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Black Folk

Review by Roger Bishop

Historian Blair LM Kelley writes, “Our national mythos leaves little room for Black workers, or to glean any lessons from their histories. . . . Never mind that from slavery to the present, Black workers have been essential to the nation’s productivity, and indeed . . . to its basic functioning.” The director of the Center for the Study of the American South and co-director of the Southern Futures initiative at the University of North Carolina, Kelley gives a sweeping narrative of 200 years of American history in her engaging and well-documented Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class. 

Kelley also uses events in the lives of some of her ancestors to tell parts of the larger story. The overwhelming impression throughout is of great tragedy combined with an amazing abundance of courage and resourcefulness in the face of impossible barriers. The author gives primary attention to “a critical era, after southern Emancipation and into the early twentieth century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves.”

Readers will especially learn about Black workers who united to gain political influence. For example, “Washerwomen, or laundresses, occupied a central place in Black life, history, and culture,” Kelley writes. Their work was hard and required great skill. After the Civil War, many laundresses had the independence to work alone and were able to spend more time with their children. They were also able to use their earnings to help support their families and communities by buying houses, building churches and opening businesses—and some were able to organize to improve their situations. In 1881, for example, laundresses in Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, went on strike for better pay and working conditions. Some washerwomen even joined labor protests for other industries, such as the successful streetcar boycott in Richmond, Virginia, in 1904.

Kelley also traces the development and importance of the Pullman porters, Black men who performed a variety of services for railway passengers beginning in 1867. The author writes of their significance, “Easily the most well-traveled Black folks in America, the Pullman porters provided assistance to people seeking opportunity in the North and West, connecting porters’ home folks with jobs, and offering their knowledge about the cities where migrants planned to settle. . . . They bore witness to the violence of lynchings and racial massacres, and also carried copies of Northern Black newspapers to sell to Black residents in the South.”

There is so much more here to interest history lovers. This fine book illuminates the intelligence, sense of community, hard work (often done under deplorable conditions) and resilience of Black workers, who have made crucial contributions to American history.

Black Folk illuminates the intelligence, sense of community, hard work, resilience and courage of the Black working class, whose members have made crucial contributions to American history.
NonfictionFeaturedHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Black history is American history

List by the editors of BookPage
Black history books 2023
STARRED REVIEW

June 13, 2023

Black history is American history

Eight excellent nonfiction books tell true stories of Black persistence and progress.

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NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

A Most Tolerant Little Town

Review by Anne Bartlett

The most famous moment following the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling is probably the day in 1957 when National Guard intervention was required to get Black students into Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. But that was just one small example of the vast changes that swept through the Jim Crow South. The first court-mandated desegregation in the former Confederacy was actually in Clinton, Tennessee, in 1956—and the effort was just as fraught with violence, fear and fortitude as the more well-known event in Arkansas.

Historian Rachel Louise Martin (Hot, Hot Chicken) first visited Clinton in 2005 as a researcher involved in an oral history project. Her fascination with that town’s story has now culminated in A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation, a day-by-day account of the desegregation of Clinton High School. The book’s title is sadly ironic. After desegregation began, it didn’t take long for a racist intimidation campaign to form, including mob assaults and dynamiting.

At the center of Martin’s tale are the 12 Black students who initially integrated Clinton High and who braved threats and violence against them and their families. But another interesting faction stands out in A Most Tolerant Little Town: the significant number of white people who opposed desegregation but opposed lawlessness even more. Their ranks included judges, National Guard leaders, the high school principal, teachers, student football players and jurors.

Little as many white Tennesseans liked it, desegregation was continually enforced. Tellingly, one turning point on the way to the community’s acceptance of desegregation was the conviction, by a local white jury, of the bigoted rabble who attacked a respected white Baptist minister shortly after he said from the pulpit that Black students in Clinton had a right to attend the high school. The Black victims in town seldom got such justice.

For decades, residents were reluctant to reminisce about these events in Clinton, where Black desegregation pioneers continued to interact daily with their former tormentors. Today, the Clinton 12 are honored with statues and a mural. But in her moving conclusion, Martin stresses that de facto segregation is surging across the U.S. and that the challenge to work together for lasting change is as great as ever.

In A Most Tolerant Little Town, Rachel Louise Martin captures the violence, fear and fortitude that accompanied the first court-mandated school desegregation in America.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryBiography

Say Anarcha

Review by Deborah Mason

In 2018, a group of protestors demanded the removal of a statue in New York City of J. Marion Sims, known as the “father of gynecology.” Sims was given this title for inventing a surgery in the mid-1800s to treat vesico-vaginal fistulas, holes between someone’s vagina and bladder or intestines (or both) that are usually caused by difficult childbirth. He developed his technique through horrific experiments performed on three enslaved women named Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, without either anesthesia or meaningful consent. Anarcha endured at least 30 experiments, but her condition never improved, mainly because Sims’ approach was ineffective—and frequently fatal. Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health is Guggenheim fellow J.C. Hallman’s dual biography of Sims and Anarcha.

