Races Books

I had a hard time finding a good book about NASCAR for my son when he turned 5. He's a huge fan. This book is perfect.He's going on 7 now and still enjoys this book. It has lots of great photos of real cars and drivers - not generic painted race cars that a fan wouldn't recognize. It has photos of the pit crew action, the tracks, actual racing photos, the parts of the cars and lots of driver and car photos that your child will love. Some of the drivers and cars included are jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Jimmie Johnson, and Matt Kenseth. Great book for a 4 - 8 year old fan. The design is neat, too with the rubber handle with the NASCAR logo, and because it's a board book it can be carried around and looked at over and over again without getting damaged! Great gift for a true fan - your child won't be disappointed.

I bought this book for my 4 year old son who loves Nascar. The book is board book with a handle that he can take with him anywhere. It has great pictures and lots of information about the drivers and his favorite cars. Great book!

This along with his *A Book of Beginnings* and *Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World* constitute a major work that took Massey most of three decades to write. There is nothing so important as these books in demonstrating the origin of all the world's languages and cultures in the birth place of Egypt in Central Africa. Massey was the 9th Chosen Chief of what is known as the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids in Britain between 1880 and 1906. And it was during these years that he was working on these volumes. He was an evolutionist, a consumate scholar, philologist, and great savant. These books are filled with the most amazing insights. A Book of Beginnings scientifically demonstrates the origins of the British Druidic and ancient Hebrew traditions in the ancient Egyptian. It also delves into the most ancient levels of the Egyptian in the lake region of Central East Africa at the source of the Nile. These books are not for casual reading. They are fraught with detail and demand careful reading. They cast a bright light on the great world tree of cultures and languages whose tap root is in Central Africa. Massey traces the development of Egypt so far back that it makes the past two thousand years look like it was just the other day. For anyone trying to understand the origins of the great African cultures, the British culture, the Jewish culture, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all other cultures as well as all of the world's languages, these books are to be regarded as a gold mine. For anyone studying the great Bardic tradition, these books belong among those that are to be considered indespensible. Massey is a major figure. All of his work is published by BCP (Black Classics Press).

Gerald Massey is 'the' most under read "seer"/researcher dealing with history, religion, typology,... I mean what doesn't he deal with directly or indirectly?

If you are trying to find the reason or essense of cultural/religious/societal practices then this two volume set is a must. Massey does for History & Understanding what Athur Young does for science (The Reflexive Universe), he makes the developement of Kemit accessible and understandable.

The writings of Gerald Massey will probably be the most dense material you have read in your life! Sometimes what he covers in one page another author would have taken 10. The book is the 2nd of 3 main books (6vols) and in my opinion should be read first! I read "Light of the World" first and understood it (I thought). When I read Natural Genesis and reread the others...they all opened up and revealed way more insight.

Lastly, I think for the establishment of the time Massey would presently be akin to a (more radical) Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn...along the religio-socio-historical side. Hope that helps some.

If you buy one IR nonfiction book this year, this would be the one.

The research covers focus groups and interviews. The research author interviews about 12-15 black-white couples, introduced as all having minimum criteria of having been in a committed relationship of at least 2 years, some married for twenty-something years. Further into the book, though, there is a couple who were together 1 year. The couples are mostly white women and black males. To keep track of which couple is which, refer to the back of the book where there's an interview transcript of couples with self-reported stats.

Thought-provoking focus groups, deconstruction, and comparative research on black-white couples, black communities, white communities, race, identity, social constructs of race, and racial boundary maintenance by individuals/society;includes address to web porn.

Each section can be read independently, as the research author restates the back up to the hypothesis. Basically, couples were were 'colorblind' were colorblind together, adopting shared visions of coping, etc., and couples who were 'color conscious' or a mixture, did so as an agreed method to cope, either implicitly or explicitly withing their relationship with their partner. Like most relationships, they were of like mind. There wasn't a couple who was all about color consciousness from one of the partners, while the other adopted a color blind approach. Would guess that this like-minded orientation was an element of their getting together in the first place as opposed to getting into a relationship with someone who conflicted with their own ways of thinking. Or better yet, kept them beyond 1 or 2 years with that person.

