"Organizing is a fine art. I have worked at it all of my adult life."
Before picking up this book, I had never heard of Louise Thompson Patterson. Whic
"Organizing is a fine art. I have worked at it all of my adult life."
Before picking up this book, I had never heard of Louise Thompson Patterson. Which is a shame, because she was an incredibly fascinating woman who influenced the movers and shakers of the Harlem Renaissance, the American Communist party, and the Civil Rights movement. Louise's story is an unlikely and amazing one, from her eclectic, peripatetic childhood, her tempestuous first marriage, to her struggles with her ability to "pass," her deep friendship with Langston Hughes and her bitter rivalry with Zora Neale Hurston, her leadership that brought together a collaboration with a Jewish organisation to fight for universal rights, her travels behind the Iron Curtain, and her lifelong loyalty to the Communist Party. The book is incredibly thorough and each page, often festooned with casual mentions of dozens of names, reads a bit like a Who's Who of the Harlem Renaissance-- which, unfortunately, would be more entertaining if I actually knew who was who.
The book deftly describes Patterson's life, not only her virtues, but also uncompromisingly explores her flaws. Yet despite learning so much about her life, I am not sure I ever really understood what motivated her, and I absolutely failed to grasp her obstinate faith in the Soviet Union, even to the point of repeatedly switching sides as the Communist policy on the Nazis changed again and again. Perhaps most impressive of all was her ability to survive on a career in political organizing. Patterson was a fascinating complex woman who influenced generation upon generation of civil rights organizers. If you're curious about her life-- and are more well-versed in the history of the time than I am-- this book is well worth a read.
~~I received an advanced reader copy of this book through Netgalley from the publisher, Duke University Press, in exchange for my honest review.~~
I became quite fascinated with what is happening *inside* North Korea while reading A Kim Jong-Il Production for a bookclub. Given that it was a book I became quite fascinated with what is happening *inside* North Korea while reading A Kim Jong-Il Production for a bookclub. Given that it was a book about movies and I generally look up photos and facts while reading, I soon found myself watching bits of Shin Sang-Ok's movies (including Pulgasari) and Kim Jong Il's propaganda films, which led to the Arirang Games, which led to the BBC documentary about child performers, which led to half a dozen documentaries, which led to several nonfiction works and memoirs, including this one.
Like all but one of the books I've read so far, it is written by a westerner and through a very Western perspective, from the allusions to star-crossed lovers to the assumptions about the North Koreans' desires and goals. Perhaps it is my newfound familiarity with the subject, but I was less riveted by the portrayal of the defectors' lives before they fled. The author weaves in a love story and the commonplace into the horrors of the Arduous March, but I never lost the sense of a story told by a parially-uncomprehending outsider.
However, I was fascinated by their lives as defectors. Despite the author's trumpeting of newfound freedoms, she finds herself admitting that most of the defectors regret their choice to some degree. A sobering thought. The same has been true of most of the other defectors I've read about so far, something I still find shocking and difficult to grasp.
According to the fount of knowledge that is Wikipedia, much of this is due to PTSD, culture shock, etc. But by putting "blame" for unhappiness squarely on defectors, I wonder if we miss something important. And that, I think, is what I found so interesting about the book: reading between the lines, there is also a critique of uncaring capitalism and false promises of meritocracy. We have so many blessings--freedom of thought and expression foremost amongst them--but it's still interesting to consider the flaws that the experiences of those from an utterly alien culture cast into sharp relief....more
"The purpose of this book is not to scare you. Instead, like all good books, it is intended to distract you from the screaming baby one aisle over
"The purpose of this book is not to scare you. Instead, like all good books, it is intended to distract you from the screaming baby one aisle over from the airplane where you are currently trapped for the next five hours."
This book was a blast. The history is fun and engaging and crazy. (Did you know that the crazy anti-plague beak doctor costumes kind of worked? I didn't.) And the author's commentary is brash and opinionated and purely entertaining.
The Antonine plague: apparently Galen was a pretentious coward, and despite his tendency to throw Christians to the lions, Marc Antony was a terrific organiser who at least temporarily saved his empire.
The bubonic plague: well apart from the beak doctor costumes, which are awesome, there's this quote:
"Shakespeare's brothers and sisters and his son died of the bubonic plague. Theaters were closed due to the plague during his lifetime. Hans Holbein and Titian painted great works before their deaths from the plague. Would they have preferred to live in a time without the Black Death? Yes. (This is not speculative. I called them all and asked.) But life went on in the face of death. Even the Roman Empire was able to endure for a few hundred years after the Antonine plague. Commodus was able to dither around killing ostriches."
The Dancing plague: a mysterious illness intriguing with any narration and spiced up by the side commentary on Paracelsus's impressive level of sexism.
Smallpox: snarky commentary about how it was feared by men for its mortality and by women for its detriment to appearance, a diatribe about anti-vaxxers, and a "Guns, Germs, and Steel"-type portrayal of the destruction of the Aztecs and Incans.
