain. Three thousand Blacks, for example, were in New York City at war’s end, under the protection of British troops.

    Thousands of Blacks moved to Nova Scotia, because it was part of Great Britain. (Check out the link, Our History-Black Migration in Nova Scotia.) They were promised land, but promises were broken. In 1792, 1,192 men, women, and children sailed out of Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone to start a free Black nation on the African shores from which many families had begun their journey. In one poignant early election in Sierra Leone, community representatives were voted on by men and women of the newfound village. Which means the first women in history to ever vote were formerly enslaved Africans.

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  • All the Sinners Bleed *** (of 4)

    October 27, 2023

    Nobody captures underlying racial tension in the contemporary south, wrapped in a crime thriller, as well as S.A. Cosby. His leads–this is Cosby’s fourth in a series of unconnected novels taking place in rural Virginia–are invariably upstanding Black men facing entrenched, and typically barely concealed, white hostility.

    Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in a coastal Virginia community. His predecessor was a Black-beating, omnipotent, Old School sheriff who barely lost to Titus in the last election. Crown faces underlying bigotry from the town’s whites and progressive Blacks see Crown as having sold out to an untrustworthy police force. In the opening pages an active shooter is in the local high school. There is, in subsequent scenes, a march by Confederate sympathizers to the statue in the middle of town commemorating rebel war heroes, an outspoken pastor of a local Black Church planning a countermarch, a serial killer, and a child porn ring. Titus Crown’s allegiances to family, community, law, and justice are yanking him in impossible contortions.

    All the Sinners Bleed is a page turner, but also tries to incorporate too many current events in one book. Cosby holds it together, but fewer yanks on a single sheriff in such a short period would have still gotten the point across and felt closer to reality.

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  • How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker **** (of 4)

    October 7, 2023

    Jerald Walker is a Black professor at a prestigious Boston college. He lives in an overwhelmingly upscale Boston-adjacent community, and on the surface would appear to have put considerable distance between his childhood days in the ghettos of Chicago and the present day. Yet, as he chronicles his daily experience as the one person who can be identified from a distance as “other” in an otherwise liberal setting, not all is well.

    Walker’s essays are short, often funny, and almost always leave you with an underlying feeling of anxiety. When Walker’s child is accused of being “stinky” in elementary school, Walker wonders if the accusation borne of home-taught racism, and does he already need to explain to his son what he is about to experience, or just a schoolyard taunt? When Walker shops at his neighborhood Whole Foods, white women instinctively seal up their purses, pull them from their shopping carts, and draw them close to their bodies. When his child suffers a seizure, and then another, and he sits in a panic in the ER for an eternity, while others appear to be treated with greater speed, is it because his is the only Black family waiting, because by rules of triage, there really isn’t much to worry about?

    This book was nominated for the National Book Award for good reason. The author makes us tighten up our shoulders with every page and we have to recognize that the fear he has engendered in us, accompanies him all the time.

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  • The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride **** (of 4)

    September 19, 2023

    The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a one-room general store owned by Moshe, but run, at a loss, by his warm-hearted, open-minded, club-footed (polio), empathetic, and tough-as-nails wife, Chona. The store on Chicken Hill may be run by a Jewish family, but it is frequented by Pottstown, Pennsylvania’s Blacks, who along with other immigrants are all but banned from downtown by the Christian elite. It is the 1920s and 1930s and according to Chona, who writes letters to the Pottstown newspaper, it is the town doctor under robes leading the annual KKK parade.

    You would be mistaken, however, if you went into this book expecting a grim tale of racial and ethnic belligerence. Instead, McBride introduces us to some of the most respectable, joyful, conniving, conscientious, and well-meaning Blacks and Jews you will ever have the pleasure of observing. Throughout–as the the two communities work together to rescue a 12-year-old Black child who has been “taken” to a criminally negligent insane asylum typical of the era — we readers have the unique pleasure of being in the room where vernacular conversations ricochet off the walls. Jews answer questions with more questions and African Americans tell stories that build upon other stories and then lead to new stories as they navigate within the confines of racial America. James McBride is one of the few, perhaps, the only, writer capable of telling such a tale with this much grace, compassion, and drive.

