Illinois Books

Black and Mormon proves to be a highly interesting book that relates directly with the LDS and their relationship with the black people of the United States throughout their history. The key element of this book lies around then President Kimball's revelation that blacks who have been denied priesthood rites by their church due to their ethnic heritage, was finally granted that right on 8 June 1978. This book is collection of essays that deals with the priesthood ban imposed by the LDS leadership during the late 1840s, its effects on the black members and after the banning have been removed, how that racist past still affected the church today.

All essays written here proves to be well written, well research and highly informative to the subject at hand. Some of the authors are black LDS members and their words and perceptions may surprise many of the white LDS members who may read this book. Many of the essays overlapped each other due to the narrow subject matter and sometimes, that helped to reinforced the information. The book is only 172 pages and that includes the index and footnotes pages.

It is no great secret that LDS practiced overt racism toward their black members before the ban was lifted and relied on old near-mythological doctrines to denied many of their black membership, the full fellowship into their ranks. The book explained these doctrines very clearly and how they became part of the accepted practice of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints until that fateful day in June 1978.

The book also sadly reflects on LDS refusal to confront their own racist history and how such attitude hampered their efforts to deal with these problems they have with their non-white members - especially blacks. Adjustment of white Mormons in accepting blacks as full members have not been easy and its no small wonder that many blacks still feel alienated in their own church. Ironically, the book pointed out that like polygamy, racist anti-black doctrines still lies within the framework of the LDS church. LDS' refusal to deal or remove these doctrines may trouble many. This means that only their policies that has changed, not their doctrines. This means that LDS could easily restore polygamy or ban blacks from priesthood anytime in the future if the political and social situation allow them so.

Overall, a very informative book that provides a lot of information about the racial relationship between LDS and the black people, especially those within their own ranks. Book come highly recommended as an introduction to this subject matter for further reading.

Walt Whitman once stated that the interior history of the Civil War soldier would never be told. Though Whitman's assessment is generally true, Edward A. Miller offers us an interpretive rapprochement through a new history of the all-black 29th U.S. Colored Infantry, a unit formed in Illinois. Yet, this work is not simply a regimental history, but a deeper study in the lives of black recruits in the Civil War era, and a journey into the hinterlands of an American racial pathos. Throughout this study, Miller explores in detail the biographies of individual soldiers, revealing their often convoluted histories which seem to be cut from the same mold. Yet, Miller has uncovered interesting and valuable demographic and socio-economic data. In addition, Miller explores the culture of the 29th's white officers, men who were unduly pre-judged as incompetent by their fellow Union soldiers.

The 29th's only substantial combat experience came at the ill-fated Battle of the Crater, where the employment of black regiments was unfairly blamed for battlefield failures. As such, many in the North wanted to place the responsibility for the disaster upon supposedly inferior black troops. However, Miller's historiography yields a saner assessment through a very detailed account of the battle. When the war ended, instead of disbanding, the 29th was brought up to full strength and marched to Texas to meet a perceived threat from French encroachment into Mexico. There life was "difficult, food shortages common, and medical care inadequate." (164), and many died of privation.

Broadening the reader's perspectives, Miller highlights the sixty percent of the 29th's officers and men who filed for pensions from their service. Many claims for compensation based upon service-related disabilities were exaggerated or downright fraudulent. No doubt many of these were motivated by extreme poverty, for a high percentage of the black veterans could find work only as day laborers.

Regardless, though they completed their military service with "devotion and competence" (206), Miller believes that most black veterans gained little benefit from their wartime service. However, when allowed to participate in combat, they performed with proficiency on a par with their white comrades. But national incredulity would persist with attitudes exemplified by "a mix of pity, paternalism, condescension, and racial superiority." (103) All told, Miller's is a welcomed addition to the growing scholarly literature on the individual experiences of the common soldier.