Sims, a shameless self-promoter, provided Hallman with an ample record to work with. His memoirs, articles and newspaper notices (written primarily by Sims himself) make it clear that he was dangerously, violently misogynist and racist. Cloaked by his medical degree and bolstered by a system that transformed human beings into disposable property, Sims was able to perform acts of brutality on Lucy, Betsey and Anarcha with impunity. And they were not his only victims: After perfecting his “cure,” Sims and his adherents maimed or killed women of all classes, from enslaved people to countesses.

Hallman’s greater challenge was reconstructing Anarcha’s life. The structure of chattel slavery ensured that the few references to Anarcha in the historical record merely reflected her status as property, leaving Hallman with the dilemma of how to tell the true story of a woman whom history had almost entirely erased. Historian Tiya Miles confronted a similar issue in All That She Carried, a brilliant reconstruction of the life of another enslaved woman and her descendants. Like Miles, Hallman uses the technique of “creative fabulation”—consulting various oral and written histories from Anarcha’s lifetime to creatively fill in the gaps within an archive distorted by racism and misogyny. The result is a nuanced and sympathetic speculative portrait of a woman who would otherwise remain anonymous.

Double biographies are fairly unusual and tend to be about people who were linked together in the minds of their contemporaries. But Anarcha was not associated with Sims in the public mind because Sims took great pains to ensure that she would not be—not because of any shame he felt about exploiting an enslaved woman but because the recurrence of her fistulas belied Sims’s narrative. Hallman’s determination to bring Anarcha out of obscurity restores her humanity and allows readers to reexamine the corrupt foundations of women’s health care.

Say Anarcha is J.C. Hallman’s dual biography of the so-called “father of gynecology” and the enslaved woman he experimented on without anesthesia or meaningful consent.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Built From the Fire

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The appalling history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma is becoming better known, albeit a century later. But journalist Victor Luckerson understands that what happened following those horrific events, as the survivors persevered and rebuilt, is also an important part of this history. In his debut book, Built From the Fire, Luckerson tells the story of the massacre, the people who restored the Greenwood district of Tulsa after that violent night in 1921, and their descendants who continue to fuel and inspire change.

The book is divided into three parts as Luckerson chronicles the last century of Greenwood’s history. Part 1 recounts the district’s beginnings circa 1901, when a segregated slice of oil-rich Tulsa became a destination for Black Americans looking for a future that the Jim Crow South would not deliver. But hope dimmed after the widespread race riots of 1919’s “Red Summer.” Black soldiers returning from World War I, where racism in the military meant menial assignments and segregated units, found that their service also failed to earn them equality at home. Yet Greenwood prospered, with movie theaters, dance halls, restaurants, hotels and a newspaper with a distinctly Black voice.

Luckerson fills every page with humanity distilled from his prodigious research. For example, there’s Dick Rowland, a young Black worker who got caught in a malfunctioning elevator with a white girl on May 30, 1921, the day before the massacre. She screamed, and he was almost lynched. Loula Williams, a successful Black entrepreneur, escaped the mob the night of May 31 but lost almost everything she had built—and later lost her mind. Prominent community member J.H. Goodwin diverted white terrorists from his home possibly because he passed for white.

During the night, Greenwood’s thriving businesses were reduced to smoking rubble. White rioters, including many citizens who were spontaneously deputized as policemen, stormed into the area and dragged people from their homes, shot them in the street and burned everything in their path. Planes even dropped explosives as they flew low over fleeing families. Luckerson holds nothing back in this description of hell, so terrifying that for years, survivors kept silent and such lurid history went untaught. But this, as Luckerson makes clear, was only the beginning.

Part II follows Greenwood’s survivors as they began the daunting task of salvaging, rebuilding and fighting back. Their descendants reclaimed the city’s entrepreneurial spirit while becoming civil rights activists and adamant reformers. Part III brings Greenwood into the still-turbulent present, as Goodwin’s great-granddaughter Regina, a Democratic state representative, pursues a relentless legislative quest for justice. As the search for the massacre’s mass graves continues, recovery from the gentrifying urban-renewal wrecking ball of the 1970s makes progress and demands for reparations intensify, Luckerson’s point is clear: Greenwood is alive again.

Victor Luckerson’s Built From the Fire documents what happened following the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, centering the survivors who persevered and rebuilt.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryBiography

King: A Life

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

“On December 5, 1955, a young Black man became one of America’s founding fathers. He was twenty-six years old and knew that the role he was taking carried a potential death penalty.” With these riveting opening sentences, journalist and author Jonathan Eig pulls readers into King: A Life, his vibrantly written biography of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. This monumental book takes King down from his pedestal, revealing his flaws, needs, dreams, hopes and weariness.

King: A Life draws on recently released FBI documents, as well as other new materials, including audiotapes recorded by Coretta Scott King in the months after her husband’s death, an unpublished memoir by King’s father and unaired television footage. In cinematic fashion, Eig follows King from his childhood through his seminary and graduate school days, his marriage and his steady insistence on the reformation of a society broken by racism. As Eig points out, King developed a rhetorical style and shaped a new moral vision when he spoke to the crowd gathered at Holt Street Baptist Church to rally in support of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. “On this night, King found a new voice,” he writes. “He discovered or sensed that his purpose was not to instruct or educate; his purpose was to prophesize. With a booming voice and strident words, he marked the path for himself and for a movement.”

Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King felt that the work he had begun in Montgomery was validated, but he recognized that the movement would be incomplete if it remained confined to the South. King desired to “root out racism” all over America, Eig writes, in all its “hidden and subtle and covert disguises.” He also began to turn his attention to issues beyond civil rights for Black Americans, focusing on poverty and the war in Vietnam. By the time he arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 to support the sanitation workers’ strike, King was exhausted, wondering whether the “arc of justice would not bend toward freedom.” In spite of his fatigue and the lack of broader racial reform in the U.S., King refused to give up hope. On the last day of his life, he thundered in his “Promised Land” speech, “I may not get there with you. But . . . we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

Eig candidly asserts that “in hallowing King we have hollowed him.” King: A Life makes him a real human being again, one who had affairs, smoked and drank, got angry and even plagiarized. But Eig encourages readers to “embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King” if we are to achieve the kind of change King himself preached in America.

Jonathan Eig’s monumental biography takes Martin Luther King Jr. down from his pedestal, revealing his flaws, needs, dreams, hopes and weariness.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

A Madman’s Will

Review by Roger Bishop

John Randolph, a wealthy enslaver from Virginia, member of Congress for almost 30 years, strong defender of states’ rights and prominent public speaker, died in 1833. In the will that he created in 1821, he stipulated the freeing of every enslaved person on his plantation, which would amount to one of the largest manumissions in American history: 383 people. Before this could happen, however, the court system had to deal with the legality of a will Randolph created in 1832 that did not grant those people freedom. To determine the legality of the latter will, the courts had to consider Randolph’s mental state—whether he was “mad” or sane when he prepared it. Meanwhile, the enslaved people whose freedom was on the line waited anxiously for 13 years for a final decision. When that moment finally came, their resettlement and “freedom” in Ohio turned to disappointment and tragedy. Historian and lawyer Gregory May brilliantly captures these extraordinary events with his compelling, meticulously documented and beautifully written A Madman’s Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom.

Randolph was not only “a political celebrity, but a colorful character of the first order,” May writes—someone who “always craved public attention” and who, over the course of his political career, both defended and denounced slavery. Two of his early wills, prepared in 1819 and 1821, “freed all of Randolph’s slaves and provided funds to resettle them outside Virginia,” May writes. However, Randolph’s final will did not offer anyone freedom but instead indicated that most of the people enslaved on his plantation would be sold.

May includes a fascinating look at the legal and medical framework the courts used to examine Randolph’s sanity after his death. There were many stories about his “peculiarities,” including “fluctuations between excitement and dejection, enthusiasm and gloom,” especially during the last 10 years of his life. A Madman’s Will also includes other interesting descriptions of testimony, scandal and greed, including entertaining depictions of disappointed relatives who had hoped to be heirs.

In the end, May writes, neither Randolph nor the people he enslaved “could escape the underlying pull of prevailing white assumptions about race and social order.” Many white people could not comprehend the plight of people who were enslaved and were indifferent about their predicament. And so when those 383 formerly enslaved Black people arrived in Mercer County in the “free” state of Ohio, they were met by a white mob—and white residents’ violent objections to their settlement continued from there.

May’s account shows that “freedom” of any kind was virtually impossible for Black people in the United States in the early 1800s, no matter how carefully planned. This important book should be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in American history.

In the compelling and beautifully written A Madman’s Will, Gregory May captures the story of 383 enslaved people who waited 13 years to find out whether or not they were free.

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Eight excellent nonfiction books tell true stories of Black persistence and progress.
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Fall 2023 preview: Most anticipated nonfiction

Feature by the editors of BookPage

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

Simon & Schuster | October 3

Throughout poet Safiya Sinclair’s childhood in Jamaica, her father was a strict Rastafarian who imposed harsh constraints on his daughters’ lives and appearances. As Sinclair read the books her mother gave her and began to find her voice as a poet, she likewise found her voice as a daughter struggling to get out from underneath her father’s thumb. In her debut memoir, Sinclair reckons with colonialism, patriarchy and obedience in expressive, melodic prose.

A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Riverhead | September 12

The celebrated novelist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer turns to memoir for the first time in A Man of Two Faces. Viet Thanh Nguyen left Vietnam at age 4 and came to the U.S. as a refugee, but even after escaping danger in their home country, his family was separated, targeted and harmed in America. This book recounts the events of Nguyen’s life, of course, but it becomes much more than a straightforward memoir as Nguyen conjures stirring insights into memory, migration and identity.

The Sisterhood by Liza Mundy

Crown | October 17

The author of the 2017 bestseller Code Girls returns with The Sisterhood, a history of the women who have played key roles in the CIA since World War II. As spies, archivists, analysts and operatives, women have been underestimated and overlooked through the years. Liza Mundy now spins a gripping tale of how those women used those slights to their advantage as they captured state secrets and spotted threats that the men working alongside them had missed.

Being Henry by Henry Winkler

Celadon | October 31

Famously kindhearted actor Henry Winkler opens up about his life and work in Being Henry. From overcoming a difficult childhood and getting typecast as the Fonz early in his career to finding his second wind decades later in shows such as “Arrested Development” and “Barry,” Winkler peers beneath the sparkling veneer of Hollywood to tell the tender personal story behind his lifelong fame.

