A brilliant and thought-provoking study of Black literacy in America.
Chronicling the history of Black reading and writing.
This important history argues that the teaching of reading to people of African ancestry, from the antebellum period onward, has been perceived as a great threat to entrenched political and social power. It tells the story of men and women who risked their lives to learn—to read and write. In the process, they sought to educate their peers to make them participants in American democracy. Figures such as Denmark Vesey, Daniel Payne, Susie King Taylor, and Charlotte Forten come alive in the author’s vivid prose. This book shows them to be as important in the history of Black freedom as more familiar writers such as Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass. Douglass famously wrote that if you teach a Black man “how to read, there will be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, builds on Douglass’ observation to show that the fight for freedom is the fight for literacy—whether that fight went on in the plantations of the 1830s, the schoolrooms of the Reconstruction era, or the courts of the 20th century. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education takes on a new meaning in the context of the fight for Black people to go to school, not just to be socially integrated but to be as literate and powerful as all Americans. The author concludes: “Though it is a functional skill, literacy is more than that. Enslaved and freed people’s literacy journeys are journeys of becoming—becoming whatever it was they hoped and dreamed to be and had the capacity to be. They are stories of people taking full ownership of their personal destiny.” In our own time, when voters are again subjected to tests of reading and identity, when books are being banned, and when access to truth is challenged by disinformation, the stories of the brave men and women in this book stand out as moral lessons for the modern reader.
A brilliant and thought-provoking study of Black literacy in America.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780300272826
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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