Since this book was first published in 1996, there has been at least some progress in terms of what Vernon Jordan calls "signs of new opportunities" as indicated by the appointment as CEOs of Kenneth Chenault (by American Express) and Richard Parsons (by AOL Time Warner). However, obviously, much more remains to be achieved in a society which still relies so heavily on gender-specific adjectives (e.g. female jockey) and hyphenated descriptives (e.g. Lilliputian-Americans). Let us all hope that Chenault and Parsons were selected wholly because they were best-qualified to provide the organizational leadership needed. Period.

The subtitle of Collins' book ("The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class") implies -- to me, at least -- initiatives which were consciously and deliberately expedient. That is to say, in response to various pressures (especially from the federal government) on many corporations in the late-1960s to create access to career opportunities previously denied to black executives. These same corporations then "racialized" the positions many black executives occupied by limiting their responsibilities to supervising Affirmative Action programs, cultivating "special markets", and solidifying relationships with minority customers. In almost every instance, this eliminated them from the "fast track" to positions at higher levels within their respective organizations. Their income permitted what Dick Gregory once referred to as an "Oreo lifestyle" but job security was tenuous. I was curious to know: Was the emergence of a Black Middle Class, throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, more a perception than a reality?

In an e-mail from her, she responds to that question. "I really don't think the emergence of the middle class was illusionary at all. I think the socioeconomic gains were/are real but they are grounded in different sets of conditions than those that prop up whites. I think that its emergence and growth was, and still is, dependent on the continued support of public policies and social pressure. When I look at the Ken Chenaults and Richard Parsons of the world I see them as anomalies rather than as symbols of a a trend. In other words, I don't think these companies are going to integrate their power structures in a sustained way unless there's some type of external nonmarket pressure to do so. Of course, I could be wrong and, if so, I'll have to rethink my understanding of race relations in the business world."

I was also curious to know to what the extent (if any) the demographics of black executives (male and female) have changed since 1996 when her book was first published. In the same e-mail, Collins observes: "The demographic trends associated with the number of black executives is almost impossible to measure for several reasons. One, the best source (EEO1 data that surveys private employers) groups managers so that rank is obscured. Managers counted here could be the manager of a 7-11 food store or a CFO of a Fortune 500 company. Census data does have an "administrator" category, but that probably relates more to public than to private sector employment. This problem has been my nemesis and probably will continue to be so because I am forced patch together information from various sources and than draw inferences." Although the scope and depth of Collins' survey sample may seem insufficient to support her generalizations (i.e. two sets of interviews with 76 of the most successful black executives in Chicago's major corporations), she consulted extensive supplementary research resources which apparently confirmed what she learned from those interviewed.

The Collins Web site features a statement which asserts that her analysis in this book "challenges arguments that justify dismantling affirmative action. She argues that it is a myth to believe that black occupational attainments are evidence that race no longer matters in the middle-class employment arena. On the contrary, blacks' progress and well-being are tied to politics and employment practices that are sensitive to race." That brief excerpt refers to her analysis of circumstances almost two decades prior to 1996. It remains for each reader to read and evaluate Collins' book, then draw her or his own conclusions as to its relevance to circumstances today. I rate the book so highly because she addresses so many important issues which remain timely in 2001; also, because she raises questions which must continue to be asked, and then answered honestly, until such time that there is no longer a need to do so.

Black Gangsters of Chicago is a true crime chronicle of Chicago's legendary and infamous black criminals. John "Mushmouth" Johnson, Jeff Fort, and Larry Hoover may not have been as publicly high-profile as Al Capone, but their deed were just as brutal and notorious. From brief biographies of prominent black gangsters, to their connections to La Cosa Nostra and its assimilation of the numbers racket, to the fascinating (and disturbing) tale of how gangs carried out their business while behind bars, Black Gangsters of Chicago is a thorough exploration of an oft-overlooked aspect of the seedier side of Chicago's past. A recommended and worthy addition to true crime shelves.

Ellen Whitney's work regarding Illinois' contributions to the conflict is "exhaustive" by definition. Typescripts of numerous orders, communications, newspaper accounts, diaries, journals, etc. from numerous leaders, communities, and common folk are provided in a readily usable format, in chronological order. Not stopping there, Ms. Whitney's extensive footnotes often add gems of information for the historian, researcher, or geneologist sometimes literally found nowhere else. Numerous maps help find obscure locations, rivers, etc.

