Richard Prince’s Book Notes: 10 to Start Summer
As the summer reading season begins, a collection of first-hand reports on the civil rights movement, along with memoirs by a pioneer L.A. broadcaster and the work of a British journalist whose father was executed highlight a list of 10 recent books by or about black journalists.
Patrik Henry Bass
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Patrik Henry Bass, book editor of Essence magazine, offers “Like a Mighty Stream: The March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963” (Running Press, $18.95).
“For as long as I can remember, February was Black History Month, meaning that I would have to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ almost every day of that month,” writes Bass, who is 37. “And I must confess that I didn’t understand the true magnitude, the true meaning of the song until I began writing this book. . . . Having grown up in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement, I want my generation to hear the memories of the struggle. I sense a disconnect between my generation and that of the Civil Rights Movement. To some of us, forty years seems like an eternity ago,” he writes. “When I did the research . . I was forced to make some apologies to the generation before me.” Among those providing eyewitness accounts of the march in this short (157-page) book are Evelyn Cunningham, who covered the event for the Pittsburgh Courier, Vertamae Grosvenor, now of National Public Radio, and Ed Bradley of CBS, who in a two-page remembrance reminds readers that “voting is key to choosing your own future.”
Michele N-K Collison
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Michele N-K Collison, a free-lance writer based in Washington, D.C., and the mother of twins, has “It’s All Good Hair: The Guide to Styling and Grooming Black Children’s Hair” (Amistad Press, $12.95, paper).
Collision’s book is designed to teach parents how to groom and create hairstyles for both boys and girls, but some of the advice could leave readers questioning her expertise. Under the “locks” chapter, for example, she writes, “don’t refer to locks as ‘dreadlocks’: There is nothing dreadful about locks.” The line betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the origin of locks’ popularity: In Jamaica, the Rastafarians do call their locks “dreadlocks,” and there, “dread” is a fine word with a positive connotation.
Joseph Dyer
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Joseph Dyer, a former reporter at Los Angeles’ KNXT-TV, now KCBS-TV, has “A Retired Black Television Broadcaster’s Lifetime of Memories: From the Cotton Fields to CBS.”
This is a self-published book, available through 1st Books.com in electronic format ($4.95), paperback ($11.50) or hard covers ($17.50).
Dyer, 68, has produced a great read and an important one for those interested in the pioneers of our business, but one that awaits a professional publisher to give what is essentially a manuscript a thorough editing. Writing as much a personal tale as a professional one, Dyer starts us with his upbringing in Bogalusa, La., taking us through service in the Air Force in the late 50s and early 60s in Grand Forks, N.D., where he engineered his rise from clerk to television producer and editor of the base newspaper.
After leaving the Air Force, Dyer eventually landed a job as a writer-producer (his choice) at KNXT-TV, the only black journalist at any L.A. television station when the Watts riot erupted on Aug. 11, 1965. But don’t think that the station rushed Dyer out the door to cover it. The news director insisted that Dyer not be deployed, lest the station be accused of using him only on “black” stories. Our hero, who didn’t want to be left out of the biggest story of the day, finally persuaded the station to send him.
The book also relates Dyer’s encounters with Muhammad Ali and George Wallace, and provides Exhibit A of how insensitive television executives can be. Dyer describes how, as community affairs manager, the brass above him undermined arrangements he had made to keep the station on good terms with the Latino community — to the corporate managers’ eventual regret. Dyer stayed with the station for 30 years, retiring in June 1995.
Aminatta Forna
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Aminatta Forna, a British television journalist and documentary producer, offers “The Devil That Danced on the Water” (Atlantic Monthly Press, $25), a nicely written narrative that chronicles her efforts to learn how her father, a Scottish-trained doctor who became an opposition leader in his native Sierra Leone, came to be executed on trumped-up charges in 1974, when she was 10 years old. “She tracked down almost everyone who was used to build the shabby and unconvincing case against him, based on statements made under torture (later disavowed) and pure fabrications by the police. It was agonising work. Her interviews with broken men are extremely moving, and tell everything of the world that vanished with her father,” wrote the Guardian in England.
Said the Times of London: “Most of the memoirs of the continent have been written by white people whose principal relationship is with a landscape that is as boundless as it is beautiful — as long as it is empty. The Africans in these books are little more than furniture or trees. Forna’s memoir, by contrast, is a great African bus of a book, full to bursting with voices, chickens, stories and warmth. This peopling alone makes it unique. . . . Aminatta Forna’s cacophony of voices makes hers an African memoir like no other.”
John W. Fountain
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John W. Fountain, Chicago correspondent for the New York Times, has “True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity” (Public Affairs, $26).
“John W. Fountain grew up on some of the meanest streets in Chicago, where drugs, crime, decay, and broken homes consigned so many black children to a life of despair and self-destruction. A father at 17, a college dropout at 19, a welfare case soon after, Fountain was on the verge of giving up all hope. One thing saved him — his faith, his own true vine,” says the publicity material.
While this is a personal story, most journalists can relate to one tale he tells, of being in a college summer work program where he reconnected with the joy of writing, only to find when the final product was published that “my stories had been obliterated and the one that bore my name was a story I had not written.”
