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Books by Walter White
The Fire in the Flint (novel,1924)
/
Flight
(novel,1926) /
Rope
and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929)
How far the Promised Land?
955) /
A
Man Called White (autobiography,1948).
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Books on Lynching &
Racial Violence
The Chronological
History of the Negro in America (1969) /
Strain of
Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (1975)
But There Was
No Peace: The
Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction
(1984) /
Lynch Law
( 1905) /
An American Dilemma
(1944)
The Crucible of Race:
Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation
(1984) /
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
(1989)
Rope and Faggot
( 1929) /
The Tragedy of
Lynching (1933) /
Race Riot in East St,
Louis (1964) /
Urban Racial Violence
(1976)
/
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
(1968) /
Violence
in America (1969) *
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How Far the Promised Land?
By Walter White
Reviewed by J. Patrick O'Connell "Our Constitution is color blind, and
neither know nor tolerates classes among citizens . . ."
wrote Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan as he dissented
in the 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson decision which established
the separate-but-equal theory in race relations. It took
fifty-eight years for the Supreme Court to get around to
repairing the damage. In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren
announced for the Court that Plessy versus Ferguson was
overruled because segregation of children deprived them of
"equal education opportunities."
The author of How Far the Promised Land? is the late
Walter White, Executive Secretary of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People from 1918 until his death,
March 21, 1955. He presents an excellent chronicle recording the
"advances made by Negro Americans during the last fifteen
years. . . ." Wisely he summarizes the situation since the
Plessy decision. In general, the book is a remarkable briefing
of the racial aims, gains and mistakes of the past quarter
century. It includes annotations and index.
Respectable gains are to be reported in all areas of the
fight for equality with the exception of the "sordid story
. . . of Negro housing," says White. He records the
strategies which led to the many legal victories, the switch in
NAACP policy from the fight for equal facilities to an attack on
segregation, and the struggles on the national, state, and local
levels for inclusion in appropriation bills effective
provisions against discrimination.
In a chapter entitled, "Sunday at
Eleven" White remarks: "Not until the pressures of
court decisions and world pressures of opinion on the issue were
exerted . . . did a discernible crack begin to appear in the
wall of church segregation." He compliments Archbishop
Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis, Bishop Vincent Waters of Raleigh
and Archbishop Robert E. Lucey of San Antonio on their recent
policies. But he complains of the "pattern of almost total
segregation" among the "fifty-six million American
protestants." And stating that a majority of Cicero,
Illinois, rioters and Chicago Trumbull Park Homes rioters were
Catholic, he declares that "without effect were efforts to
persuade Samuel Cardinal Stritch to speak out publicly, if only
to remind his communicants of the Pope's encyclicals about race
prejudice and the edict of the Society for the Propagation of
the faith that hate of another person because of color is a
mortal sin."
Regardless of the validity or lack of
validity of the preceding charges, White's doctrinal comments
betray his ignorance of Catholicism. It is unfortunate that Mr.
White's rare ventures into "philosophizing"
persistently expose him to refutation and lessen his
effectiveness.
Source: Books on Trial (14) 1955-1956
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 5
October 2011
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