Interestingly enough, the author who self identified as a white woman who was formerly with a black male, and now the parent of biracial children, was pretty analytical about communities and people 'coding' prejudice and racism, whether black or white, focusing readers' attention on not just what was said, but the context and how it was said. A lot of doublespeak that she cut through after her interviews with groups was aired out. The author rarely interrogated much her subjects, because the research was basically about people airing their thoughts and feelings, without being confronted of potential bias. A particularly strong point that still resonates is the idea that communities and individual said that IR couples would have problems (ostensibly that non-IR couples never have problems, for instance because they're different--a woman and a man having sexism issues). IR relationships don't work because 'others' and 'society' would mistreat them and their children. The children would be confused about their identities, feel like they didn't fit in. The author points out that in each excuse why someone said IR was a bad idea and that society would mistreat them, was the failure to recognize that the speaker was excluding themselves when they already said they had a problem with IR couples. That they were in fact the 'society' doing this to IR couples. Yet excusing themselves from culpability of any kind.

There's a lot of material to mull over. The author does call the readers' attention, and an occasional research subject's, to the idea that if they prefer a certain race to the exclusion of all others, then, yes, they are not colorblind, but color conscious on a personal level, to a racist degree, even if they are colorblind about the idea of love, colorblind about interacting in the community, and once in their targeted relationship color, colorblind about their interactions with that person.

When ministers and others such as family and friends advised the IR couples about the challenges they would likely face, the author took issue with this as a negative sign that society was making an issue that might not have been an issue of concern for the respective couples. As with any couples counseling, the understanding is that people want you to be aware not caught off guard or otherwise blindsided by potential opposition. Make sure you are committed. I didn't have an issue with people being advised of potential marital or relationship monkey-wrenches. There were a couple of instances where an IR couple did face actual opposition from clergy, family. One woman's parents came to her wedding, and her mother cried. Not tears of joy that her daughter found someone to love and be loved by, and they'd pledged eternal love by traditional ceremony. The mother should've stayed home. Another woman whose family did not support her with her personal choice of a loved one, did not invite them to the wedding when the two decided to marry.

Very insightful, helping to frame ways that IR couples elect to cope and what methods apparently have helped couples stay together as a unit when dealing with IR topics within and outside their personal space. Methods parallel same-race couples, unified front, like minds going in the same direction. It also parallels the styles of some living and working in segregated spaces. It seemed like the colorblind couples worked in a professional or paraprofessional jobs, and traveled in mostly white circles, if not at home, then at work. And in that knowledge as anyone who does live and work in predom white circles knows, a certain level of colorblind will get you further than color consciousness, if that's what you want. You will be expected to overlook things, and adopt the majority code that things are better, even as you get excluded from living with your IR partner in predom white neighborhoods, etc. I wouldn't necessarily define it as internalizing racism so much as upholding the code of 'guest' conduct in environments where you have little to no power authority, or support to change the status quo. The same could be said in how women manage in predom male environments. It's almost like being bilingually conscious.

At one point the author mentions a personal episode where she felt she should've challenged her doctor about a derogatory remark, but instead the author ignores it. And she felt bad, like she dropped the ball. Her thinking is that in order to truly progress coded instances of racism should be challenged, on the spot, to that person, to hold them accountable, and ..begin to clear the air for honest dialogue, and relationships that develop from the superficial stereotypes or ignoring race problems hoping they'll go away by continuous code talking and denial. This was an ironic piece of information that the author shared in that she did what others in her book had also done. Heard something racist but coded, and chose to ignore it, allowing it to keep its faux finish of being other than what it was. Before someone can address something, it has to be agreed that this is what was said, and what you heard and interpreted is what was meant. If someone is being avoidant, it's basically a stonewall. Code talking allows people to say the codes, and if you are into what they're selling, then you go along to get along, or you don't. The author's doctor was an older woman. In the book, research subjects did say that they factor in someone's age when they're talking out of the side of their neck about race.

Sometimes, the best defense is no defense. If you hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil, then maybe you're not fighting battles all the time. And you're not giving credibility where it's not do. The cliche that, 'I'm not going to dignify that with an answer' is as good as said, when you say nothing. Don't even participate in the codetalking or other charade.

In this regard, the book has much to teach about how IR couples whose relationships do last, have worked, and what individuals and communities are thinking, why, and how they keep the visible and invisible fences up.

