Blues, Biography, Slavery, and Politics

This season, independent publishers are giving much deserved attention to African American leaders, blues music, political issues, and little-known aspects of slavery. Here we present a collection of reviews of some of the most intriguing of these books as Black History Month approaches.

Those about Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W.E.B. Du Bois
by Amy Bass
University of Minnesota Press
Hardcover $24.95 (201pp)
978-0-8166-4495-7

A descendant of the “first slaves to be freed via an American court,” W.E.B. Du Bois spent an idyllic childhood in Great Barrington, Vermont, before earning the first Harvard doctorate ever conferred on an African American, co-founding the NAACP, and writing “over twenty books and several hundred articles.” However, at age ninety-three, he joined the American Communist Party, and many people felt that this act rendered the legacy of his lifetime meaningless. Luckily, realtor Walter Wilson felt otherwise. In 1967, Wilson purchased the land on which Du Bois’ childhood home once stood and inspired scores of committed volunteers to undertake the enormous project of creating a Du Bois memorial on the site. Despite achieving National Historical Landmark status in 1976, however, the fate of the park remained uncertain until well into the 1990s because of the continued opposition of local residents. An excellent example of local history on a national canvas, this volume charts over three decades of conflict about the legacy of the “most famous native son” ever to hale from the Berkshires. (Elizabeth Breau)

The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman:Volume 1: My People Need Me, June 1918-March 1936
Walter Earl Fluker, editor
University of South Carolina Press
Hardcover $59.95 (464pp)
978-1-57003-804-4

An unprecedented account of one of the principal architects of the nonviolent civil rights movement, the four-volume series The Papers of Howard Thurman offers the most complete portrayal of the religious leader and activist to date. The well-curated first volume exposes the decades of Thurman’s thinking that preceded his first publication in 1922. Also described in this volume is Thurman’s involvement as chairman of the Negro Delegation to India, Burma, and Ceylon in 1935 and 1936, during which he met Ghandi.

The series is part of the Howard Thurman Papers Project, an initiative that will also produce the largest database of Thurman’s corpus, containing more than 58,000 documents. The four-volume series comprises about nine percent of what is in the database, focusing on Thurman’s lesser-known works—articles that were obscurely published and personal correspondences not intended for the public eye. These selections are arranged chronologically and contextualized with editorial statements. Senior Editor Walter Earl Fluker intends that the series will “challenge its readers to remember the story of Howard Thurman in the context of larger historical narratives which gave birth to the modern civil rights movement and impacted modern religious liberalism.” The collection reveals Thurman’s intellectual development and his milieu. It’s consequential reading. (Janelle Adsit)

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues
by William Ferris
University of North Carolina Press
Hardcover $35.00 (302pp)
978-0-8078-3325-4

Renowned folklorist, Mississippi native, and author of Blues from the Delta, William Ferris continues his exploration of the musical roots of the blues in this raw and beautiful collection of interviews with African Americans in the Mississippi Delta. Ferris profiles Louis Dotson, who made his own one-strand guitar out of a broom wire, a nail, and a brick; Fannie Bell Chapman, a charismatic faith healer who integrated music into her handiwork; the black inmates of Parchman Penitentiary, who chopped wood to the rhythm of work chants; and legendary blues patriarch B. B. King. The interviews conducted in homes and neighborhoods during the 1960s and ’70s reveal the racism of the time and the power of music to overcome adversity, find spiritualism, and celebrate life.

Adding his own memories about the interviews, striking black-and-white photographs, a CD with songs from the interviewees, and a DVD with more sights, songs, and stories, Ferris, a history professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, delivers a complete package that defines the blues to fans and scholars alike. (Angela Leeper)

The Ghosts of Harlem: Sessions with Jazz Legends
by Hank O’Neal
Vanderbilt University Press
Hardcover $75.00 (488pp)
978-0-8265-1627-5

The ground-breaking work for this huge undertaking was carried out between 1985 and 2007, when the author interviewed forty-two jazz legends who played in Harlem during its heyday and decline. The photographs he took at that time, using a large-format view camera, appear in the book, along with many others from the archives of Chiaroscuro Records, of which he is president.