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  • The Last Slave Ship by Ben Raines *** (of 4)

    September 30, 2022

    On the face of it, the story of 100 enslaved Africans smuggled into Mobile, Alabama does not feel that significant among the 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World (10.7 million survived the Middle Passage.) Aside: I am only now figuring out that more than 90% of the people kidnapped, chained below decks, and, if they survived, sold, went into the Caribbean and South America. America’s four million enslaved people were mostly bred (breeding is a term used by slavers) by their owners here.

    The Clotilda was the last ship carrying human cargo to arrive in the United States, running past naval patrol ships into Mobile Bay in 1860. After the south lost the Civil War, many of those transported by the Clotilda settled in Africa Town just outside Mobile. They lived long enough to be interviewed and photographed. They provided firsthand accounts of their lost African families, details of their capture by Dahomian warriors, the life-threatening Middle Passage, and sale to other humans to do animal-like labor. They also recall African customs that persisted inside Africa Town.

    The author, Ben Raines, describes the Clotilda from the days of its inception as a ship bound for Africa in contravention of American law, its scuttling after disgorging its human cargo into the swamps of Alabama, until its rediscovery 2019. The ship’s story brackets the story of its enslaved Africans and their offspring.

    A century of racism haunts Africa Town and its descendents to this day. And yet, The Last Slave Ship grows stronger until its finish, describing a sordid history that somehow still points a way toward recognition and finally, forgiveness.

    Africa Town today. The commerce is gone now, and you see boarded up homes and vacant lots in the neighborhood. Link to NPR story.

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  • How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith *** (of 4)

    September 16, 2022

    Clint Smith educates white Americans who likely never learned the true extent and depth of slavery in the foundation and enduring legacy of the country. He does so, however, with poetic passages rather than a two-by-four across the side of your head. He applies the same gentle approach as he makes clear that never in America’s history – today included – has a Black person ever felt complete freedom. Skin color defines every interaction on the street, in a store, at a bank, during an interview, or in front of a jury. Consider for even sixty seconds, the strain that must induce.

    Using the same understated approach, while visiting seven important landmarks in the history of enslavement, Smith establishes that there never was, nor could have been, such a thing as acceptable or benevolent enslavement of other human beings, despite numerous enduring attempts to suggest otherwise. If enslavement as it was practiced in America cannot be justified by any rational or compassionate human, how, asks Smith can any veneration of The Lost Cause, Confederate Soldiers (and their reenactors), so-called defense of state’s rights, or idolization of Confederate leaders be tolerated? Wasn’t every Confederate, in essence, a subversive fighting to overthrow the rule of law. Wasn’t the Civil War fundamentally an armed insurrection in defense of the right to hold other human beings in conditions to which they could be flogged, starved, detached from their families, or worked to death?

    At his best, Smith interviews white tour guides at Monticello (working to teach anti-Racist history) and white Daughters and Sons of the Confederacy and does so without malice or confrontation, an act of noble restraint. He reminds each person he speaks with, however, what it has meant to him to grow up in a country that has never taught him, or itself, about its true history.

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  • Black Cloud Rising by David Wright Falade *** (of 4)

    September 4, 2022

    As the Civil War dragged on and Union troops made advances across the south, formerly enslaved people fled bondage to take up refuge behind northern armies. Some of the escaped men were organized into fighting regiments: Black soldiers fighting for the Union cause.

    Richard Etheridge, a Sargent in the African Brigade of Colored Troops, is the primary subject of this fictional account of a real-life American hero. The Colored Troops traverse the lowlands of North Carolina dispossessing former plantation owners of their property, burning their homes when necessary, and gathering up enslaved people still being held in bondage. The embedded racism among white officers and southerners of all stripes is laid bare and real as the author, David Wright, incorporates an exceptional amount of homework. All that research, however, makes the book, and its attempt at period vernacular, hard to follow at times. A list of dramatis personae at the beginning of the book would have helped we readers keep all the players straight.

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