My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

Viking | November 7

If there is one book that truly captures the spirit of “most anticipated,” it has to be screen and stage legend Barbra Streisand’s memoir. Fans have been looking forward to reading the full saga of Streisand’s life and unparalleled career for years—and this fall, they will finally get the chance. At 1,024 pages long, this book is unlikely to skip over any of the juicy details.

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith

Knopf | November 7

Tracy K. Smith digs into historical archives to craft a new terminology for American life in this centuries-spanning portrait. Using the personal, documentary and spiritual, Smith considers the memory and possibilities of race, family and intimacy throughout history and into the future. By the end of this meditation, readers will have a new vocabulary and insight into the powers of their own soul.

Gator Country by Rebecca Renner

Flatiron | November 14

Gonzo journalism meets nature documentary in this fast-paced Floridian crime story. Officer Jeff Babauta goes undercover into the world of gator poaching in an attempt to bring down the intricate crime ring. As he becomes embedded in the network, meeting a zany, desperate cast of characters, Babauta’s sense of justice is challenged and he soon has to choose between sacrificing his new community and the safety of the natural world. 

The Lost Tomb by Douglas Preston

Grand Central | December 5

True crime meets a crash course in archaeological history in this extravaganza of a book. When he isn’t co-writing bestselling thrillers featuring FBI Agent Pendergast, Douglas Preston has been traveling the world, visiting some of history’s most storied and remote locations. From the largest tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings to a mass grave left by an asteroid impact, Preston will take readers on a fun, insightful journey into history.

Discover all of BookPage’s most anticipated books of fall 2023.

From CIA spies to Barbra Streisand, alligator tales and more, there’s something for everyone in fall’s most anticipated nonfiction releases.
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

Before the Movement

Review by Roger Bishop

In his sweeping, extensively documented and elegantly written Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, $35, 9781324093107), Dylan C. Penningroth, a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley, gives us a new way to look at Black lives throughout American history. Penningroth explores Black people’s everyday experiences with the law in depth. “The basic premise of this book is that Black people’s lives are worth studying in themselves,” he writes.  

Tracing the Black freedom struggle from the last years of slavery through the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods and “the subsequent forty years when battles over the scope and meaning of civil rights broke out again on the national stage,” Penningroth contends that “we cannot understand Black legal lives after slavery without first examining Black legal lives during slavery.” Based on Penningroth’s extraordinary research conducted from records in the basements of county courthouses, we learn how Black people, following the end of the Civil War, dealt with owning property, marriage and divorce, conducting business and church matters and much more. He refutes the idea that Black people knew little about the law. “White people recognized Black rights,” he writes, “because life’s ordinary business could not go on if whites could not make contracts and convey property to Black people.”    

We read about the rise of Black property owners from Reconstruction to the depths of Jim Crow. Penningroth notes that “Five years after the Civil War ended, 4.8 percent of the South’s Black families, about 43,000, owned real estate. Over the next fifteen years, that figure steadily rose.” This happened despite virtually no help from the government and the passing of so-called Black Codes that severely restricted the rights of Black people in some Southern states..

The meaning of “civil rights” has changed through the years. In 1866, it meant contract and property rights and the ability to take a case to court. By 1954, the term had come to refer to racial discrimination at work and school and the right to vote. More recently, Penningroth writes, “the grassroots wanted much more than some federal laws protecting their right to vote, to patronize restaurants, and to attend integrated schools. They wanted to remake American democracy from the ground up.”

An important book full of insight into issues and personalities, Before the Movement should be of interest to anyone who wants to better understand American history.    

Dylan C. Penningroth’s history of Black Americans’ experiences with U.S. law is sweeping, extensively documented and elegantly written.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Half American

Review by Deborah Mason

World War II is remembered as a conflict between democratic and fascist countries. But during the 1940s, nearly 10% of the residents of the world’s largest democracy were considered second-class citizens because of their race. Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, chronicles how Black Americans had to fight for the right to combat racism abroad because of the racism at home.

The irony of this was not lost on African Americans, who were acutely aware of how segregation kept them from full citizenship. Adopting a “Double Victory” strategy, Black Americans treated the war as a means of defeating foreign fascism and domestic racism. Half American recounts the history of this struggle, from Langston Hughes’ newspaper coverage of the Spanish Civil War to the mistreatment—even murder—of returning African American veterans. Furthermore, Delmont demonstrates that this story is not frozen in the past but is key to understanding—and changing—our present.

This book would have been a significant contribution to our knowledge of World War II history even if Delmont had only focused on the performance of African American combat troops. The Tuskegee Airmen are famous, but fewer people are aware of the Black Panthers, a Black tank battalion that served in Italy, or the Montford Point Marines, who were the first African American marines and fought valiantly at the battles of Saipan and Iwo Jima. But Half American is more than an excellent introduction to this underappreciated chapter of military history. It is also a groundbreaking illumination of African American civilians’ complex involvement in World War II.