Among the legends he interviewed are Andy Kirk, Doc Cheatham, Benny Carter, Jonah Jones, Eddie Barefield, Milt Hinton, Buck Clayton, Erskine Hawkins, Buddy Tate, Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Williams, Clark Terry, and Jimmy Hamilton.

Researchers and probably many others will want to know that the index is crowded with references to other jazz musicians whose names inevitably come up in connection with the forty-two headliners whose bios fill most of the book.

A Harlem native, Congressman Charles B. Rangel, has provided a foreword in which he writes knowledgeably and entertain-ingly about some of his own favorite spots and musicians he saw and heard. He might have been given an additional column or two without detracting from the overall value of the book.

O’Neal and Chiaroscuro Records have also produced a CD, tucked inside the back cover, which features recordings of seventeen of the Ghosts playing near the ends of their careers.

Most of the superlatives that reviewers are warned to use sparingly, if at all, come inevitably to mind as one samples the rich content of this outstanding compilation. (Harold V. Cordry)

Long is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP
Kevern Verney and Lee Sartain, editors
University of Arkansas Press
Hardcover $70.00 (342pp)
978-1-55728-908-7
Softcover $29.95 (342pp)
978-1-55728-909-4

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903.

The success that has occurred in the United States since 1903 in solving the “problem of the color-line” is, in large measure, due to the hard work and perseverance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Long Is the Way and Hard, published to honor the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP, is a collection of essays by noted historians, each discussing an aspect of the organization’s structure, programs, and identity.

Essays in the first section of the book deal with several national issues affecting the NAACP, including the often stressful rela-tionship between NAACP and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the more radical students of CORE and SNCC during the 1960s. One essayist portrays the NAACP as an organization pursuing gradual change through litigation and legislation which, during the 1960s, was propelled by events and charismatic leaders into the maelstrom of direct confrontational politics. Occasionally these essays make for difficult reading because the writers assume their readers have greater knowledge of the subject matter than may be the case.

The second section consists of essays regarding the work of the NAACP at the local and state levels. The discussion of the NAACP’s successful efforts in 1944 to end the all-white Texas primary is remarkable in its implications for what transpired later in our politics.

Long Is the Way and Hard furthers the definition of “the strange meaning of being black” in America. It is a doorway into an essential room in the mansion that is the American story. The book could well be an introductory text for students of twentieth-century America. (John Michael Senger)

Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies
Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, editors
The Feminist Press
Hardcover $22.95 (400pp)
978-1-55861-611-0

This rich collection of essays commemorates All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some Of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, first published in 1982, during a time when black women’s issues, literature, and thought, were largely ignored by the Women’s Studies and African American Studies programs that had been in place for nearly twenty years on college and university campuses. Still Brave celebrates the spirit of the collection, but it also asks: What does Black Women’s Studies look like in the twenty-first century? The collection contains more than twenty-five pieces; seminal articles by Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde ap-pear alongside those written more recently by scholars such as Farah Jasmine Griffin, Violet Eudine Barriteau, and Cathy J. Cohen. Divided into five sections, whose names come from songs, the essays raise questions about naming, health, sexuality, class, racism, and politics. An added bonus comes from the essays that explore how men take up feminist issues. Of the selected pieces, the editors, all of whom are scholars of African American Studies, say, “We believe that each selection is a classic, a benchmark, a turning point, or a moment of startling clarity in Black Women’s Studies.” Still Brave is among the most important collections of writings to date. (KaaVonia Hinton)

The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing it is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time
by Rod Paige and Elaine Witty
AMACOM
Softcover $22.00 (208pp)
978-0-8144-1519-1