Over a decade ago, a white male in his 30s told me his theory about what he was seeing online. He was mostly an average guy with average interests. He'd earned a BA in psychology, but that wasn't his profession. He liked to sit back, smoke, sip some suds, and tell me what he thought about things. Liked to entertain us, sometimes silly nonsense. And when he told me, then his African American wife, what he thought about IR internet porn, I rolled my eyes. He had a theory about IR black-white porn that I laughed off as nonsense, until maybe a couple of years ago when I thought maybe he wasn't full of it. Yeah, it makes sense. It's in the book. It's what most porn's about anyway, fantasy and the 'what if', etc. It's funny how you dismiss something logical because you've got your colorblind goggles on, and can't imagine even when you hear it from someone who presented himself as a rep, to see him as white, a male, telling me of the racism he'd figured out was in the porn, and who was watching it, and why, that I couldn't get my mind around at the time.

In any event, the book does inform the readers of how and where couples met. A fair amount met at work or in the community.

Research author hits a large number of topics, amazing points of perception. Includes addressing perspectives of some African Americans as feeling slighted by biracial, multiracial people who want to have it both ways, even so far as to distance themselves from black people on the Census, yet, still enjoying the privileges

Another interesting thing was not the opposition of black women to white female+black men unions as depleting the 'scarce' supply of available black men, but that black women often accept the couples, their black male relatives in these relationship, the children of the unions, that have excluded them except to the extent that they be used for support. It's almost like the mammy thing. No love for the black woman. And she's gotta be there, supporting the black male. I hadn't thought about that one. Although there's a white aunt in the family, living hundreds of miles away, Aunt T, even if the Uncle and his wife were nearby, I don't do diapers for anybody w/o commensurate compensation for pain and suffering.

There a couple of mentions by research subjects, community focus groups, in which there's the remark made that there's not much interest in IR dating, etc., between BW + WM because white males don't find black women attractive. Huh. Every time I hear this b.s., I can hear my great, great grandmother, and every black woman from the day black women stepped off the boat and up onto the auction block say. "B.S."

For as much as there's denial, avoidance, and undercover stuff happening to this day, it's a myth of epic proportions belied every time we look around and see the many shades of 'high yellow', tan, coffee, mocha, brown, red bone, etc., 'black' people walking around. The code talk is that black women are unattractive, and white women most attractive as a group. For as much as black women are kept out of the limelight of beauty and have been from day 1, we've been disowned in public and ravished in private. I'm not sure about the average person, but I can't imagine someone being sexual with someone that they think is repugnant. And copulating for centuries, ie, white men finding black women attractive. (Even before there was relaxer, and black women bought into the deliberately degrading hype that she wasn't). White males find black women attractive. All else is propaganda.

The propaganda is that so long as black women are not presented to the public as just as desirable and attractive as white women or other women; this elevates others at her devaluation, a losing battle no matter what she looks like individually because she was born into a group summarily devalued. At least in the public sphere. So long as society continues to punish people for breaking the rules of what's agreed to as the norm conduct. That doesn't mean that this is what's believed or practiced in reality. The myth of the unattractive black woman has been handed down for generations, and for generations, tan people, etc., have popped up 'magically,' 'out of nowhere' like reality slaps, testaments of truth. And the truth has always set people free, one way or the other.

Black women remain stereotyped in other ways, too. That doesn't make it fact, or dismiss those who do not fit inside the frame or fall far far outside of the stereotype.

Stereotypes of black women as oversexed Jezebels are touched on in the book. Black women as being a 'rite of passage' for white males.

On this note, here's where the IR couple gets a bad wrap. It's mentioned in the book. Society wraps up its stereotypical race bag and sees that the IR couple is portrayed as just all about sex. People involved are not really about a relationship, it's all about the s-e-xxx.

Since when does a relationship not have elements of attraction? If it's a same race couple, I can't imagine that there's no element of physical attraction. So what's the difference with an IR relationship? Zip. Other than others' focus on that one aspect. Enough already with beating the IR sex deadhorse in books, TV, film, etc. (Can someone please put the IR fiction covers with trashy sex covers into the trash bin already, or the soft porn section? and can people stop supporting this IR flesh mill?), there's more to a relationship, including IR than sex. And if not, it's not really a relationship, but as with other same race non-relationships, who says it always has to be a relationship of depth, or a relationship at all. Interjection here, if an IR couple is not in a long-term but transitory situation, not committing because of society's pressure to split up, then it might very well fuel the idea of IR couples being all about sex because as with any new relationship, people start out in the 'honeymoon' stage; or if the couple goes 'underground' with their relationship, it further fuels the 'taboo' of not being able to be with that person except as you can...fuels the public perception that the couple are no longer together and it was not a 'real' long term relationship...and on top of this, absence makes the loins grow fonder, so that when they do meet again, it's a continuation of the honeymoon, which may give the perception that this is all the IR relationship is about. But the above would happen to others in similar new relationships or one's that were restricted access.