"The devastation of smallpox in the Americas was not due to a vengeful God or a mysterious man bearing an evil box, but rather to the fact that the Amerindians did not spend as much quality time with their domesticated llamas as Europeans did with their cows. Now maybe you are reading these tales of destruction and thinking, Oh, God, I myself do not have a cattle farm, or I am a proud llama farmer (there's got to be one somewhere), and are therefore convinced that you would die if you contracted smallpox because of your sad immune system--and what if terrorists purposefully incubate smallpox and come in a suicidal pact and spread it to us, and we all die and our civilization perishes and everything is very bad? I am with you, citizen! [...] Fortunately..."
Syphilis: the amazing lengths to which biographers will go to avoid admitting their subject had the disease, plus the "No-Nose Club."
TB: a tirade against the romanticism of the disease.
Cholera: a character assassination of John Snow (personally, I think he sounds a bit spectrum and I'd like to have a conversation with him, if only to know how he came up with the idea of veganism about a century before it was a fad). Points gained for never using the phrase, "You know nothing, John Snow" when describing the cholera detective.
Leprosy: the truly lovely story of Father Damien, the Leper Priest of Molokai.
Typhoid: the rather insane story of Typhoid Mary, the government's attempt to lock her up, and her determination to make ice cream despite it all.
The Spanish Flu: apparently it wasn't actually Spanish in origin, but:
"An all-American plague hailing from Haskell, Kansas. There is still research that attempts to pin the biggest plague in the twentieth century on anyplace else (guesses range from China to Great Britain), probably because "America's bread-basket" is a much nicer way to refer to the Midwest than "the planet's flu-bin."
The most amazing aspect of this particular plague is the incredible lengths the US and UK went to to pretend it wasn't happening, including threatening journalists with jail and/or death.
Encephalitis Lethargica: scary scary scary, with the interesting collateral that it may be the disease responsible for a lot of our endless-sleep fairy tales.
Lobotomies: not actually a plague, unless you'd consider "hysteria" in women to be a plague, but I think Wright just really wanted to talk about Walter Jackson Freeman II and his penis ring (seriously) and the time he put two ice picks in both eye sockets and hammered them in simultaneously... actually probably the most horrifying chapter.
"Feel free to start using Walter Jackson Freeman II as an insult directed towards people you hate. Almost no one will get the reference, but if I am in the room we'll high-five and it will be awesome."
Polio: coming after the lobotomy chapter, a rather heartwarming and life-affirming take on FDR, March of Dimes, Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, and the biggest human trial in history.
HIV/AIDS: the really depressing state of this current epidemic, our return to demonising the victims and treating the disease as a "judgement" and a consequence of "bad behaviour," as with syphilis. My problem with this chapter is that it really talks only about the disease in the US. In the Congo, it affects a truly horrific percentage of the population, and conspiracies that western governments actually created and spread the disease do nothing to help mitigate it.
Even though the book is crazy and funny and lighthearted with in-your-face opinions and irreverent commentary and pop-culture references, I never felt that Wright dehumanized her subjects. Even as she found the crazy comedy in it all, I never felt that she was disrespectful towards the victims or made light of their suffering. Maybe it is because my sense of humour tends towards the morbid, but I don't think comedy is not antithetical to tragedy. Seeing people as rounded and multifaceted and, yes, wacky, enhances their humanity rather than lessening it.
I got to the end of the book and was sad that there was no more. I would have thoroughly enjoyed a chapter on yellow fever or measles or mumps or rubella (the namesakes of the now unfairly-infamous MMR vaccine), or meningitis, one of the more frightening diseases of my childhood, or tetanus, aka lockjaw. I suspect Wright would have enjoyed describing tetanic convulsions. My only major complaint against the book is its extreme Western focus. Where was the Plague of Justinian? The Ebola outbreaks in Africa? Malaria in Spain and Africa? What about dengue fever, particularly in the eighteenth century? "History" doesn't mean "Western history," and I really wish more historians would remember it. But other than my greedy desire for more--or perhaps a sequel--I got a huge kick out of the book. If those quotes sound intriguing and you like the conversational style and snark, grab a copy. It's a wild ride. And now I'm off to go request Wright's other book, It Ended Badly, from the library......more
This wasn't what I'd hoped it would be, but I think the fault was probably my expectations rather than the book itself. I'm not much for philosophy; IThis wasn't what I'd hoped it would be, but I think the fault was probably my expectations rather than the book itself. I'm not much for philosophy; I much prefer history. I was hoping for a thorough, fact-driven analysis of the various totalitarian regimes throughout history, determining key characteristics and similarities. Instead, it's a philosophical treatise on Arendt's view of how the Jews became the scapegoats and how Nazi Germany gained power. Fully one-third of the book is taken up with Arendt's analysis of the rise of antisemitism in Europe. The rest involves grandiose oft-repeated axioms based entirely on Nazi Germany. It talks about the importance of a key central figure and an isolating ideology that includes a sense of exceptionalism, etc, etc, but I can't say I feel much more enlightened now that I've finally (finally!) finished it. And maybe there's a stylistic thing, too-- to me, it felt like her grand assertions were stated over and over, and despite the book's length, there was precious little hard evidence to back them up.