An incontrovertible and present-day fact: all statistical measurements (SAT/ACT tests, high school dropout rates, National Teacher Examinations) show African American students to perform significantly lower on assessments of learnedness than their white, Asian, and Hispanic peers. Regardless of how skewed some standardized measures of assessment are from the outset, a willingness to acknowledge this achievement gap (which, if narrowed, could result in, among innumerable other social gains, a quantum leap in earnings by African Americans, according to the authors’ extensive data analysis), is the keystone to progress. Corollary necessities include quality education, positive reinforcement from home, and government-supported charter schools and programs such as Head Start and No Child Left Behind. Providing a wealth of level-headed insights on the phenomena levied as responsible for the achievement gap (the unconscionable laws that prohibited literacy among slaves followed by educational segregation; the fear that scholastic success is “acting white”; and the ability of internalized low expectations to paralyze academic performance), The Black–White
Achievement Gap does not enter into the fray of this contentious debate. Instead, it sounds a clarion call to today’s leaders of all races to put the nation’s children before party politics and confront head-on this towering obstacle to social justice, rightly considered, in light of the devastating consequences of academic underachievement, “the greatest civil rights issue of our time.” (Virginia Konchan)

True Places: A Lowcountry Preacher, His Church, and His People
by Stanley F. Lanzano
University of South Carolina Press
Hardcover $39.95 (118pp)
978-1-57003-851-8

In 1994, while vacationing on Pawleys Island in South Carolina, New Yorker Stanley Lanzano became curious about his historic hotel’s “silent black staff” who seldom smiled while they worked, but who put on a happy and lively gospel show for the guests. After some inquiries, Lanzano was invited to the church of Reverend Floyd Knowlin. He was welcomed warmly by the congregation and especially by the reverend. He was smitten with the congregation and returned to Georgetown six times a year for the next eleven years to photograph the church, its members, and its events — both happy and heartbreaking.

Over the years, Lanzano attended the Lighthouse of Jesus Christ Church’s all-day Sunday services, the shorter Wednesday noon services, and revivals held in backwoods churches located in cotton fields, at the ends of unpaved roads, and next to “unimaginably beautiful swamps.”

He includes photos of the churches he attended, baptisms, funerals, and most importantly, the friends he made, including sisters Zelma and Velma Albertson who raised their own families and other needy children in the small house where they were born.

In these images, members of the congregation testify, sing, and pray, presenting an image of a close-knit community that is rich in friendship and faith. (Whitney Hallberg)

’Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America
by Frances Smith Foster
Oxford University Press
Hardcover $21.95 (224pp)
978-0-19-532852-3

“’Til death or distance do us part” might very well be the dictum of traditional marriages today, but many believe the vow originated with marriages between enslaved people, people believed to have married without permanence in mind. Unable to own them-selves or to control when or if they would be sold, it would seem impossible for them to promise much more. However, this logic ignores complex matters of the heart. When distance threatened to ruin a marriage between enslaved people, the love they shared still existed, as evidenced in the newspaper advertisements inquiring about love ones. Foster, the chair of the department of English at Emory University and author of numerous books about African American literature and culture, including Teaching with the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, argues that this view, along with the idea that enslaved couples did not choose their spouses, is erroneous and misleading. She proves her thesis by turning to overlooked sources: enslaved people. In an effort to allow enslaved people to speak for themselves about who and how they loved, the author uses narratives, letters, newspapers, and other sources written for and by blacks. This book is an important addition to African American studies collections.

Cotton and Race in the Making of America sounds like a ponderous textbook, full of charts and windy academic verbiage. Nothing could be further from the truth. For many people, Gene Dattel’s study will be an eye-opener guaranteed to change their idea of the American experience.

As the title suggests, Dattel chronicles the crucial role cotton had in the growth of America, demonstrating in a fair, dispas-sionate way how many of our forebears worshipped almighty profits as much as almighty God. Slowly but inexorably, the story becomes a damning indictment of racism, from eighteenth-century slavery to twentieth-century segregation.

Statistics don’t lie, but they can shock. In 1790, the Land of the Free had approximately 700,000 slaves. By 1860, there were four million — out of a total population of 31 million. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the slaves were involved in cotton production.