In addition to official records, Delmont used archives, oral histories and contemporary coverage from the Black press to document his work. As a result, Half American gives voice not only to prominent African American leaders such as Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but also to Black soldiers, factory workers and other everyday people who contributed to the war effort—people who are rarely mentioned in history books, even though they created history.

During World War II, Black Americans had to fight for the right to combat racism abroad because of the racism at home. In Half American, Matthew F. Delmont chronicles that fight.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

The Grimkes

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah were the white daughters of South Carolina slaveholder John Faucheraud Grimke and his cruel wife, Polly. When the sisters fled the South and, as Quakers, sought redemption for their family’s racist ways, they became celebrated 19th-century abolitionists and women’s rights activists, blazing a trail through the turbulent antebellum Northeast with speeches, writings and protests against America’s “original sin” of slavery. This story looms large in the popular American imagination, but in The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, Tufts University historian Kerri K. Greenidge reveals a counternarrative—one of a complex, conflicted Black and white Grimke family that was often at odds with their country, their own progeny and themselves.

Following the Civil War, white mobs in Charleston, Philadelphia and New York City torched Black homes and churches, lynching people with impunity as they fought to keep the institution of slavery alive. Greenidge unflinchingly relays the horrors that Black Americans endured before the Civil War and during the days of Reconstruction. She also reveals that, during this latter period, the Grimke sisters overlooked their own Black nephews until the boys’ mother, Nancy, who was enslaved by the Grimkes’ brother, begged for help.

The stories of Nancy’s sons—Archie, Frank and John—and their entanglements with their famous white aunts in the postbellum North are rich with ironies. The aunts’ often ambivalent support helped Archie through Harvard Law School and Frank at Princeton Theological Seminary, but there were odd strings attached. For example, the young men had to abstain from flashy clothes and avoid any familiarity with the “negro masses” struggling beneath them. Later, as part of the “colored elite” of the Gilded Age, ​​Archie mingled with Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. But these relationships did little to influence Archie’s work as consul to the Dominican Republic and his racist treatment of Black workers there.

Greenidge bookends this history with moments from the life of another Angelina Grimke in the 20th century: Archie’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who was abandoned by her white mother. Family members despaired over her immodest dress and, later, her impassioned voice as a celebrated playwright and poet. Her stories, as well as her ancestors’, belong in the wider Grimke history. Now, thanks to Greenidge’s provocative and well-written account, they are.

Kerri K. Greenidge complicates the accepted history of the abolitionist Grimke sisters with the full, complex story of their Black and white relatives.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

American Sirens

Review by Alice Cary

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics reveals a hidden slice of history about the emergency services that we all depend on but largely take for granted. Kevin Hazzard (A Thousand Naked Strangers), a print and television writer who worked as a paramedic in Atlanta for nearly a decade, does an excellent job of transforming his exhaustive research into a compelling narrative suitable to its gripping subject.

While the book is replete with white-knuckle medical emergencies, the real story here is the inspiring saga of how the paramedic profession was born. Before the 1970s, emergency services were “slapdash and chaotic,” with ambulance runs “treated like a Frankenstein limb rather than a full-fledged arm of public safety.” Hospital transportation might have been provided by the police, firefighters or a funeral home, with little regulation involved and a shocking absence of training. As Hazzard writes, “On any given day, the patient in an ambulance may have been better qualified to handle their own emergency than the person paid to save them.”

In 1966, medical pioneer Peter Safar, known as the father of CPR, lost his 11-year-old daughter to an asthma-induced coma while he and his wife were away at a medical conference. He channeled his grief into designing and implementing an entirely new model of ambulance care, partnering with Freedom House, a grassroots organization in the Black, immigrant neighborhood of Hill District in Pittsburgh, to train ordinary people to administer lifesaving techniques. After intensive training, a group of Black paramedics took their first call on July 15, 1968, and went on to respond to nearly 6,000 calls in the Hill District that year, saving more than 200 lives. Their response abilities got better and better under the direction of Safar and medical director Nancy Caroline, and their curriculum was eventually chosen by the Department of Transportation to serve as the model for standardized EMS training.

Astoundingly, Freedom House’s achievements were met with “the city’s unyielding resistance,” and their groundbreaking program was eventually turned over to Pittsburgh’s local government. A crew of lesser trained white men took over in 1975. Meanwhile, the longtime Freedom House paramedics who knew how to intubate in the field were asked to carry the bags.

American Sirens is a stirring, ultimately heartbreaking story in which jaw-dropping medical innovation meets racial prejudice. After finishing Hazzard’s memorable account, readers will never hear an ambulance siren the same way again.

After finishing Kevin Hazzard’s memorable account of America’s first paramedics, readers will never hear an ambulance siren the same way again.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistoryBlack History

Under the Skin

Review by Alden Mudge

Linda Villarosa grew up in a high-achieving Black family in a mostly white suburb of Denver. When she began writing about Black women’s health for Essence in the mid-1980s, her articles were all about self-help and self-improvement, based on the assumption that poverty and poor education were the reasons for detrimental health conditions among Black people.

But then she discovered that well-educated, upper-middle-class Black women were also having underweight babies and higher rates of maternal death than white women. She found herself wondering, “Why is the current Black-white disparity in both maternal and infant mortality widest at the upper levels of education? And what was it about our health-care system that exacerbated this problem?”

