Shared experience
These books open doors for exploration during Black History Month
February celebrates Black History Month and one pathway to celebrate is reading books. Here is a short list of some of the many recent books that can give new insights and open doors to understanding more of the Black experience in North America, an experience that goes back more than 400 years.
■ “A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom” by Brittany K. Barnett.
The author was a law student when she heard about Sharanda Jones, a woman serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time federal drug offense. The book tells of Barnett’s success in getting Jones released from prison. At the same time, Barnett found parallels in her own life. Both were daughters of the rural South. And Barnett’s mother had a drug addiction and was imprisoned. In working on Jones’ case, Barnett also turned her attention to what she perceived as pervasive societal issues — mass incarceration, an ailing judicial system, and misguided calls for law and order. Jones was one of a number of clients imprisoned for federal drug offenses for whom Barnett has won freedom. The American Bar Association has named Barnett one of America’s Outstanding Young Lawyers.
■ “The Old Truck” by Jarrett Pumphrey and Jerome Pumphrey. This charming children’s picture book tells of the durability of an old pickup truck on a farm as it ages, and the determination of a young girl who works hard on her own farm and keeps the old truck going. The book is the first collaboration for the Pumphrey brothers. They worked together on the art and the story. The brothers said that the character of the young girl was inspired by the women in their family, including their mother, who raised four boys and ran her husband’s dental practice; their grandmothers who worked for the postal service in the segregated South; and a great-grandmother who picked cotton, saved her money and bought her own farm. Jarrett Pumphrey said he celebrated the completion of the book’s artwork by buying and restoring an old truck — a 1956 Ford F100.
“Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter” by Kerri K.
Greenidge.
Trotter’s name may be not well-remembered today, but he was a prominent Black voice in advocacy journalism and a civil rights activist in Boston and in national politics in the first three decades of the 20th century. In other words, a full generation before Martin Luther King, Jr. The Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly newspaper promoting the idea of liberation to the Black working class. He was considered a radical in the sense that he — and his newspaper — sought “nothing less than our full citizenship rights.” At the same time, he decried Booker T. Washington’s “gradualism,” a concept that urged Black economic advancement while capitulating to white demands for segregation and disenfranchisement.
And for the first time, an African American political leader, Trotter, challenged a sitting president, Woodrow Wilson, to not neglect civil rights “and the institutional white supremacy” it inevitably produces, the book states. The biography won the Mark Lynton History Prize. Author Greenidge is Mellon Assistant Professor at Tufts University’s Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora.
“Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America”
by Marcia Chatelain.
This book examines the complicated history of the relationship between Black America and the fast food industry, primarily McDonald’s. One chapter tackles in great detail the extended and confrontational boycott of several
McDonald’s restaurants in
Cleveland in the late 1960s over a demand for black franchisees. A new preface to the paperback edition says that “McDonald’s has helped determine — for better and for worse — where we live, what we eat and how we fight for justice.” The author is a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University.
“How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays”
by Kiese Laymon. You’ve got to pay attention when you read these essays. The author crisply shape-shifts ideas from one page to the next. That is seen clearly in the essay “What I Pledge Allegiance To.” First idea — the author, a Mississippi native, finds out the state’s magnolia flag was its flag of secession. It had a magnolia tree in the center. Next idea — the state’s flag that shows the Confederate battle emblem in a corner. And then on to a discussion of the American flag; Laymon says:
“It reminds me of what we
Black folk have survived and witnessed at the hands of white folk hiding behind the American flag for centuries.” In the middle of the essay, he discusses family ties and reading William Faulkner. Laymon closes the essay with a lengthy, inventive, politically charged pledge of his own.
Last month Mississippi adopted its newest flag. It has a magnolia blossom in the center and no Confederate symbolism.