One volume is a complete reprint of the Illinois muster-rolls for the volunteer militia, complete with index.

If you can only afford one comprehensive look at the Black Hawk war 1831-2, this is it!

I am intrigued by the continuing controversy over Aosdana's election to the office of Saoi of my cousin Francis Stuart, author of Black List. Francis is the cousin I didn't know I had, at least until last year. The family black sheep, the skeleton in the cupboard, he has been the family member that everyone found so hard to deal with that it was easier to deny his existence completely and since the war he has been written out of the family history, both in Burke's 1958 Landed Gentry of Ireland and in their 1978 Irish Family Records. It was not until I found the rather obscure 1930 family history "Three Hundred Years in Inishowen" by our mutual cousin Amy Young (nee Stuart) that I started to fill in the gaps and realised who he was. Francis has said (Irish Times,November 14, 1996, "Nothing But Doubt") that "the Stuart family, however, never forgave Francis's mother and blamed her for Henry's death." That's probably only a partial truth; rather, Henry's suicide shattered the family in ways that have resonated down the generations. The collective failure of the Stuart family, including, but not only, Francis, to integrate the trauma were surely a factor in the 1993 suicide of his and my cousin, travel writer Miles Clark, and so it continues. I confess I read Black List Section H at least in part neither as a literary masterpiece nor as a justification for Francis' wartime actions, but as a family history. Where he writes of how "he'd imagined his cousin Stella coming to his room at night to initiate him into the sexual mystery" I read of my godmother, later Stella Greer, who used to send me 5 quid at Christmas, and was said to be a bit of an old dragon. I presume she was the cousin whose love-letters Francis kept in the pigeon-holes of his roll-top desk at Rugby (Things to Live For (1934) ,page 17) and mentions again on the first page of Black List. And I suspect that, despite two marriages and a divorce, her cousin Francis was in some ways the unrecognised love of her life. I didn't meet her until she was eighty, but as Francis confirms, she must have been young once!

The claims against Francis of anti-semitism are a malicious nonsense. Francis's biographer J.H.Natterstad (Irish Writers series, 1974) notes that "There is no evidence whatever that he saw the Jew as part of an international conspiracy or as the incarnation of evil. Although he was not sympathetic to what he saw as the Jewish obsession with money, the Jew was, as the archetypal outcast, a natural ally and was treated as such in "Julie" (written in 1938, a year before he went to Germany). Natterstad also notes that at Rugby, "There were others, he discovered, who felt themselves outsiders, and they formed their own clique, which insulated them to some extent against the life around them: 'Well, we Irish and a Jew and a Pole,' he recalled, 'we made a little group, and it was good.' " Francis has said that "I have spoken and written several million words in my life. No one could ever point to a sentence of mine that was or is anti-Semitic." In fact he could go further than merely denying any expression of anti-semitism; he has firmly nailed his colours to the mast and they contain nary a shred of racial or other prejudice. The only circumstance in which I could imagine Francis being anti-Jew is if he went to live in Israel, when he would no doubt quickly identify with the downtrodden Palestinians.