If someone's in a same race relationship frowning down on an IR relationship, plagued by fears of sexual combustion going on, it'd have to be insecurity and projection over what they imagine they don't have.
And it has nothing and everything to do with race. It's not about the IR sex going on, and everything to do with racism. Consider the "Navigating Interracial Borders" section about black-on-white web porn, asserting stereotyped white male fantasies of black men with white women.

Note in this book, that was one area the research author chose not to discuss with either the couples or the respective white or black communities. Instead just mentioning in a comparatively brief section the fascination and perpetration of stereotypes of IR web porn. It's possible the research author was aware that this was likely an invasion of privacy that the average person would probably not want to talk about, especially if in committed long term relationships, or married. Doesn't sound like anything out of the norm of protecting relationships from becoming a sex circus. Even if to contradict the web IR sex circus. Further, in making the topic of sex irrelevant to the research discussions, the author dignifies and validates the sanctity of the IR unions, and talks about their relationships, not the mystical sexual relations. If this were a book about other couples, and how they cope with outside opposition, maintain their relationships, it would also likely focus on the hearts of the matter.

In various IR books, whether fiction or nonfiction, even in movies--which the author does address (mostly "Jungle Fever" about a BM+WF), there's the community prying into your private life, speculating about what's going on in your relationship in the bedroom, sly comments and inquiries of disrespectful proportions. The black woman some wild beast or other, in the book "Meeting of the Waters" a colleague makes a sexually stereotypical comment to the main male character about his black girlfriend, speculating that she's probably an animal.

In any event, sex is overrated in IR relationships by inquisitive outsiders who are competing with their own wild imaginations. And surely the garbage online these days is fueling the edges of erotic fantasies, even pushing them over the edge of what's to be found in normal, healthy relationships, IR or not.

Overall, the book gives visibility to some important things to consider, frameworks for private and public strategies of how others manage to live in committed, long term relationships with someone who is white-black. It includes references to a variety of IR books, research, and films. There are chapter notes as well.

There are all kinds of people, and someone for everyone and anyone at any time. It all depends on what and who you're looking for. People like what they like or don't. We don't all have to like everybody. It's our right. We all have to answer for ourselves, as well.

At the end of the day, pursuit of happiness, personal choices, privacy are things that play a role. For as much as political correctness has people talking out of the sides of their neck in cowardice, free speech would allow people to tell you who they are, and with the freedom we all have, we can walk or not. It's your life, now or never. You can live how you want. The book's a good analytical study in how others in IR relationships manage to sustain long-term, successful relationships.

This book is EXCELLENT not only for the academic community but for those in an interracial union also. I am working on my PhD and this was a great reference source. In research I have already completed, much of Chito Childs findings support mine or mine support hers, however you want to look at it.

She gives excellent references and includes many quotes from individuals in Black and White interracial unions which enables the reader to strongly grast what couples in an interracial union are experience.In fact, all of the couples I interviewed, and my peers interested in multicultural issues, I refer them to Chito Childs book.

It is a great source for Clinical Counselors, Clinical Psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and all those working with interracial couples.

Negotiating Language, Constructing Race is a book which deals with vital issues of concerning the post-colonial world. I talks about the affects of race policies throughout SE-Asia, but especially in Singapore. It is a magnificent book, and well worth the time it takes to read, especially for people interested in Race, Language or South-East Asia.

PuruShotam's book is an acedemically rigorous study of the changing issues of language and race policies in Singapore. The author is critical of the main thrust of offcial policy and points out the risks and consequences of these policies.

A reading of the book raises serious questions about Singapore's image as model of racial harmony.

