Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Viking Adult, 2001, 608 pp. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention hit the book stands last spring with considerable buzz, given the allure that accompanied Malcolm X’s life story, …
D. Wellington Reviews Precious
At the Greyhound, Seven Stages, and Trailways bus stations, when you approach the ticket agents behind the glass that separates the world of employees and rules from the public at large, you may be asked, “Where are you trying to …
By the time this article sees print, our eyes will have blurred from reading that Barack Obama, the first African American to win the presidential nomination of a major party, has accomplished a feat that many Americans would not have …
Fanon: A Novel by John Edgar Wideman Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 240 pp., $24.00 The overall critical response to John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon was not positive. Carlin Romano wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “At a time when Barack Obama offers America …
The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why by Jabari Asim, and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy.
I appreciate today that a jury summons is serious business, but I didn’t two decades ago, when I was twenty-three years old and living in Savannah, Georgia. I received a jury summons and promptly ignored it. After ignoring the first …
Michael K. Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike,
King’s Last Campaign
New Orleans has been challenging the limits of taste for over a century now. It is the city of Mardi Gras, of decadence, romance, stylish bohemianism, and, on Bourbon Street, unadulterated raunchiness. One might think that nothing could offend the …
Target Zero: A Life in Writing by Eldridge Cleaver
In the early nineteen sixties, Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison crossed swords in an exchange of vehemently argued essays. Ellison’s half of the exchange remains handily available, “The World and the Jug,” reprinted in his now canonical essay collection Shadow …
The fiftieth anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education leads uncomfortably to a South Carolina country town named Summerton. With a population of barely one thousand, Summerton seems too culturally unimpressive a place to have ever participated in a …