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation answers these questions and many more. In one of the most interesting chapters, Villarosa writes about “weathering,” a concept developed by Dr. Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Weathering is the idea that “high-effort coping from fighting against racism leads to chronic stress that can trigger premature aging and poor health outcomes.” It draws the throughline from systemic failure to a harmful bodily response.

Under the Skin audiobook image
Read our starred review of the audiobook for ‘Under the Skin.’

Villarosa, who now writes for The New York Times Magazine, explores many more aspects of American prejudice and health in this book. In a chapter recounting a visit to Appalachia to write about the addiction crisis among poor white people, she suggests that many of these people suffer from the debilitating effects of class discrimination, with similarly negative health repercussions. She examines myths about Black genetics—that Black people are less sensitive to pain than whites, for example—that persist within the medical community to the detriment of Black Americans. She looks at how racism in housing forces many Black families into environmentally hostile neighborhoods. And, based on her reporting, she offers several ideas for improving community health that she believes will change American health care for the better.

Under the Skin is wonderfully written. It’s not an inaccessible academic work or a polemic. Rather, its points are made amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences. The book also serves as a stake in the ground for Villarosa as she powerfully discloses what years of reporting have led her to understand: “The something that is making Black Americans sicker is not race per se, or the lack of money, education, information, and access to health services that can be tied to being Black in America. It is also not genes or something inherently wrong or inferior about the Black body. The something is racism.”

Linda Villarosa’s wonderfully written book makes stunning points about the health risks of racism amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

We Refuse to Forget

Review by Anne Bartlett

When Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a white U.S. military officer who in 1842 was sent on a mission to what is now Oklahoma, wrote in his diary about a smart, skilled Black man who was serving as a language interpreter for a Native Creek chief, he assumed “Negro Tom” was enslaved by the chief.

That Black man’s descendants would beg to differ. According to their family lore, the man more widely known as Cow Tom (because of his livestock holdings) was not enslaved. He later became a Creek Nation chief, honored for negotiating a landmark treaty after the Civil War that established Black Creeks as full tribal citizens. But they lost their status in 1979 because of the same racist perspective that skewed Hitchcock’s vision. Journalist Caleb Gayle’s absorbing We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power explores how this happened, and what contemporary Black Creeks are doing to reclaim their legacy.

Gayle, a Black American of Jamaican descent who was raised in Oklahoma, traces the history of Black Creeks from the early days, when some but not all were enslaved by Native Creeks, through the considerable prosperity of many Black Creeks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cow Tom’s descendants, such as the Perryman and Simmons families, became wealthy pillars of the Oklahoma civic establishment, largely because their Creek status gave them access to capital that other Black Americans did not have.

Gayle blends that story with his own encounters with racism and his personal identity: Is he Jamaican or Black? The Black Creeks’ ongoing legal fight to reclaim Creek heritage has inspired him to reexamine his own perspective, he writes. He is Black and Jamaican and American, just as the Black Creeks are “fully Black and fully Creek.” The United States, he argues passionately, would be a richer, more beautiful society if we recognized and honored those complexities.

In We Refuse to Forget, Caleb Gayle chronicles the history of Black members of the Creek Nation and their descendants’ ongoing fight to reclaim their legacy.
HistoryBlack History

Carry Me Home

Review by bookpagedev

will likely be one of the most widely read and hotly discussed books of the year. The scholarship is meticulous, the story-telling is fascinating, and the actual events portrayed are so monumental they deserve everyone’s careful attention.

Even the most avid civil rights history buff will find revelations in Carry Me Home. Author Diane McWhorter, a journalist who has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post, grew up in Birmingham and was a member of a prominent country club family. The author’s hometown became a crucial battleground in the struggle for equality, and McWhorter looks back almost 30 years later to assess the city’s role.

She offers strong evidence that Martin Luther King was not the sole or even the most active leader of the civil rights movement. McWhorter acknowledges that he was certainly the most articulate, but she also recounts his repeated reluctance to participate in, and his early departure from, some of the events with which he was later credited. Many forgotten and deserving civil rights figures step forward. Fred Shuttlesworth, a firebrand Birmingham preacher, emerges as the common sense, we-have-to-keep-going leader. Activist Jim Bevel mobilizes the 1963 jail-filling children’s march that effectively propels passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Carry Me Home is also the story of the segregationists. We follow the wealthy white DeBardeleben family from their early union-busting days under patriarch Henry, through their support of Hitler’s fascism, and down through the generations to Margaret DeBardeleben Tutwiler, who served in both the Reagan and first Bush administrations, eventually becoming spokesperson for the State Department. We venture inside Klan meetings and through the tangled web of police and FBI collusion in Klan activities.

McWhorter’s original motivation was to determine whether her complex, difficult father had participated in the bombings that earned Birmingham the nickname “Bombingham.” Throughout the narrative, she intersperses snapshots of her personal life. She tells of attending the Birmingham premiere of To Kill a Mockingbird with her classmates, including Mary Badham, who played Scout in the movie. She writes of “the racial guilt we [privileged white girls] shared in rooting for a Negro man.” McWhorter draws on almost 20 years of research to make the reader a participant in both segregationist and movement activities, using actual, almost verbatim recounts by the original participants. Extensive notes give the sources of McWhorter’s narrative and include hundreds of documented interviews. McWhorter also read many thousand historical public and private documents. In 1982, her early research landed her on Governor George Wallace’s “sissybritches” enemies list.

