100 Books Like A Fool's Errand

I love this book because of the strange and wonderful 10-year-old female protagonist, a white girl who is “rescued” from Kiowa captivity on the Texas frontier in 1870, a time of Indian raids and pervasive anarchy.

This girl was assimilated into her Indian family and considers her “rescue” a kidnapping; she remembers almost nothing of her family of origin. She is icy-veined, fearless, and creatively violent. The scene where she improvises ammunition from hundreds of dimes (yes, coins) blew my mind.

From this book, I learned about how whites (especially children) who were captured by Indians quickly abandoned their former lives and usually did not want to return if given the opportunity. The language is spare, tough, and beautiful. I did not want this book to end.

I taught this book years ago while an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Written like a novel, although a serious work of history, it is not your usual book on Reconstruction. In compelling prose, Evans details the struggles of the Lowry Band of Lumbee Indians who clashed with Confederate officials in southeastern North Carolina during the Civil War. Henry Berry Lowry managed to escape after killing a rebel official. He took to the swamps, eluding capture with the help of local African Americans and Native Americans. It is a little-known story among people outside of that region and shows the complicated nature of putting the country back together again after a Civil War. I had never heard of this tribe until encountering the book and found the story unlike anything else in Reconstruction literature.

I know the author personally and had a chance to read portions of the manuscript before it went to press. It is by far the best account of the occupation of the former Confederacy by the U.S. Army during Reconstruction. Meticulously researched, it gives readers a firm sense of where the military was and when, as well as how it was forced to confront insurgent white Southerners determined to obstruct advances in equal rights through whatever means possible, including violence. That intransigence caused increases in military supervision of governments, leading the author to state, “Military Reconstruction therefore exposed the necessary interdependence of democracy and coercion. (180)” There’s the irony—that expanded freedom required military control of governments. The author is a very good writer, having won the Flannery O’Connor Award for a short story collection Spit Baths.

This is a brilliant, harrowing book that should be must-reading for anyone who might still be swayed by the worn-out moonlight-and-magnolias mythology of the “Old South.”

Drawing heavily on a wealth of remarkable first-person testimony, Williams chronicles the systematic brutalization of usually helpless Black women by white men. In particular, she makes all too clear that rape and other forms of sexual abuse were not just incidental but central to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan in its campaign to assert power over freed people.

Although women couldn’t vote, the abuse of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers was a way to intimidate the Black men who could. Williams also shows how that abuse continued long after Reconstruction to become part of the repressive fabric of the Jim Crow era that followed.

I found some of the accounts in Williams’s book difficult to read, but I don’t think the full… show more.

The term “Scalawag” was pretty close to a curse word in the Reconstruction era South, meant to smear native whites who became Republicans and allied themselves politically with freedmen.

Baggett explodes the tenacious myth that the “scalawags” were no more than a gang of disreputable, self-serving louts who “shamed” the South by working with Blacks. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he shows that far from being sleazy opportunists they were often remarkably brave men the roots of whose political activism lay in clandestine Unionist resistance to the wartime Confederacy.

After the war, most of them embraced the Republican party from patriotic conviction and support for its expansion of democracy, as well as—if less frequently—the cause of extending civil rights to Blacks. Along with Black activists, they were frequent targets of the Ku Klux Klan; many died for their beliefs.

I found this an extraordinarily enlightening book… show more.

This book gave me shivers, both from the monsters and the evil that humans are capable of.

This novella from P. Djeli Clark manages to be action-packed while still dealing with heavy topics like racism and slavery. It’s the 1920s, and Maryse Boudreaux is a Black woman living in the deep south of the United States. Maryse and her friends have formed a militia to fight the ‘Ku Kluxes,’ monsters who take the form of Ku Klux Klan members to spread hate further.

There are points in this book where it seems like all is lost, which makes it all the more satisfying when the heroes rally. 

As a writer, this book enabled me to get inside the mindset of Eastern Oregon Klan members in the 1920s. The heart of the book is the weekly meeting minutes of a local KKK chapter, which allowed me to see through the eyes of the men who made up this organization from May 1922 through April 1924. Their concerns included recruiting new members, supporting Klan-friendly political leaders at all levels of government, preventing Catholics from employment in teaching and other positions, and supporting a state bill that would ban Catholic schools. All this helped me create realistic characters with social and political views that are very different from my own.

As a fiction writer trying to depict 1920s Portland, Oregon, I found limitless inspiration from this book. Chandler and Kennedy give the background leading up to Prohibition, chronicling the women’s temperance and suffrage movements; the establishment opposition to the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies; the organized crime in the city and police corruption; and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. When George Baker became mayor in 1917, he took advantage of all these elements to control a system of corruption that kept him in power. While the book does not focus on the KKK, it offers important details about its powerful influence on this particular city at this time in history.

I love Hill’s passion for elucidating our history in order to combat prejudice. She approaches the origins of fear and intolerance from diverse perspectives, starting with violent clashes between 1700s explorers and indigenous peoples of Oregon’s Pacific coast. She describes the long history of stealing Oregon land from natives, and how the US Civil War contributed to the exclusion of African Americans from Oregon in its state constitution. Later she shows how D. W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nation was instrumental in the re-emergence of the KKK in the 1920s, and WWI propaganda against Germans and fear of Bolshevism contributed to Klan hatred of immigrants. In later chapters Hill brings us up to the present summarizing anti-LGBTQ political initiatives and the Black Lives Matter movement.

I always love it when a work of history connects with and helps me understand the present, and Linda Gordon’s book certainly does that.

Not only does she provide a riveting account of the revival of the Klan in the 1920s, she clearly demonstrates the tremendous impact the organization had on America during this period and long beyond, through its skillful use of demagoguery, its canny media strategy and its underlying politics of resentment.