MixedThe Washington PostAfter four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, it is almost inspiring to read an author who thinks America still has a chance of achieving racial justice ... earnestly concieved ... A former speechwriter for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Johnson writes with lyrical clarity, delivering tales that are by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking ... While this is an enormous moral problem, Johnson is an Obama-like pragmatist and tends to focus on how racism prevents Blacks from accessing the Promise, the distinctly American opportunity to put freedom and liberty to work in pursuit of one’s flourishing ... What kind of solidarity in favor of racial justice can be expected of a nation so unsure of its own moral compass? National solidarity is a lofty ambition, but no matter its earnestness, it will only ever be an ambition as long as a guiding nugget of Black wisdom must prevail — when people tell you who they are, you best believe them.
Thomas Healy
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewHealy’s greatest strength is his eye for the procedural details — the who, what, when and where of the Soul City story. Yet his book is a lost opportunity ... One part of the problem is Healy’s reluctance to contextualize the case of Soul City. He acknowledges racism generally but presents the slow and inevitable collapse of the project as though it were separate from the wider phenomenon of institutionalized inequality ... Smaller problems abound as well. Though Healy early invokes the fact that Soul City was located near Klan country, he only ever vaguely signals that the city faced local racial resistance. And though he energetically describes a minor player in the Watergate scandal as a \'dirty trickster,\' somehow the segregationist Senator Jesse Helms, who promised McKissick that he’d “kill Soul City,” is never called what he was: a racist. There is much to be learned in Soul City about the facts of the case. But if we want to know what the project meant at the time and what it should mean for us today, Healy’s book provides more of a reason to move on from rather than linger on its pages.
Jennifer Berry Hawes
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... soul-shaking ... [Hawes] is s a writer with the exceedingly rare ability to observe sympathetically both particular events and the horizon against which they take place without sentimentalizing her subjects. In Grace Will Lead Us Home, the sorrow of the massacre’s three survivors, and that of the relatives left to mourn the dead, is vividly rendered but not to the point of caricature. Similarly admirable are moments when she depicts the difficulties faced by Roof’s family without compelling us to feel for them what we feel for the victims and their relatives ... Hawes is so admirably steadfast in her commitment to bearing witness that one is compelled to consider the story she tells from every possible angle. In doing so, one could be persuaded by a third rationale cited by the survivors in favor of forgiveness: that it leads to closure. Yet one of the most haunting threads in Hawes’s book concerns the way none of the people deeply touched by all the death Roof dealt has achieved anything like closure.