The most intriguing part of the story isn't even told in this book: for all of her stony detachment when talking about antisemitism and Hitler and the rise of the Nazis, Arendt was herself a German Jew who escaped to America. I think I would have found her philosophizing far more powerful if she'd allowed a bit of the human element to seep through.
All in all, while I'm relieved to have finished it, I'm glad I picked it up in the first place. While I found it a dry read, it was still an interesting one, such as her comparison of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and her assertion that autocratic regimes seek to repress opposition while the core goal of totalitarian regimes is domination and control. While it wasn't a great fit for me, I'm sure it's a phenomenal book if you're a fan of philosophy and have an attention span that's a mile longer than mine....more
"We cannot transcend our past without confronting it."
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"How do you give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only known love?" -- Mamie Til
"We cannot transcend our past without confronting it."
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"How do you give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only known love?" -- Mamie Till, mother of Emmett Till
Emmett Till. The boy whose lynching galvanized a global movement. Right now, the media seems to be afire with one of the revelations of this book: that Carolyn Bryant has finally admitted that she lied and that Emmett Till never accosted her. Other than her admission, that's not exactly a surprise. So what is the story of Emmett Till? While on a trip to Mississippi from his home in Chicago, he stopped in at Carolyn Bryant's store and bought candy from her. He may have said something pert to her. He may have put the money directly in her hand--physical contact, a taboo in Mississippi--rather than leaving it on the counter. He wolf whistled when she ran out after him in a fury to get the gun out of her car. JW Milam and Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant's husband and brother-in-law, pulled Emmett Till from his house, beat and whipped him for hours until his face and body were pulp, shot him in the head, tied his body with wire to a 74-pound industrial fan, and threw it into the Tallahatchie River.
Here are the murderers, celebrating as they escape justice: [image]
Before she changed her story to attempted rape to provide an indefensible defense for a lynch mob, Bryant originally said only that Till "insulted" her. When her husband and brother-in-law came to lynch Emmett, they demanded that the family produce the boy who had done the "smart talk." This pretense of the "mystery" of Emmett Till's case is and always has been utterly fatuous. As Carolyn Bryant herself said,
"Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."
The story of Emmett Till is so short, so heartbreaking. But the story of what comes after is both terrible and uplifting, and Timothy Tyson does the story justice. He starts by laying out the political backdrop, a necessary step to explain the meaning of Emmett Till's death to his killers and to those who mourned him. Emmett Till was not a naif to the world of bigotry and racism. Chicago was one of the most racially divided cities in America, and throughout his childhood, guerilla warfare raged over attempted housing desegregation. Dawson and Daley may have given lip service to equality, but they actively maintained segregation because it furthered their political ends. In both Chicago, as in Mississippi, black families kept loaded firearms in close reach, knowing that a lynch mob could burst through the door at any minute.
Mississippi, on the other hand, "outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching." Vagrancy, a.k.a. "Jobless while Black," was treated as a crime, and through the convict leasing programs, black "criminals" were leased out to plantations as slave labor. To get the ballot, prospective black voters were forced to answer questions like, "Do you want your children to go to school with white children?" or "Are you a member or do you support the NAACP?" Citizens' Councils, white supremacy groups formed in the wake of Brown v Board of Education, terrorized African Americans with "personal visits" and by publishing their names, addresses, and phone numbers in newspapers. As with the present practice of doxxing, lynch mobs were never far behind. And it worked. As Tyson notes, "In the seven counties with a population more than 60 percent black, African Americans cast a combined total of two votes in 1954."
Citizens' councils were obsessed with maintaining white supremacy in the face of the federal government's decrees, and for them, as Tyson puts it, "The unsullied Southern white woman became the most important symbol of white male superiority." Emmett's death was, for his murderers, about keeping African-Americans in their place, and fearmongers used the "the old song of the Bruised Southern Lily and the Black Beast Rapist" to whip whites into hysterical furor. As J.W. Milam, one of Till's murderer's, put it:
"As long as I live and can do anything about it, n** are going to stay in their place. N** ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a n** even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him."
Interviews showed later that none of the jurors ever doubted that Milam and Bryant were guilty, but they simply didn't consider the murder of a black boy who insulted a white woman to be a crime.