But it should be remembered that Francis was not the only member of his family to spend the war in Germany, the other being his cousin's son, my uncle Bob Stewart-Moore. Bob,brought up on the same Queensland sheep station where Francis Stuart was born, and traumatised not by the suicide of Henry Stuart but by the accidental death an elder brother Henry Stewart-Moore, was in bombers, shot down over Germany and,rather than being "passionately involved in my own living fiction", as Francis Stuart claims to have been, spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war at Lamsdorf, some fifty kilometres from Auschwitz. He then walked 500 miles in three months through Poland and Germany in the middle of winter to freedom at the end of the war, eventually being picked up by American troops near Muhlhausen. The group of Australians with whom he was imprisoned recently published a book on the experience, titled "The RAAF POWS of Lamsdorf", which is certainly anything but fiction, and in it Bob recounts the experience of being shot down, crashing in the Elbe canal, getting out of the plane underwater, and being imprisoned by the Germans. Certainly a different way of entering Germany to that chosen by his cousin Francis! One can only hope that the account in Black List of Francis's meeting with a POW at Frankfurt is not a (heavily disguised) description of a wartime meeting with his cousin. The age is wrong, as is the nationality and the rank. In fact the flying boots are about the only thing that is right. But the overtly and quite unnecessarily sexual references he ascribes to Captain Manville are something that this encounter has in common with Francis's descriptions of his cousins Maida and Stella: Are they a device he has used to distance himself from a connection uncomfortably intimate? Do I read too much into this encounter, or are there some subjects too tough even for Francis Stuart's brutal brand of honesty? The Aosdána award seems richly deserved, awarded as it is on literary merit, and I congratulate him on it. But now that he has done the easy bit and made his peace with Ireland and the world, perhaps it's time Francis tried something a little more challenging, and started to reintegrate with his family, starting with Bob Stewart-Moore in Sydney? I would have given Francis a ten for a book that I found to be quite enthralling (and not only for the family connections), but subtract one point for what appears to be his apparent failure to confront this most difficult of issues.

I had the honor of having Dr. Clark as a professor at George Mason University. What seperates his work from a lot of others is that he just doesn't argue his point but shares it with you and challenges you to use your mind and think. A great read.

Black Metropolis is perhaps the founding document of African-American studies, a classic work of sociology that still resonates today. It is a paradigmatic expression of the Chicago School of sociology, however, a school that today stands in some disrepute, at least in some circles. Indirectly, it was the target of James Baldwin's famous attack on Richard Wright in his essay, Everybody's Protest Novel. The claim of the criticism has been that the Chicago School, due to its insistance upon using a "scientific approach", merely reproduces the very terms under which African-Americans have been oppressed--a claim that has proceeded under the warrant of European intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno. Still, Black Metropolis is a landmark study, and, unfortunately, many if not most of its observations and conclusions remain true today, and in fact it could be argued that conditions in the Black Belt of Chicago have gotten worse, not better, since 1945, the year of Black Metropolis' publication--which lends a certain credence to the criticisms mentioned above, though perhaps it should be qualified by saying that they are not so much criticisms of the Chicago School as they are criticisms of American society. Since then, as we know, we have witnessed a great shift in American public opinion away from what some consider to be the excesses of those days; so much so, in fact, that the work of Black Metropolis may again be regarded as a profoundly useful book. Embodying American liberalism as it does--which counted as a grave sin thirty years ago--Black Metropolis may possibly be due for a fresh look.

Excellent, one of the most forgotten histories of this country; the political struggles of Freedman in South Carolina, one of the most populated areas of the country. Read and study a political history the state where the Civil War was started.

The history of the Floridas and its Black peoples has for many years been relegated to the back pages of American history. Jane Landers' important work will move the history of Black Florida before 1820 to the forefront of American history. She presents the people of color of Eastern Spanish Florida free and enslaved, as active participants in shaping 500 years of American history. Landers helps to dispell the one dimensional template (and inaccurate) of slavery taken from the central Southern states: cotton fields, the big house, field hands and the few and despised priviledged house slaves. Life during Spanish rule was similar but different. Landers certainly doesn't let the Spanish off the hook, but brings another dimension to Blacks living enslaved or free in the eastern Floridas. These were multi-lingual people Blacks, who traveled throughout the ports in the Caribbean, or interacted with the many cultures of the Florida's port cities. Landers forces the reader to look at Blacks in Florida in a different light. The early sons and daughters of Florida "MET" the immigrants from Europe, the Upper South and the Caribbean at the docks of St. Augustine, Tampa etc.

Jane Landers' thorough research of St. Augustine unearths fascinating histories of Black families who live in present day Florida.

Hopefully the readers of this book will look for the imprint of Florida Blacks beyond the Spanish Rule.

For historians, or fans of African-American history, or American history, Lander's style will captivate and compell them to search for more histories on the Afro-Caribbeans of Florida.