Lisa

The Little Piece of the World That We Know

Across seven decades as a working reporter and over 10,000 columns filed, journalist Murray Kempton’s approach, from the ‘50s to his death in 1997, was always the same: stick up for the people and do so with uncommon style and grace. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, he reported for the New York Post, the New Republic, Newsday, and the New York Review of Books – among other publications – and was credited, by David Halberstam, for pioneering the genre of New Journalism.

Kempton elevated the art of reporting as both a stylist and a moralist, matching his attentiveness to wit and irony with what one critic called “a compassion that is sometimes unruly.” The scion of an aristocratic Southern family who rejected his staid upbringing to become a radical socialist, he was an eloquent defender of American communists during the McCarthy era and one of the first white reporters to make the Civil Rights Movement into a beat. And he was an indelible New York character, traveling across Manhattan by bike, even as an old man, a Walkman around his neck.

The Little Piece of the World That We Know: Selected Writings of Murray Kempton is the first collection of Kempton’s writing to appear in over a quarter-century. In collecting these pieces, historian Andrew Holter, with the collaboration of Kempton’s estate and the family of Barbara Epstein, his longtime companion, blows the dust off an illustrious body of work. The book puts one of the most revered, if too long unsung, American nonfiction writers of the 20th century into conversation with controversies of the 21st that he anticipated. These include the ascendancy of Donald Trump, whom Kempton took seriously in the 1980s; the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement; the disappearance of daily newspapers; and the crises of homelessness and mass incarceration.

Especially among reporters themselves, Kempton’s name is invoked with the kind of reverence reserved not merely for a master of the craft but for one of the profession’s virtuoso stylists and a paragon of journalistic integrity.

Radical Acts of Justice

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, community bail funds surged, as a form of protest and a focus of philanthropic energy. While they were hardly new, bail funds garnered attention as an effective and individual means of responding to the failures of the police and the courts and a way to channel outrage in a pandemic era. And these funds have made a difference – after months of uprisings, thousands of protesters and ordinary people were freed from jail as millions of dollars were donated to bail funds nationwide.

In Radical Acts of Justice: Shifting Power to the People, from Community Bail Funds to People’s Budgets, Jocelyn Simonson, who has written extensively about the ways that social movements shift our views of justice, looks at bail funds and other ground-up actions that are, one by one, effecting social change and contesting preconceived notions about freedom and safety. She explores the problematic idea that individuals who are prosecuted are not the people who matter when it comes to politics. Actions like bail funds, courtwatching, and people’s budgets give agency to these individuals and their families and loved ones, and force us to recognize the deep forms of violence in each and every corner of the carceral state.

By focusing on the reforms that shift power to the people who are most directly affected by the system, Radical Acts of Justice proposes that communal resistance within the system is a form of justice-making itself. The stories of grassroots activism that Jocelyn Simonson follows are a reminder of the power, and unpredictability, of planting many seeds. These forms of resistance open up transformational possibilities that would otherwise elude us and that can lead to change that is both urgent and necessary.

The Injustice of Place

More than a half century after the January morning when President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty, scholars and pundits alike are still debating its impact. Yet few, if any, of even the program’s most ardent defenders would claim the war has been won. Even in the years before the pandemic-induced economic crisis of 2020, when poverty was at its lowest level in a generation, hardship remained visible in the swelling demand at food pantries, high rates of eviction, and a sharp increase in child homelessness.

It is beyond time for a new way to measure poverty, and to identify and put in place new strategies to confront it. The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the History of America’s Internal Colonies harnesses the immense growth in the nation’s data infrastructure to propose a far more nuanced way to measure well-being than has ever before been possible. Our method reveals that the pockets of the nation where deep disadvantage is most keenly felt today are those in which poverty and other social ills have persisted for generations. With big data as our starting point, yet knowing it could only take us so far, we became students of the histories of these regions. Through embedded ethnographic research, we engaged intensely with five communities of deep disadvantage that are representative of these regions, observing and gathering stories. These sources reveal how centuries-old exploitation has retained its ugly grip through generations of violence, segregated schools, elite political corruption, and systemic racism embedded in government policy. Each of these mechanisms have mired these places in a structural cycle of poverty, precarious health, and a lack of mobility.

Black Man’s Burden

After the Civil War, as national leaders hurried to consolidate and expand their reunited empire, Congress approved the largest standing force the United States had fielded in its history. This regular army included, for the first time, African American regiments—the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry, and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry— initially filled with hundreds of formerly enslaved men who were otherwise maligned in almost every corner of American society. As armed representatives of the state, the “Black regulars” found unusual equality in the army and performed critical roles in service to the country’s military aspirations. They helped secure United States empire in the transcontinental West and along the Mexican border, and then in the Caribbean and the Pacific. They became heroes in the Black press, and indeed,to many of their white officers, who endorsed them for combat decorations and sang their praises. For half a century, Black regulars aided in the enlargement of what expansionists by 1900 were calling the Greater United States.

But what might have been a path to equal treatment and patriotic credibility for Black soldiers instead inflamed white supremacist outrage. Over time, the fact of armed African Americans proved intolerable to many white people, from local citizens to military officials to some officers in the four regiments. Here was the uniformed Black man’s burden—he was both agent and target of white supremacy and state authority. And when bigotry and violence became unbearable, some Black regulars took on a third role as rebels against Jim Crow. In the worst but not first rupture of these impossible contradictions, men in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry staged a deadly uprising against police brutality and racism in Houston, Texas, in July 1917.

Black Man’s Burden: Jim Crow and Mutiny in an Age of Empire tells the epic, globe-spanning story of the rise and fall of the Black regiments. The book centers them in a revised history of American empire and military growth during a pivotal half-century for both, following the Black regulars as they abetted settler colonialism in the West; hemispheric dominion in Cuba and Mexico; and global empire in Hawai’i and the Philippines. For five decades, these men projected American power, attracted white supremacist violence, and responded with acts of both accommodation and resistance.Their story ends in Houston, where the rebellion of infantrymen in the Twenty-Fourth led to the largest murder trial inUnited States history and the execution of nineteen Black soldiers.

A Madman’s Will

The untold saga of John Randolph’s 383 slaves, freed in his much-contested will of 1821, finally comes to light.

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph’s cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph’s wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves—and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen’s dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman’s Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.

Lisa

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