A welcome resurrection of a forgotten episode in the sorrowful history of segregation.
Searching history of an event long hidden in the annals of the Civil Rights Movement.
Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham: Alabama’s cities have long been commemorated as flashpoints in the Black struggle for equality. Tuscaloosa, writes University of Alabama professor Giggie, should be mentioned in the same breath as “an important battleground in the escalating conflict between Black activists and white segregationists in the South during the 1960s.” There, on June 9, 1964, a combined force of city police and KKK members attacked Black protestors, sending almost 100 to jail and badly injuring dozens more. One of the instigators was Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, who drew on a force of an estimated 10,000 members and sympathizers in Alabama alone. Local police were squarely on the side of the segregationists, backed by the infamous Bull Connor in Birmingham. That the violent suppression in Tuscaloosa isn’t better known, writes Giggie, can be attributed to many factors. Other events crowded it off the front page, most survivors and onlookers kept silent out of fear, and “none of the white people responsible for the violence were compelled to explain themselves and be held accountable.” Justice slowly arced all the same: One KKK attack met with armed response from the Black community; a confrontation with actor Jack Palance (assumed to be Black due to his deeply tanned appearance) led to negative publicity for the city; Shelton lost his job; the chief of police eventually turned on the KKK; and, in time, the University of Alabama was desegregated, along with other city and state institutions. For all that, notes the author, the current right-wing move to suppress the history of civil rights means that it will be all the more difficult for the lessons of Tuscaloosa to be aired.
A welcome resurrection of a forgotten episode in the sorrowful history of segregation.Pub Date: June 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780197766668
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Questlove’s instincts as a superfan and artist take this history beyond the hype to something very special.
A memorable, masterful history of the first 50 years of an indelible American art form.
While historians often cast themselves as omniscient in their works, delivering facts and stories as important without acknowledging the impact of their own experiences on the narrative process, Questlove—drummer, DJ, music historian, and author of Mo’ Meta Blues, Creative Quest, and Music Is History—is forthcoming about the fact that he experienced music differently as he grew older. “I wasn’t sitting down for five hours listening to them over and over and over again, trying to unpack every nuance from every corner,” he writes, recalling his feelings decades into his relationship with the genre. “But I was—I am—a DJ, which meant that I had a professional interest in excavating the songs that worked.” The author’s observations spanning the entirety of hip-hop’s history are consistently illuminating—e.g., connecting its shift in five-year increments to the dominant drug of the period, from crack to sizzurp to opioids. However, it’s his personal connection to certain eras that make his latest book stand out. Questlove considers the late 1980s and early ’90s as the “golden age of hip-hop, when innovative MCs and innovative DJs seemed to spring up every few months, and classic albums regularly sprouted on the vine.” That era—filled with masterpieces from Public Enemy, De La Soul, and N.W.A.—is universally revered, but Questlove also recognizes that it coincides with the years between high school and when he officially became an artist—a time when he was immersed in finding inspiration and understanding the construction of hip-hop. While the author’s knowledge of hip-hop is as deep as any musicologist, it’s his passion for certain artists and songs that sets him apart.
Questlove’s instincts as a superfan and artist take this history beyond the hype to something very special.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780374614072
Page Count: 352
Publisher: AUWA/MCD
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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