Emmett's death came after a host of assassinations of various civil rights leaders whose murders were treated as "accidents." Despite the coroner's verdict, the mutilations, the bullet, the fan hog-tied to the body, the local newspapers still termed the death an "odd accident" and Sheriff Shelton claimed that the bullet fragments were "most likely filings from his teeth" and put about the theory that the whole case was a fake concocted by the NAACP. If it hadn't been for Mamie Till, Emmett's death would have been just another lynching. But her strength and determination and courage transformed his death into "a watershed historical moment." As she said,
"I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that ultimately led to a generation of social and legal progress for this country."
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The Blood of Emmett Till is an exceptional work. Not only does it bring humanity to the major players; it also vividly details the political and cultural backdrop and the global movement that Mamie Till and her allies galvanized. The writing and story are so compelling that I found myself racing through it like a thriller, even though I knew the outcome. Tyson captures the pathos, but also the hope, the bravery, the valiant actions of the witnesses who, like Moses Wright, stood in front of a white court and accused a white man. [image] If you want a better understanding of racism and the Civil Rights movement, add The Blood of Emmett Till to your list. I'll leave you with a quote:
"That we blame the murderous pack is not the problem; even the idea that we can blame the black boy is not so much the problem, though it is absurd. The problem is why we blame them: we do so to avoid seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not so much as we pretend. [...] Ask yourself whether America's predicament is really so different now. [...] We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy."
~~I received this ebook through Netgalley from Simon & Schuster in exchange for my honest review. Quotes were taken from an advanced reader copy and while they may not reflect the final phrasing, I believe they speak to the spirit of the book as a whole.~~
Still as riveting as everything else Macintyre writes, but this book is definitely less fun than ZigZag or Double Cross. In fact, it's downright depreStill as riveting as everything else Macintyre writes, but this book is definitely less fun than ZigZag or Double Cross. In fact, it's downright depressing. And how could it be otherwise? At its heart, this book is about a terrible, immeasurably costly betrayal.
While the book describes the life of Kim Philby, the infamous Russian double-agent who actually headed counterintelligence the USSR, it doesn't ever really explain the man himself, possibly because with Philby, it's not really possible to ever determine what was real. Certainly Macintyre seems to have given up on that task. And with the eponymous character an enigmatic villain, we're left to choose protagonists from the men that Philby duped: Nicholas Elliott, James Jesus Angleton, and the other figures of the spy game. And in the end, everything they did, every action they made, is tainted or destroyed by Philby. So many lives were lost by their attempts in the Cold War, from assassinated defectors to murdered nationalists whose identities Philby leaked to his masters. As some later admitted, it would actually have been better if they had done nothing at all, and Philby's betrayal continues to have repercussions to this day. For how can one ever trust anyone if a traitor can hide for so long?
The book has all of Macintyre's sly asides, but not even his rendition can make the story fun, or even simply satisfying. I wanted Philby to be disappointed with the USSR he found. Certainly his wife claimed he tried to slit his wrists, but in that leaked video from the 1980s, he seems utterly self-satisfied and content. And with Philby, how can one ever conclude which attitude was real and which fake? I wanted some sort of final stand, some case in which Elliott or Angleton genuinely got the better of Philby, even if unconsciously, and thereby saved lives. But it really never happened. The book is of course utterly readable and addictive, and if you get lost in the words and the wackiness and can briefly forget the bigger picture, quite fun-- there's something insanely wonderful, for example, about the Russians not believing their double agents' reports about Double Cross because, in their paranoia, they assumed their own agents had been doubled as part of the Double Cross scheme those same agents were telling them about-- but at the back of it all, there is always Philby and the terrible tragedy of it all.
I can think of one good thing that came out of reading it: I can no longer disparage ridiculous spy story plots whose final twist is that the Big Boss is actually a sleeper agent. After all, it already happened (at least) once....more
If you weren't aware that the American War On Coyotes has been going on for longer than Vietnam, had more casualties than the Civil War, and was even If you weren't aware that the American War On Coyotes has been going on for longer than Vietnam, had more casualties than the Civil War, and was even more futile than the War On Drugs, you're in for a surprise.
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I must admit to a certain fondness for coyotes. When I lived in Texas, I loved hearing their howls at dusk, their shapes framed against stark treeless hills and tall houses. I think they're gorgeous creatures, as far removed from the Looney Toons Coyote as a bean sprout from a redwood. While wolves are perhaps dearer to my heart, a coyote loping along a grassy trail is a rare and wonderful sight. So I have to admit that I was utterly shocked to discover that the US has been waging constant war on coyotes for well over a century.