Wow! What a wonderful read. I learned so much and Mr. Grant made so many pieces of history fall into place for me. Obviously my education regarding African-American History has been incomplete. Growing up in the sixties with "The Black Power Movement," I now understand where it began and Garvey has not received enough credit or press for his "dream." This book has greatly blessed me. Right on Colin Grant! Thank you.

Independent historian and BBC Radio script editor Colin Grant presents Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, an in-depth biography of Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940), who is perhaps best-known for his "Back to Africa" movement that sought to create an independent homeland through Pan-African emigration. Known as the "Black Moses" to his many admirers, and crowned Jamaica's first national hero after his death, Marcus Garvey also made plenty of enemies - he was deemed a enough of a threat by Winston Churchill and J. Edgar Hoover to warrant surveillance, and was scornfully derided as a "negro with a hat" by W.E.B. Du Bois. His talent for promoting his ideas and resurrecting memory of lost African civilization was unsurpassed, and he earned his place in history as one of the founders of black nationalism and a crucial figure of the twentieth century. Negro with a Hat spares no detail yet remains accessible to readers of all backgrounds, and is highly recommended for its thoughtful and balanced presentation of a thoroughly complex individual's life.

For a first novel,this book has several layers of both plot and nuance.She delves into our prejudices,both expressed and repressed.We are forced to examine our own souls in ways that may not be comfortable in the least.I thought she was a little viscious with the mother figure,but maybe that was a bit autobiographical.Her later books have improved in any number of ways.Maybe her opinion of her sainted mother has improved too.Her brand new book looks pretty good.I'll have to read it,I guess.

This is a wonderful story. It brought forward all the fears, and struggles we all have in our relationships with other races. But as we accept, with all our hearts the real person, the soul of another being, our love grows and expands. Our circle of family expands, and then hope really can spring eternal. If Cassie can accept the chalenges, so can we. Great little story, would love to hear more from this author!!! We need more stories that are uplifting, and to beable to read a book with out foul language or vile sexual content, is wonderful. I could recommend this book to any one, of any age, or race.

In a sense this is two books. While it starts with a discussion of how the author, a medical ethicist, was drawn to write this book about Eldrewey Stearns, the first 100 pages primarily tells the story of integration in Houston, Texas in the late 50s and 60s. It's a compelling and interesting story, but it is more compellingly told by the video that was made simultaneously with this book. That video, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow: How Houston Desegregated Its Public Accomodations, 1959-1963 is available from University of Texas Press (I can't find it on Amazon). The video includes interviews with many of the prominent actors in this drama and is always a favorite when I use it in my Introduction to US and Texas Politics class.
The second 100 pages of the book is about Eldrewey Stearns' life before and after the movement. Stearns was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Houston, but he is also someone who has struggled with mental illness all his life. This book provides a fascinating insight into the struggles the author goes through in trying to help Eldrewey and to understand this complex, flawed, yet sometimes heroic man. He also comes to considerable insight about himself through the process of trying to chronicle Eldrewey's story.
An excellent read, whether you are interested in the history of the movement or in getting an understanding of how it is to deal with mental illness.

In the 1990s I spent two years traveling in Europe. One day in a Hungarian history museum I hit the wall: Here I was reading all about the Magyars, but I knew little about my own hometown--Houston, Texas--except whatever I'd been forced to memorize eons ago in grade school. Unfortunately, once I got back to Texas I found many of the local history books unbearable: "In 1832, Lamar So-and-So reined in his trusty steed at the banks of Buffalo Bayou." I gave up my getting-to-know-Houston project until recently, when I stumbled upon No Color is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston. This is easily the best book I've ever read about Houston history. Thomas Cole personalizes the story, makes himself visible as a person confronting his own ideals, frustrations, and personal myths. His subject, Eldrewey Stearns, is obviously no easy man to pin down. Stearns has troubles, and I'm afraid he suffers more than most people. However, the fact that the writer refused--or was unable--to paint Stearns as a perfectly noble (and flat) hero is, in my opinion, exactly why Stearns is such a moving figure and why this work is so much richer than the Daughters of the American Revolution (or worse, Daughters of the Confederacy) tributes that so many other books about Houston and Houstonians seem to be. Stearns is real, and Cole's depiction of him and his part in Houston's integration movement deepened my appreciation for African-Americans' struggles and their courageous stands.