The slaves were mainly in the South, of course, but it is part of our national myth that the good people of the North went to war against those defiant Southerners in order to free the slaves. Many of those good people, including some abolitionists, wanted to unshackle black people in order to ship them back to Africa or to colonies.

“We forget that anti-slavery for the most part also meant anti-black,” Dattel writes. “White Americans have decoupled the hor-rors of slavery from the condition of free blacks.”

The author grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta and worked for years in the financial industry. In tracing the growth of King Cotton and its economic influence, not just in the US but overseas, he has compiled a narrative that is both an impressive work of history and an important sociological masterwork. (Dick Cady)

Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power
by Gene Dattel
Ivan R. Dee
Hardcover $28.95 (416pp)
978-1-56663-747-3

When Langston Hughes described slavery as the “rock on which Jamestown stubbed its toe,” he might have had this volume about slavery’s role in the democratic experiment in mind. From the Revolutionary War to the 1830s, it examines white attitudes toward slavery from state to state. This geographical focus clarifies economic motivations for slavery’s continuance and their ef-fect on many well-intentioned but failed attempts to phase it out. As staple crop agriculture waxed and waned from “upper South” states such as Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia to the “lower South” states of Mississippi and Louisiana, slaveholders’ enmeshment in slavery led to endless legislative debates, moral wrangles, and public controversies. Efforts to justify legalized human ownership so its practitioners could remain financially solvent while also salving their consciences were both aided and countered by Chris-tian evangelicals who sought to both save souls and render slaves submissive to their fate. Fear of slave rebellion was fueled by white guilt, black demographic majorities, and the successful revolt in Haiti. Goaded by international opinion, slave states devel-oped the paternalistic fiction of “contented darkies” simultaneously with the race-based inferiority arguments that have only re-cently begun to disappear from American discourse. (Elizabeth Breau)

Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South
by Lacy K. Ford
Oxford University Press
Hardcover $34.95 (673pp)
978-0-19-511809-4

“African contributions to the global table began with the journeys of several crops across time and space.” Mothers facing the Middle Passage tucked rice seeds into their children’s hair; it became one of the most lucrative plantation staple crops of colonial America and enabled maroons to survive in the swamps and mountains where they hid. Slavers purchased African foods for their trans-Atlantic voyages: manioc, plantains, sorghum, millet, yams, black-eyed peas, and African livestock all enabled African sur-vival and affected “New World” diets, both creating white wealth and aiding the success of the small garden plots slaves kept to enhance their scanty diets. This well-documented history provides new insight into how Africans survived multiple life-threatening challenges, staved off dietary insufficiencies, and added to the colonial era’s medicinal knowledge. Carney and Rosomoff also document how African and American foods merged to create culinary traditions, such as the rice-based dishes callalou and gumbo. This account of the “botanical gardens of the dispossessed” draws on shipping records, diaries, account books, and other primary sources. Elizabeth Breau

The paradox of American history; the great experiment gone awry: A people seeking a new land with new freedoms establish a home for themselves and within decades embark on a campaign of genocide and institute a brutal system of slavery.

Using Ten Hills Farm, a prime parcel of land self-deeded to John Winthrop, Puritan leader and first governor of the Massa-chusetts Bay Colony, as a focal point, author C.S. Manegold tells the story of slavery in the North, from its inception as a punitive measure against warring Native Americans to its entrenchment in American society as a racist economic system and the founda-tion of wealth for America’s oldest families. Ten Hills Farm dispels the myth of slavery as a solely Southern phenomenon. It recounts the establishment of slavery in the northern colonies and traces its path to the sugar cane fields of the island of Antigua.

Manegold, an award-winning journalist and the author of In Glory’s Shadow: The Citadel, Shannon Faulkner, and a Changing America, unravels the intricate family lineages and the brokered deals of America’s elite and the institutions they founded upon slavery, including Harvard Law School. With a wealth of primary source research, Manegold, a former fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and Harvard University, reveals the names and faces of masters and slaves alike, while providing the reader with an invaluable lesson on the history of slavery. Robert L. Brandon Jr.