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Flores takes us from the dawn of coyote history and their tumultuous relationship with wolves to their first interactions with people. Coyotes were a semi-divine figure, both trickster and the butt of every joke, to an impressive number of Native American groups. For the Yanas and Navajos, Coyote was even bringer of death. Coyotes, or "coyotl," to give them the original Aztec name, have always been a cosmopolitan species, and they've apparently been living in urban environments for millennia: even the center of Tenochtitlan has an alley named "Coyoacan" ("place of the coyote"). Flores starts with the original myths ("The only thing smarter than coyote is God"), then takes us from Lewis and Clarke's "prairie wolves" to Twain's diatribe of them as "spiritless and cowardly" to the 1920 Scientific American article that proclaimed them as the "ORIGINAL BOLSHEVIK." [image] Flores estimates that we're still killing about half a million coyotes per year--that's about one per minute. Early Americans believed that their new country suffered from a "predator problem," and that wolves-- and to a lesser degree, coyotes-- needed to be extinguished to "save" both farmers and wildlife. (Apparently they never stopped to wonder how the deer managed before their arrival.) Settlers tried everything from lacing carcasses with strychnine powder to introducing sarcoptic mange into the wild canid populations. In the early 1900s, bounties for coyote "scalps" took about ⅔ of Montana's annual budget. Wolf populations collapsed, but coyotes, now viewed as "the archpredator of our time," remained constant. The Division of Biological Survey, created in the late 1800s, used only about 3% of its budget for scientific study. It saw its mission as solving the "predator problem," and it did so with gusto: by the mid-1920s, they had set out over 3.5M poison bait stations across the US. Hoover's "Animal Damage Control Act" earmarked $1M/year of federal funds for the eradication of coyote and other pests. The Biological Survey and Forest Service would eventually carpetbomb massive tracts of land with a series of poisons, including sodium cyanide, thallium sulfate, and Compound 1080--one which is still used today. As one member of the bureau put it during WW2:
"I hope I have three celebrations coming--when we whip Hitler and Hirohito and when we kill that damn coyote."
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So how did coyotes survive? Flores postulates that their resilience is unique: they have fission-fusion societal structures, long childhoods where they can learn caution from their parents, and an impressive ability to increase litter size under environmental pressure from 5.7 pups to as many as 19. As secondary predators to wolves and later dogs, they learned vigilance and flexibility, even in diet: they're omnivorous, primarily eating small creatures such as mice, gophers, grasshoppers, and crickets, but they'll also happily scavenge for berries and plants as well as carrion. Their survivability in cities--sheltered from the aerial gunning of the country--is as high as that of national parks.
Flores takes us through all this and much else besides, from the effects of "The Great Dog War" of the mid-1800s to Disney's pivotal role in changing America's perspective on the coyote to the eventual political embrace of biocentrism to the repercussions of the first recorded death by coyote in 1980s LA. The book is utterly fascinating. My only caveat is that it's difficult to take the book without a grain of salt or two, and I ended up spending a lot of time fact-checking various statements. For example, he credulously repeats the old chestnut about canids only seeing in black and white, and his own political beliefs--in particular, a surprisingly virulent hatred of Reagan-- strongly color his narrative. His portrayal of red wolves, too, seemed to me to be incomplete, containing only the facts that support the narrative he wants. (I do, however, agree with Flores about the insanity of killing and sterilizing coyotes and wolf-coyote hybrids in the effort to preserve the "purity" of the red wolves.)
But what I simply couldn't wrap my head around was the American government's dogged determination to exterminate the coyote. The predator-killing bureau is still around-- since 1997, it's been euphemistically known as the Division of Wildlife Services, and it killed about 4M animals in 2013, a good proportion of them coyotes. These days, they mostly shoot them out of planes, but they've also experimented with sterilization. If you're interested in coyotes and America's fraught relationship with environmentalism and predators, Coyote America is definitely worth a look.
~~I received an advanced reader copy of this book through Netgalley from the publisher, Basic Books, in exchange for my honest review.~~
I don't say this type of thing much, but here goes: I believe that if you live in the US, this is one of those books you should read.
"The issues are n
I don't say this type of thing much, but here goes: I believe that if you live in the US, this is one of those books you should read.
"The issues are not complex. The objective is seizure of power. Until we seize power, not visible power where a black man looks like he's running things--but real, actual power; everything else is bullshit [...] Peace and order are bullshit; they are meaningless without justice." --Leroy Goodwin
I believe we have entered another Civil Rights era, and I have a perhaps naive hope that this one will finally complete the mission that was left incomplete during the time of MLK and Malcom X and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense: full, meaningful equality. Equality that is reflected in housing, in the police force, in education, in integration of society, in self-determination for all.
The Black Panthers believed that such a world could only come through true revolution.
I believe that we must share a common context for what has happened before we can shape what should happen. We must understand the past in order to shape the future.
And here's the problem: mainstream America still has a woefully inaccurate view of the BPP, even though at this point, it's widely acknowledged that the Black Panther Party was the target of an insidious, targeted, widespread, often illegal onslaught by the U.S. government, including a concerted policy of propaganda and isolation and infiltration and misinformation. And yet despite continuing revelations about the extent of COINTELPRO-BLACK-HATE, Operation CHAOS, and all the rest, the Black Panther Party remains an uncomfortable and often misunderstood political movement. Independent of whether you agree with the stances taken by the BPP during its evolution, it's crucial to understand their contexts.
