An uncompromising history of Black education in America.
How Black identity has been shaped by schools and ideologies of control.
“The struggle over the Black mind has been a defining feature of each generation’s fight,” writes Brown, a sociologist. Like a flag planted on alien soil, her book stakes a claim on Black education as central to American history. The book shows how Black Americans fit, or did not fit, into institutions of instruction over the past two centuries. It reveals how the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education, framed largely in the wake of Booker T. Washington’s example, was education not by Black Americans but for them. It tells the story of the founding and the flourishing of historically Black colleges and universities. Brown writes a personal history of coming to terms with what it means to be educated and Black in America. She sounds a call for activism in response to governmental scaling back of diversity initiatives and the recognition of African American achievement. Familiar names from Black history take on new urgency here: W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke (the first Black Rhodes scholar), Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Thomas Jesse Jones. In its chronicles of these and many other figures, and in its clear outlining of the legal and social watersheds in American history (from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education), the book offers an effective and forceful guide charting Black history. Written in a vivid vernacular by a gifted teacher, it speaks for a generation of students who are asking “questions that demand justice and recognition: What were the contributions of our ancestors? What does true repair look like in this moment? They are pushing for access, representation, and a profound sense of belonging. And they’re not waiting around—they’re demanding change now.”
An uncompromising history of Black education in America.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781538768433
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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