Carry Me Home is filled with small moments of revelation. For example, Alma Powell, the wife of Secretary of State Colin Powell, is the daughter of R. C. Johnson, former principal of Birmingham’s Parker High School. Many of his students participated (without permission) in the children’s marches, while he sat outside his home at night with a shotgun, determined to protect his daughter and new baby granddaughter while his son-in-law earned military recognition in Vietnam.

In Carry Me Home you will learn of the early communist versus fascist struggle beneath the racial battleground; you will find out which entertainers supported the civil rights movement; you will read about the sexual blackmail triangle involving J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Almost every page brings a new insight or shock about an era, a place and a movement that changed our nation forever.

Mary Carol Moran’s Clear Soul: Metaphors and Meditations (Court Street Press).

 

will likely be one of the most widely read and hotly discussed books of the year. The scholarship is meticulous, the story-telling is fascinating, and the actual events portrayed are so monumental they deserve everyone’s careful attention. Even the most avid civil rights history buff will find revelations in Carry Me Home. Author Diane McWhorter, […]
HistoryBlack History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in graphic black and white, King’s story unfolds in a series of photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and the result is a visual retrospective almost as mighty as the man himself.

Photographer Bob Adelman assembled the starkly beautiful, sobering images that comprise this volume, and it’s a detailed compilation that spans more than a decade. With authoritative text written by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, this in-depth look at one of our most revered leaders is organized around the major events in King’s life, from the 1957 prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.

C., to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 1964. But most touching are the simple moments in which the great man seems mortal: King dozing in a chair in an airport; struggling over the composition of a sermon; having a strained moment at home with his wife Coretta. While documenting the life of King, the book also captures the essence of a violent epoch, presenting the triumphs and trials that characterized the civil rights movement and doing so with an intensity that makes the events of the ’50s and ’60s feel strangely immediate. Most importantly, King penetrates the surface of its subject, presenting both the public and the private sides of an icon, a superman of sorts who was, after all, human.

Black history is at the reader’s fingertips with Velma Maia Thomas’ ingenious three-dimensional book Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The second volume in a series chronicling black history and the sequel to Thomas’ best-selling Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children addresses the years following the Civil War, examining the challenges faced by slaves tasting liberty for the first time. With illustrations, photographs and one-of-a-kind interactive elements, this intriguing book requires reader participation. A letter from a Freedmen’s Bureau agent is tucked into an envelope. A miniature version of The Freedmen’s Third Reader a primer studied by illiterate slaves invites perusal. A ticket for the Colorado and Southern Railway, which bore freedmen and freedwomen west in search of better lives, and script money folded into pockets lend an air of authenticity to Thomas’ narrative, making Freedom’s Children something of a fold-out museum, a mini-archive. Thomas’ illuminating text, which follows the lives of former slaves, along with the replicas of documents and artifacts that illustrate the era, make Freedom’s Children both an invaluable work of scholarship and a beautiful gift volume.

A book that delivers the nobility, beauty and dignity of the world’s most mysterious continent, Sensual Africa by photographer Joe Wuerfel captures the essence of a place and its people in pictures that are sheer poetry. Wuerfel visited the Cape Verde Islands, Tanzania and Namibia, where he lived among a nomadic tribe of herdsmen called the Himba, and the results are images tempered by a golden tint, photographs that have the warm haze of yellowed lace, of something aged. Dressed in calfskin loincloths and beaded belts, the bodies of the Himba seem burnished. At times, in this light, Africa itself appears apocalyptic a landscape yellow-white, barren and bone-dry in which zebras look otherworldly, and black baobab trees stand like supplicants beneath an unyielding sky. In his travels through Africa, Wuerfel captured archetypal images of the masculine and the feminine, of youth and age. Young Himba girls flirty yet demure seem to be sharing a secret; Tanzanian women mourn, their heads shaven in honor of the dead; a bare-chested Himba boy runs with a bow and arrow. Foreign yet familiar, the postures of these isolated people transcend language and culture and remind us of what it means to be human. In their gestures, we can see ourselves.

An interview with photographer Peter Beard, who has spent 25 years on the continent, is also included in Sensual Africa. A remarkable visual experience, this is a stunning volume that Africaphiles will love.

Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in […]
HistoryBlack History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The powerful message of King’s “Letter” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is generally regarded as the preeminent piece of writing from the civil rights movement. Forceful, scholarly, persuasive, the letter rallied supporters behind King’s cause and staked his claim to a moral high ground above those who urged a more cautious solution to racial discrimination. Now, for the first time comes a comprehensive examination of King’s famous letter in Blessed Are the Peacemakers. Author and historian S. Jonathan Bass presents a well-researched account of how the letter was created and examines in compelling fashion how it affected the lives of those it touched.