It's easy to laud a nonviolent movement, at least once the movement is over. It's safe. Putting nonviolent figures on a pedestal is comfortable. It's probably why my childhood education repeatedly ignored all other aspects of the Civil Rights movement to focus on MLK. Maybe that's why we remember, say, Harriet Tubman as a kindly figure of the Underground Railroad rather than an active supporter of John Brown's raid and a vocal supporter of war against the South. It's even harder to go back and look at revolutions where violence was a relevant factor, particularly when those revolutions were lost. But this battle will be fought again and again until it is won, and I believe that a crucial aspect is for all Americans to try to understand the history and context of the unrest of today.
Black Against Empire is a fact-driven, unemotional examination of the social history and context of the Black Panther Party. Although a little dry at times, the sense of impartiality is one of the most impressive aspects of the book. It's a massive tome because the BPP has a long and fascinating history.
Often, as the rhetoric on each side mounts, it's difficult to read. But it illuminates on aspect that I, at least, was missing before reading this book: the BPP saw itself as a revolutionary force representing a disenfranchised nation occupied by a hostile invading force. The BPP's Ten Point Program even paraphrased the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, and that all men are created equal that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [...] But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, and their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards of their future security.
This aspect alone goes far in explaining the rationale behind armed defense. As George Mason Murray put it in 1968:
The Black Panther Party recognizes the critical position of black people in the United States. We recognize that we are a colony within the imperialist domains of North America and that it is the historic duty of black people in the United States to bring about the complete, absolute and unconditional end of racism and neocolonialism by smashing, shattering, and destroying the imperialist domains of North America.
“If one would look closely, and check this three year history, he will find that in damn near every rebellion a racist cop was involved in the starting of that rebellion [...] by inflicting brutality or murdering some black person within the confines of one of our black communities. Black people will defend themselves at all costs. They will learn the correct tactics to use in dealing with the racist cops […] The racist military police force occupies our community just like the foreign American troops in Vietnam. But to inform you dog racists controlling this rotten government and for you to let your pig cops know you ain’t just causing a ‘long hot summer,’ you’re causing a Black Revolution."
TL;DR: if you live in the US, and maybe even if you don't, this is a book worth reading....more
Superficially, it's just another pat nineteenth-century abolitionist polemic: a heartwarming--if patronising-- story of wrongs committed by slave-owniSuperficially, it's just another pat nineteenth-century abolitionist polemic: a heartwarming--if patronising-- story of wrongs committed by slave-owning Southerners and brave (white) Northerners fighting for the justice and freedom of their black neighbors. However, the realities that underlie the Parker sisters' kidnapping are far murkier: not only did its notoriety stem almost solely from the death of a white man rather than the kidnappings themselves, but one of the kidnapped girls didn't want to return; she preferred slavery to "freedom" in the North. It's an unsettling story. Maybe that's why it's been so comprehensively forgotten.
The kidnapping and its aftermath are both a product and a perfect exemplar of its time. By 1851, tensions between North and South, and between Pennsylvania and Maryland in particular, were reaching flashpoint. While most Pennsylvanians rejected the term "abolitionist"-- it seems to have picked up the same negative extremist connotations that "feminist" has today-- they also wanted no part in the slavecatching business and enacted laws to keep them out of it as much as possible. And then the new Fugitive Slave Act stripped the state of even this power: under the act, new commissioners decided cases without giving the accused an opportunity to speak on their own behalf. Given that they were paid twice as much to find in favour of the slavecatchers, it's unsurprising that only about 6% of the cases found in favor of the defense. Marylanders celebrated while Pennsylvanians fumed.
Slavecatchers doubled their efforts, abducting fugitive slaves and free blacks with equal ruthlessness. These aggressions brought out the militant side of both free Pennsylvanians and escaped slaves. As Maddox puts it,
"Racial equality had no place in their world, but neither did the kidnapping of "their" black people."
Some, like William Parker, set up vigilante groups that used the "Lynch Code" to combat kidnappers. In 1851, Parker's group fought back against a Maryland slavecatching party, leading to the so-called "Christiana Riot" in which the slaveholder was killed. The slaveholder quickly became a Maryland martyr, while Pennsylvania courts swiftly acquitted most of the "rioters." In Maryland, acquittals in a case where "A white slaveholder had died at the hands of a crowd of black men" was an outrage and a travesty of justice. Into this powder keg stumbled Rachel and Elizabeth Parker, their kidnappers, and Joseph Miller, white "benefactor" of Rachel and the only fatality in the case. Yet again, tensions between Pennsylvania and Maryland exploded:
"Black people had been hustled out of the county by slave catchers and kidnappers for years, and white people had been chasing after them to bring them back, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. But for one of those white people to die--in the process of doing what most in the county considered the right thing--was another matter altogether."
