A fresh look at the fight for human rights reveals the unsung leadership of Black women.
Eyes on the prize.
Though there is a rich bibliography about Black women in the United States, Blain asserts that this is the first overview profiling those engaged in the struggle for human rights, an area long associated with white men and institutions. A professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University, Blain argues that long before the term “human rights” became part of the public discourse, Black women were already advocating that all people should be granted rights and protection based on their humanity. In this rigorously documented history, the author illustrates how Black women from many walks of life made the link between racial violence at home and genocide and apartheid abroad, identifying the common roots of oppression in slavery and colonialism. Many names are well known, but Blain puts their work in a new context. Journalist Ida B. Wells campaigned vigorously against lynching as a crime against humanity not only in the United States but in Europe. Singer Lena Horne wrote a weekly column in the People’s Voice, condemning racism in the U.S. and supporting anti-colonial struggles and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The mothers of the Scottsboro Boys advocated for justice in the 1930s, as did the mother of Amadou Diallo seven decades later, “politicizing their roles as mothers, daughters, and sisters to call attention to the devaluation of Black lives.” Fannie Lou Hamer said, “I’ve passed equal rights and I’m fighting for human rights.” Less-known figures include Maria Stewart, a former indentured servant who wrote a pamphlet, published by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, advocating equality for all. Aretha B. McKinley, at the time the only Black female lobbyist on Capitol Hill, organized an “avalanche” of letters in 1960 to prove to skeptical lawmakers that Blacks supported civil rights legislation. And Mary Church Terrell, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents, traveled to Zurich in 1919 for the International Congress of Women. Many of these women merit a book of their own.
A fresh look at the fight for human rights reveals the unsung leadership of Black women.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780393882292
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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