His father arrived on the scene when James was two. His mother stood between the children and the father. When King died, Baldwin was working on a screen version of the Malcolm X story. James Baldwin appeared with Martin Luther King at Carnegie Hall in a newly purchased black suit, and wore the black suit to the funeral two weeks later. Then he gave the barely worn suit to a friend.

Baldwin observes that the French did not dare to think that the Algerian situation could be existentialist. When he went to France he went there to escape racism. He could live with Africans in Paris in comparative peace. Baldwin went to Paris with no money. He frequented Arab cafes. Baldwin could not undertand why Camus produced William Faulkner's REQUIEM FOR A NUN. James Baldwin claims that Faulkner is attempting to exorcise a history which is also a curse in his work. He argues that the cultural pretensions of history are nothing more than a mask for power.

He knew by 1956 when he saw a picture of a school child being jeered by a crowd while seeking to integrate her school that he would be leaving Europe to return to America to take up the cause. Returning in 19576 he saw New York in a different way and went to the South. James Baldwin relates that he has always been struck in America by an emotional poverty. He says he really didn't know much about terror until he went to the South. In large ways and small Baldwin found the people in the Civil Rights Movement, facing Southern terror, heroic. Before his trip to the South the author had never seen the horror or the poverty.

Malcolm X, unlike Frantz Fanon, operated in the Afro-American idiom. In 1968 James Baldwin was sharing a flat with is sister Paula and his brother David in London. He learned there of Malcolm's death. A former resident of Harlem, he distrusted the legend of Malcolm X until he had the opportunity to meet him.

Uncomfortably, Baldwin came to realize later that in those years, in the fifties and sixties, he was a sort of great black hope of the great white father. Malcolm X considered himself to be the spiritual property of those who produced him. He was dangerous because he apprehended the horror of the black condition. Writing an epilogue in 1971 Baldwin noted that the book had been delayed by trials, assassinations, and funerals.

It seems strange that this crisp and concise essay is less known and less read than Baldwin's earlier collections. True, he is angrier, rawer, less forgiving here, and his earlier diplomatic hopefulness has given way to a deeply cynical and contemptuous view of American society. Yet, given the atrocities Baldwin, along with his friends and colleagues, personally witnessed and underwent during the years immediately preceding this book, his fury is, at the very least, understandable.

Baldwin's recollections of the 1950s and 60s are not presented as linear narrative. Instead, he intertwines, among other topics: the cowardice of liberals during the McCarthy era; the French-Algerian conflict; his investigations and travels in the South; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (and his own reminiscences of them); his experiences in Hollywood with commercial filmmakers; his encounters with Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers; his bemused reaction to the flower children in San Francisco; and his four-year battle to rescue his former assistant, Tony Maynard, from an arrest and conviction for a murder he didn't commit. (Maynard's conviction was overturned after this book was published.) The supporting cast of his friends and adversaries in these personal and societal struggles is a veritable who's who: Elia Kazan, William Styron, Fred Shuttlewsorth, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte, Billy Dee Williams, Marlon Brando, Robert Kennedy.

Baldwin's self-effacing willingness to reopen old wounds and expose the evidence of his own folly is still on hand here. He opens with an anecdote about a visit with a childhood friend in the south Bronx: his humorous and humiliating arrival in a limousine, the all-too-apparent difference between his own prosperity and his friend's meager (but contented) subsistence and his shameful condescension toward his friend's "job at the post office," and their explosive argument over the war in Vietnam. He also recounts his own naivety in a chronicle of his first traumatic exposure to Jim Crow laws in Montgomery: "It is not difficult to be a marked man in the South--all you have to do, in fact, is to go there."

Baldwin admits to the impossibility of objectivity in his writing, comparing his task to Shaw's writing "Saint Joan": "he had the immense advantage of having never known her." And his account of two decades of struggle is by no means impartial. But I prefer this version of Baldwin, who no longer seems to care about kowtowing to the mostly white New Yorker readers who made up his audience for his earlier work. "No Name in the Street" is uncomfortably honest--and that bluntness lends the work a faithfulness to the spirit of the times.

The very title of the book suggests that a great deal of help was needed in overcoming one of the most shameful events in the annals of America's very dark racial history. The events in question have to do with Robert Whitaker's award winning story about what happened to a group of black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, in Elaine, Arkansas, just up the street from Helena, about a 4 hours drive from my own hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

What happened on the night of September 30, 1919 has been seared into the collective memory of all blacks affiliated with the Helena area. On that night, a group of Black sharecroppers, who had gotten tired of years of being cheated out of their fair share of their cotton crops, decided to take matters into their own hands by forming a union with the intention of petitioning and eventually suing their landowners to redress this long-running economic inequity and injustice.