No matter which side of the Mason-Dixon line you were on, it wasn't black lives that mattered.
Not only did the book give me a clearer sense of the seething tensions of the 1850s; it is also dramatic in its own right. Quite a bit of the story is spent on Joseph Miller's mysterious death. With all the twists and startling revelations in court, it felt very much like an episode of Law and Order. However, my major discontent is that it is primarily a story of white Pennsylvanians versus white Marylanders. For most of the story, the Parker sisters are trapped in prison, yet very little pagetime is spent on their experiences or their family's. Although the story's catalyst centers two African-American sisters, they and the other black citizens are stripped of agency and silenced by those around them.
Yet even so, Elizabeth Parker defies our expectations. Reporters of the time
"Tried to create a story which 'confirms a simplified, safe, and reductive version of the antislavery message: liberty is always sweet, even to those who are low, poor, and black.'"
Rachel's story is in some ways the story the North very much wants to promulgate: the kindly white citizens banded together, putting fortunes and life in jeopardy, to protect their African-American neighbors. Rachel, who was later eulogized as (gag) a "trusted, faithful servant, after the manner of the colored Mammy of the South", is given basically no voice in the story but seems to have been acquiescent throughout. However, Elizabeth so preferred her life as a slave in New Orleans that she didn't want to come home to "freedom." Admittedly, her experience was unusual: rather than suffering the terrible exertions and vicious punishments of plantation life, she was purchased by a shopkeeper to sell flowers, milk, and candy. She had a soft bed, good food, the companionship of girls her own age. She was praised for her abilities and enjoyed the novel experiences of dances and the theatre. Was it really a surprise that she hesitated to return to an unloving mother, cold neighbors, and uncertain and onerous employment? Given how little control Elizabeth had over her life in Pennsylvania, her story begs the question of how free the free blacks in the North actually were. In the mid-nineteenth century, not even fiercely abolitionist Quakers believed in real equality. Black families in Pennsylvania tended to be ripped apart, with young children acting as live-in servants in widely-dispersed white homes. As Maddox says, it was a
"Twilight zone between slavery and freedom."
Perhaps Elizabeth's free life was especially bad and her life as a slave especially good, but her story certainly provides a startling contrast with stories such as Solomon Northup's. The story was both educational and entertaining, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in this period or the deep tensions running between North and South. Yet I couldn't help but find it both depressing and ironic that Maddox's narrative sheds so little illumination on the personalities of Rachel and Elizabeth. Even in their own story, their voices are lost in the telling of the tale.
~~I received a copy of this book through Netgalley from the publisher, Temple University Press, in exchange for my honest review. Quotes are taken from an advanced reader copy and while they may not reflect the final phrasing, I believe they speak to the spirit of the narrative as a whole.~~
"When you face prejudice, fight it and fight it hard."
I have to admit that before reading this book, I don't remember ever really hearing about the Ch
"When you face prejudice, fight it and fight it hard."
I have to admit that before reading this book, I don't remember ever really hearing about the Chicago Defender, and yet throughout the last century, The Defender has acted as more than simply a voice for a marginalized group. Robert Abbott created the newspaper with a mission in mind: particularly after the Atlanta riots of 1906, he saw that a new voice was needed to act as "Defender of his race,". For over a century, The Defender has been a staunch combatant against racism and promoter of integration. [image]
The book opens with Frederick Douglass's visit to the World Fair in 1893. Although the Civil War was over, prejudice, racism, and inequality was just moving into high gear. As he put it:
"There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own constitution."
Inspired by Douglass, Abbott set out to create a newspaper that could continue to advocate such honesty. It was a rocky beginning: Abbott started by running the newspaper out of his boardinghouse, subsisting off limited community support rather than advertising, and even being forced to rely on money from Teenan Jones, an infamous gangster. Despite its message of racial pride, it routinely carried advertising for skin lighteners and hair straighteners. Without full-time journalists on the payroll, Abbott and his crew started by pulling stories out of other papers and rewriting them for their audience. The Defender also faced an impressive level of hostility: Southern "gentry" and law enforcement ridiculed the paper and sent taunting telegrams suggesting Defenders come and report on lynchings that had yet to happen. Abbott was repeatedly investigated by the FBI and related organizations, and various Southern states even made attempts to extradite him for libel charges. [image]
In the early twentieth century, Chicago was a comparative bastion of liberty and freedom: while lynchings and attacks certainly happened, police usually attempted to stop them instead of joining in, and although Chicago's race riot of 1919 was one of the bloodiest seen, it still indicated that Blacks in Chicago could fight back. The Defender sought keep a spotlight on racist violence, reporting continuously and vividly on lynchings and other atrocities of Jim Crow. Although a firm supporter of integration, the Defender wasn't always conciliatory. Often fiercely emotional and moralistic, it occasionally stooped to publishing clearly apocryphal stories or using aggressive rhetoric, such as the time it insisted that anyone who failed to vote against Hanrahan was "a traitor to the black cause". But perhaps a strident voice is necessary to actuate social change. As a Defender editorial put it:
"We are a watchdog and to many bigots in Chicago, an irritation, a Socratic gadfly, a pain in the neck or even a 'black hysterical voice,' but we proudly accept this role at this critical juncture in American history and will jealously cling to it until we can become 'just another daily newspaper.'"