The perpetrator was the “bourgeois” director of the summer youth program who apparently wanted to prove who was boss. Fountain ran into her years later when he was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, told her that “every time I thought about giving up, I thought of you and kept going,” and confides to the reader that he felt “like Michael Corleone at the end of ‘The Godfather,’ settling all family business.” The coup de grace was that he was then covering Bill Clinton‘s 1992 presidential campaign, and his byline was on the front page the next morning for all, including his onetime tormenter, to see. Before Fountain landed in the New York Times’ Chicago bureau, he spent time at the Washington Post and at other papers in Chicago.
Deric Gilliard
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Deric Gilliard, who did public relations for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1994 to 1998, has “Living in the Shadows of a Legend: Heroes and ‘Sheroes’ Who Marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Gilliard Communications, Atlanta, $25, paper).
“As we kept going around the country, I kept running across all these old people who had committed their entire lives to the struggle for equality and justice,” said Gilliard, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, “at great personal sacrifice. I asked them if they would do it all again, and every single one said, ‘in a heartbeat.'” Gilliard, who is 48, now works for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Atlanta. He says he is trying to capture as many of the stories of those who worked with King as possible. Six of the 20 in this collection, which took four years to compile and includes six women and three whites, have since died. Gilliard says he is working on a sequel to this first book produced by his communications company.
Library of America
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The Library of America, which previously compiled a two-volume set of reporting on the Vietnam War, now has “Reporting Civil Rights” (two volumes, $40 each), a must-have for students of black journalism history, especially the second volume. The two books cover, in turn, 1941-63 and 1963-73, comprising nearly 200 pieces by 151 writers.
While few black journalists worked for white newspapers for most of those years, the Library compensates by republishing pieces from the black press, from magazines and books, and by black non-journalists such as James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is included. The white journalists represented include many well-known names, including Renata Adler, Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wicker, Hunter S. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Russell Baker and David Halberstam. Their work establishes the you-are-there feeling that only contemporary accounts provide.
Among the pieces by black journalists are the reports of Robert Richardson, a classified advertising messenger who volunteered to report on the Watts riots of 1965 for the color-challenged Los Angeles Times; Earl Caldwell in the New York Times from Memphis on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; a 1968 story by C. Gerald Fraser, “S.N.C.C. in Decline,” also in the Times; a Life magazine piece from 1967 on Stokely Carmichael by Gordon Parks; Ted Poston in the New York Post on “Florida’s legal lynching” from 1949 and on the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956; George S. Schuyler on “Jim Crow in the North” for the American Mercury in 1949; and Carl T. Rowan reporting from South Carolina in 1953 for the Minneapolis Tribune.
The Web site makes the project a work in progress by providing space for others who covered the Movement to add their comments.
Julianne Malveaux and Reginna A. Green
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Julianne Malveaux, the economist and commentator, and Reginna Green, a writer, activist and research associate, have edited “The Paradox of Loyalty: An African American Response to the War on Terrorism” (Third World Press, $26.95). Among the contributors to this volume are columnists Askia Muhammad and Roland Martin, Marcia Ann Gillespie, former editor of Ms. and Essence magazines, and cartoonist Aaron McGruder, who contributes “Boondocks” panels to introduce each chapter.
“W.E.B. DuBois talked about the duality of our African American existence of ‘two warring souls in one black body,'” writes Malveaux, “even as our American nationalism and outrage at this sneak attack angers us, our African identities must allow us to put this foul attack in context. We cannot condone the hijacking of airplanes, the bombing of buildings, and the loss of innocent life. But we must acknowledge that our nation’s own hubris may have pushed others into testing our power and exposing our vulnerabilities.”
Lori S. Robinson
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Lori S. Robinson, who as associate editor of the late Emerge magazine wrote in 1997 of her own rape, has “I Will Survive: The African-American Guide to Healing from Sexual Assault” (Seal Press, $12.95, paper).
It is described as “a self-help book for women and men survivors of sexual assault or childhood sexual abuse [that] provides practical and inspirational information about the criminal justice system and physical, emotional and spiritual healing.” The book is also designed to be “a risk-reduction and prevention manual.”
“An article I wrote about my assault and the alleged assault of a college student — for which I won a first place award at the 1998 National Association of Black Journalists annual convention — generated an outpouring of letters from readers affected by sexual violence. Those letters inspired me to write this book,” Robinson says.
Shawn Wilson
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Shawn Wilson, a New York-based documentary film maker, contributes essays to “Separate, But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson” (Public Affairs, $35).
During segregation, every black community seemingly had a photographer who documented its social and political life. In Greenville, Miss., it was Henry Clay Anderson, who established the Anderson Photo Service in 1948. Fifty years later, Wilson called him from New York to find out whether Anderson had more photographs of his late mother like the one he’d taken when Wilson was young. That led to this book project, in which Anderson tells his own story while Mississippi-raised author Clifton Taulbert (“Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored”) recalls the city’s life during segregation. Northern photographers “captured our tears,” as they were “interested in the cruelty of Jim Crow,” Taulbert writes. They “missed the colored medical auxiliaries, the well-dressed wives of black doctors who proudly framed their degrees from Nashville’s Meharry Medical School. . . . the colored couples who had two sets of clothing, one that they worked in as servants and the “good” set they wore among their friends and families.”
With 130 photographs, “Separate, But Equal” shows that side of Greenville. Wilson is working on a documentary about the city during the Jim Crow era that he hopes to finish by fall.