This injustice, incidentally was common practice used against black farmers, whether sharecroppers or not, and existed all over not just Arkansas, but all over the South. As a small boy, I can distinctly remember my grandfather, Silas Brown, who was not a sharecropper, but happened to own his own proverbial "forty acres and two mules (Blue and Cake)," bitterly complaining about how he too was being cheated out of his cotton crop by the unscrupulous "buyers and ginners of cotton."

In any case, the group didn't get very far along in their plans to form a union, as a car pulled up to the wooden church where the meeting was taking place and with a posse of "federalized concerned white citizens" began a four day massacre that ended up killing more than 100 black men, women and children, and was also coincidentally responsible for the death of a solitary white man.

This "white instigated vigilante action," as is customary in the U.S., was of course referred to as a "race riot." Meaning of course that the blacks inside the church, and not the white terrorists outside, were responsible for the occurrence of the incident. In the "mop up operation," following this clear white vigilante action, massacring more than 100 blacks, more than 300 black farmers were also arrested and charged with a variety of crimes ranging from illegal assembly, rioting, resisting arrest, carrying concealed weapons, to the murder of the lone white man.

In the "kangaroo court" that followed, the court-appointed defense attorneys refused to call any witnesses; prosecution witnesses were whipped if they didn't lie; and a mob held sway outside the courthouse, threatening to burn it down if there were no convictions. Some of the defendants were sentenced to die in the electric chair in less than two minutes; the rest in no more than a few hours. The all-white jury consisting of the normal cast of characters, of local leaders and "distinguished concerned white citizens" sentenced the "so-called union ring leaders" to death in the electric chair.

In 1919, this was American justice in its fullest racial glory.

The book however, is not about the "so-called race riot" per se, but is about the heroic legal efforts of a black Little Rock attorney named Scipio Africanus Jones, an about how he succeeded in taking the case (Moore vv. Dempsey) all the way to the Supreme Court and getting six of the death sentences overturned. And while the author readily admits that many of those involved in the legal victory were white, for obvious reasons his focus was on the bravery, courage and skill of this lone black lawyer, who risked his life in taking up the cause of the defense.

Since the context and circumstances of the story constituted a virtual leitmotif of small town southern racial injustice, it is puzzling how some Arkansas white historians (especially the author of Blood in Their Eyes, which is "a decidedly white account" of the same set of events) can call the incident controversial? It is also difficult to see why they chafe over the fact that Scipio Jones was made into a black legal hero. It is a black hero story, told about black people. Do whites have to always steal all black narratives, when American history is written? Why not just leave it alone?

As a footnote, there was once a black High School in North Little Rock, Arkansas, in the same AA Conference as my own Merrill High, name Scipio Jones High School. Until reading this book, I had never known who Scipio Jone was.

Worthy of a movie for sure! Five stars

This book is heartrending but also uplifting. It brings into focus a national hero, Scipio Jones, who was born a slave but rose to prominence. Now forgotten, he brought about--through his deft legal work--changes in our national law that we would do well to remember now in these days when habeous corpus seems to have gone by the wayside. Truly this book can be seen as examining the changes in our law that made it possible for the civil rights movement to emerge. It really is a great book and a great read. It can be hard to get through some of the gripping--but painful--accounts of the killings in the beginning of the book--but the end is worth it.

Contemporary scholars of law and the social sciences have awoken to an understanding of the law of unintended consequences. This law states, roughly, that the most important consequences of any law, regulation, or policy, will be those that none of its advocates desired.

Examples are too numerous for recitation here. But one of the most poignant fields for the operation of this law is the whole issue of race relations in America, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny.

Halpern shows, with exacting scholarship, just how the effects of these acts differ from the intention, and how people in the US of all races have to rethink their most firmly held convictions, to square them with the observed (however unintended) consequences of the actions recent generations have taken, acting on just such convictions.

This book was exactly what I was looking for my College term paper. It is clear that the book is impecably researched, finely crafted and tweaked to perfection. Perfect for anybody studying the civil rights movement. BRAVO messr Halpern