[image]
The Defender and its editors played significant roles in actually influencing and guiding public policy. The newspaper was a critical catalyst for the Great Migration. It lobbied tirelessly--and eventually successfully--for an integrated military. It was a Defender reporter who was beaten during the Little Rock Nine's entrance into the school. As the paper gained greater influence, Abbott and Sengstacke directly interacted with more and more powerful political figures, including many presidents-- even if most refused to be photographed with a black man. A true believer in unity, the Defender was internally integrated, hiring white reporters throughout its history. [image]
The story of the Defender is fascinating, and Michaeli's writing style is vivid and moving. My biggest complaint is a certain lack of scholarly disinterest, which makes sense, given that Michaeli worked at the Defender and met many of the people whose lives he documents. Throughout, Michaeli's protagonists are described ias "brilliant,""charismatic," etc, often without supporting evidence, and he tends to ignore flaws intrinsic to rounded portraits. For example, he simplifies the complex relationship between King and Jesse Jackson, lauding Jackson as King's successor and later portraying him as an august "elder statesman".He is also uniformly negative towards enemies of the Defender such as Marcus Garvey. Throughout, figures such as Abbott and Sengstacke are treated almost hagiographically. For example, when Sengestacke fires every reporter on the paper who won't tow his pro-Truman line, Michaeli phrases it as a dismissal of those who crossed "Sengstacke's red line of explicit political work." I found it an amusing description, given that under Sengstacke's direction, the Defender vigorously endorsed Truman, spearheaded a huge fundraising effort for him, and actually characterized the election as "A crusade, not a political campaign." Michaeli is also clearly a fan of Obama and describes even his questionable actions in glowing terms. For example, when describing how Obama snakes the nomination out from under Palmer by challenging Palmer's petition to get proof that each signer had the right to vote, Michaeli characterizes him--unironically-- as being "gracious in victory." [image]
There is so much to this book that I can't even begin to describe it all. The book provides a vivid, visceral history of the last century, It's the minutiae that highlights the insidiousness of racism and the courage of those who fought it; Jack Johnson's world championship, the century-old conflict over segregated real estate, Brown versus the Board of Education, the Freedom Riders, King's efforts in Chicago and his slow fade during the rise of Black Power, Clinton's reaction to Dantrell Davis... the Defender reported it all. More than that: it was instrumental in all of it. As one reporter said of Robert Abbott:
"When he sought to raise the black man to the level of the white man, he was branded a radical. The radical of today is the conservative of tomorrow and other martyrs take up the work through other nights."
And there is plenty of work left to be done. If you're interested in learning more about Chicago, or reading twentieth century history through a distinctive lens, The Defender is absolutely worth a read. [image]
~~I received an advanced reader copy of this book through Netgalley from the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in exchange for my honest review. Quotes are taken from an advanced reader copy; typos are all mine.~~...more
If you've interacted with me much, you'll know by now that I absolutely love heists. So how could I resist a book called "Heist"?
The opening is promisIf you've interacted with me much, you'll know by now that I absolutely love heists. So how could I resist a book called "Heist"?
The opening is promising enough. We are introduced to the aforementioned "oddball crew," which consists of a thief, a grifter, a hitter, a brain, and... Oh, wait. That's Leverage. [image] As it turns out, Heist isn't so much about the heist as it is about the aftermath. The heist itself is dirt simple: an employee goes in at night, pulls out the money, hands it off to his conspirators, and heads off to Mexico. What happens next involves a hitman, a cigar store Indian, a lot of M&Ms, and a Velvet Elvis. The book is not so much about the heist as it is about the insane and idiotic things the conspirators tried to do with the money. To take only one example, one of the women goes to a bank, asks about the max she can deposit without having it reported to the federal government, and then adds cheerfully to the teller, "Don't worry, it's not drug money."
While it is funny, I also found it distasteful, and it took me a while to pin down why. For one thing, I don't generally like reading recent histories; I like my nonfiction to involve people who are not only dead but whose bones are basically dust at this point. Second, this story and the way it is presented is simply a reinforcement of all the negative stereotypes people have of "hillbillies." The theft itself appears to have had devastating effects on the community, and not only because of the families with members in prison. Because of the theft and its aftermath, the whole area became a laughingstock for the rest of the US. It bothers me that the story extracted from the theft is one of hollow mockery.
Alright, all that over, I'm going back to watching Leverage, where the heists are clever, the humour is more upbeat, and the endings are happy....more
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