Defying a court injunction against marching, King and his followers were arrested in April 1963 by Bull Connor’s Birmingham police force and confined to the city jail. There, in a dark and isolated cell, King began scribbling in the margins of a newspaper his eloquent response to eight white ministers who had criticized his demonstrations and called for a more gradual approach toward solving the South’s racial dilemma. When King’s letter was made public, many of the ministers to whom it was addressed endured personal agony. Vilified in the national media, they received hate mail and criticism from both sides civil rights advocates in the North, as well as segregationists in their own congregations. In this balanced portrayal, based on personal interviews with many of the participants, Bass describes how the turmoil took its toll two of the pastors left their churches (and the city of Birmingham), soon after, while others remained bitter and puzzled by their inclusion in this troubling piece of the nation’s history. Bass’ book is a worthy addition to the history of the civil rights movement and a vivid reminder of the passions and conflicts it aroused.

The powerful message of King’s “Letter” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is generally regarded as the preeminent piece of writing from the civil rights movement. Forceful, scholarly, persuasive, the letter rallied supporters behind King’s cause and staked his claim to a moral high ground above those who urged a more cautious solution […]
Black History

Remembering an American Hero

Behind the Book by James L. Swanson

Chasing King’s Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassin, can trace its origins back to my childhood. When I was a boy, my mother—an artist—led me to what she called her “morgue”: a tall, floor-to-ceiling closet with a sliding door that concealed several shelves piled high with vintage source material, including newspapers, magazines and picture books documenting the tumultuous events of the 1960s, including the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Mesmerized, I paged through old Life magazines from the spring of 1968. I opened long-folded newspapers, their pages browned and brittle, and read their frightening headlines. I wanted—needed—to learn more. For years, I have collected the books, documents, artifacts and original sources that allowed me to write Chasing King’s Killer.

My book is about more than the assassination. The story opens before the tragedy, in 1950s America, when a 29-year-old minister survived a shocking, near-fatal stabbing in New York City and went on to become the greatest civil rights leader in American history. I want young readers to know Martin Luther King, Jr. in life—first as a boy, then as a young man and finally as a leader on the world stage. Readers accompany King on his amazing 10-year journey to greatness. And then they travel to April 1968, and to King’s fateful trip to Memphis, Tennessee. They also meet a mysterious, lifelong criminal whose 1967 escape from prison sent him on a bizarre, year-long odyssey that climaxed with the murder of Dr. King, a dramatic escape and the biggest manhunt in American history. I set the whole story against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s that had mesmerized me in my youth: the civil rights movement, the FBI’s harassment of King, the Vietnam War, the counterculture and the race to the moon.

To research Chasing King’s Killer, I immersed myself in the documents, photographs, music and popular culture of the 1960s. I studied biographies, memoirs and histories, but also newspapers and magazines to capture the mood of the era. I combed through thousands of images that tell the story of the turbulent time of civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War protests. I discovered a shocking and surprising new letter written by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, illustrating his hatred for King and his desire to ruin him. (Published for the first time in this book, the letter has already made the news!) And I located original examples of the four different types of FBI wanted posters for James Earl Ray. Each one tells a story. All of these sources put me into the mindset of what it was like to live through the tragic events of 1968. My research was every bit as intense as the work I do in the books I write for an adult audience. I researched everything from slavery and the Civil War to the history of the civil rights movement and the pop culture of 1960s America. All told, I used several hundred sources and several thousand photographs. Some photographs will be familiar, others are seldom seen. All are incredibly moving. I think we achieved seamless matching of text and images.

It is exciting to write a book set in the 20th century. One of the frustrations of writing about Abraham Lincoln is that he lived long before the age of film or sound recording. Everyone who once knew him was long dead. In contrast, while researching this book, I was able to meet some of those who actually knew Dr. Martin Luther King. It was a privilege to meet people like Julian Bond, Dorothy Nash and Congressman John Lewis, who wrote the foreword to the book. And unlike Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. can speak to us through films and recordings. We can watch him in action striding across America’s stage, and hear his magnificent and stirring voice.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, haunts us to this day. We miss him still. But the tragedy of 50 years ago can also inspire us. King was a great man who loved America. He was an optimist about the country’s future who believed that one day “we as a people will get to the promised land.” He was also one of the bravest men in American history who lived for years under the near-constant threat of violence and death, even more so than Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy. On the last night of his life, in the most moving speech he ever gave, King said, “Tonight I am not fearing any man,” and that “I want to live a long life.” It was not to be. Half a century later, the all too brief life of Martin Luther King, Jr.—he was only 39 years old when he died—continues to inspire us.

I hope that sharing his story will inspire a new generation of young Americans.

 

Author photo by Lisa Nipp.

Chasing King’s Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassin, can trace its origins back to my childhood. When I was a boy, my mother—an artist—led me to what she called her “morgue”: a tall, floor-to-ceiling closet with a sliding door that concealed several shelves piled high with vintage source material, including newspapers, magazines and picture books documenting the tumultuous events of the 1960s, including the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Mesmerized, I paged through old Life magazines from the spring of 1968. I opened long-folded newspapers, their pages browned and brittle, and read their frightening headlines. I wanted—needed—to learn more. For years, I have collected the books, documents, artifacts and original sources that allowed me to write Chasing King’s Killer.

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