A sobering, frightening account of what happens when that foul beast, racism, breaks its fragile leash. (16 pp. b&w...
A chilling re-creation of the worst instance of racial violence in US history—the 1921 destruction by rampaging whites of a black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Journalist Madigan (See No Evil, not reviewed) believes the Tulsa riot deserves a more prominent place in the ugly history of racial conflict—and his diligent research and graceful writing will certainly help. He begins on June 1, 1921, with the memories of a little girl. Her mother woke her with a scream: “The white people are killing the colored folks!” And so they were. Before the day ended, the white mob burned 35 square blocks of Greenwood (virtually the entire community), murdered as many as 300 blacks (many did not escape their flaming homes), arrested hundreds more, and drove into the hills thousands of black citizens whose slow procession northward would in the 20th century become an all-too-common image. Two planes flew overhead, firing down into the black crowds. Many had fought back with every weapon at their disposal (dozens of whites died by gunshot, too), but they were outnumbered and out-gunned by whites who broke into hardware stores to steal firearms and ammunition. What had happened? Greenwood was a “model” community—a peaceful, prosperous (though entirely segregated) neighborhood whose residents for the most part worked for white employers. The author uses multiple points of view to capture the dimensions of the tragedy. It began when a young white woman, an elevator operator, falsely accused a young black man of assaulting her. Many whites resolved to lynch the man; many blacks resolved to prevent the lynching. Both groups were armed, and when they clashed outside the courthouse, the wheels of tragedy were set in motion. Madigan follows his riveting account of the violence with the sordid story of denial and cover-up that ensued.
A sobering, frightening account of what happens when that foul beast, racism, breaks its fragile leash. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27283-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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