MixedThe Washington Post... an intriguing analogy swept along by Ricks’s impressive storytelling skills. It also misses one crucial point. Ricks is certainly right to say that the best militaries have clear goals and tactics that they execute with precision. But that’s true of any successful organization, from the well-run grade school around the corner to the massive corporation that puts a package on your front step the day after you clicked your order into a shopping cart. What sets the military apart, what lies at its core, is its commitment to using violence to pummel its opponents into submission. The Union Army didn’t turn the course of the Civil War at Gettysburg purely because it had an effective plan, but because it littered the ground with Confederate corpses ... That’s where Ricks’s analogy breaks down, not on the movement’s mechanics but on its mind-set. Imagine a commanding officer marching his unarmed troops toward the enemy lines on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, knowing that they have no way to defend themselves from the assault to come, and believing that through the resulting horror they might achieve something transcendent. It’s impossible to do because militaries operate on a fundamentally different imperative than the movement did. Armies are forces of destruction, as the past century’s dark history makes clear. The movement was a moral crusade, driven by a radical faith that the soul of America could be redeemed by ordinary people willing to take the terrible weight of its racism on their shoulders.
A.J. Baime
PositiveThe Washington Post... vigorous ... a remarkable run, which Baime recounts with the vividness it deserves ... Baime details those difficulties, but he never really grapples with the racial dynamics behind them. It’s a crucial omission, as it’s through those dynamics that White’s story speaks most powerfully to the American dilemma.
Curtis Wilkie
RaveThe Washington Post... vivid ... In [...] When Evil Lived in Laurel, Wilkie follows along through the ludicrously conflicting stories the Knights concocted to cover themselves; the spiraling fear of informers they couldn’t manage to identify; the wild-eyed accusations they started to level at one another; the threats of trials and expulsions and retribution that ran through the ranks; the desertions, the confessions, the breakdowns, the collapsing membership and the deepening despair.
Jill Watts
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review[Watts] is at her best when she gives a frank accounting of the barriers the Black Cabinet encountered ... the value of this thoughtful book becomes clear. For far too long we’ve lived with the comfort the movement’s sacred story provides, that the suffering of a single generation of activists — great as it was — redeemed the soul of America. Now it’s time to face the fact that whatever redemption this nation can claim came through a long, hard, often dispiriting struggle littered with defeats like those the Black Cabinet experienced, inflicted by a racial system of overwhelming and enduring power. That’s not a comforting story to tell. But it is a necessary one.
