The disturbing and absorbing story of Black America’s enduring battle for freedom of mobility.
From stagecoaches to iron horses to Cadillacs to the unfriendly skies, Black people in the U.S. have never been truly free to traverse the open road. In this unique contribution to the literature of Black American history, Bay, a professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, successfully resurrects the story of “a sustained fight for mobility that falls largely outside the organizational history of the civil rights movement.” In doing so, the author effectively demonstrates “Black mobility as an enduring focal point of struggles over equality and difference.” Bay shows how Black travelers have faced a mercurial nationwide patchwork of segregationist laws and practices that have deprived them of accommodation and amenities, dignity, and safety and security. In the early 1800s, young Black boys rode on steamship decks, barely fed and exposed to the elements. During the Jim Crow era, Black passengers, forced to ride in flimsy, old, dangerous railroad cars, were routinely crushed and burned in collisions. As cars entered the mainstream, new Black drivers were denied access to fuel, bathrooms, and hotels, forced to navigate an unspoken White right of way. More than a century after the first Model T hit the road, driving while Black is still fraught. In a fascinating, sometimes infuriating narrative spun with engaging facts, stunning firsthand accounts from generations of Black travelers, and potent imagery, Bay elevates the importance of the Black right to mobility in the struggle for civil rights. Not simply a record of oppression, the book also illuminates the determined spirit that underpins the fight for Black equality across the country, exploring the methods that Black people have used to subvert a racist system that persists today.
A book that shocks, shames, and enlightens with critical scholarship on the Black pursuit of genuine liberty.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-674-97996-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Categories: AFRICAN AMERICAN | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | ETHNICITY & RACE
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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