Connor Towne O’Neill, a Pennsylvania native author and journalist who teaches at Auburn University in Alabama, set out to understand American racism by visiting monuments of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who represented all that was evil about the South ... O’Neill’s first book is a dazzling reminder that American racism is robust and virulent. He writes with a fluency of American culture that portends well for his books to come.
The narrative excels in blending personal and historical throughout, but especially in Memphis, as the author visits a church on the site of Forrest's former slave mart and delves into the general's involvement in the 1864 Fort Pillow Massacre ... O'Neill is a talented writer, and this powerful meditation on collective memory is necessary reading for knowing ourselves and our history.
This timely, engaging book examines whiteness through controversial Confederate symbols and statues that have become a focal point in the national discussion about systemic racism and white supremacy. Producer of the podcast White Lies, O’Neill focuses on several statues and a building named after Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who looms large in Confederate lore ... O’Neill uses a literary-journalism style and gives voice to both sides of the argument ... Still, it’s clear in both O’Neill’s personal reckoning and his brief history of the monuments and their ties to white supremacy that he believes they are one of the many ways we keep 'intact the things we want to believe about our country, our past, our present, ourselves.'
Though O’Neill doesn’t go too deep into his own experience, sharing his inner monologue serves as an invitation for white readers to likewise examine the ways they have benefited from systems built by and in the interest of white people. Along the way, O’Neill offers all readers a lens through which to examine their relationship to the past.The monuments O’Neill writes about were erected long after Forrest’s death. In this way, the Confederacy isn’t just history. It’s a foundation for how our present-day society functions. In recounting the ways Nathan Bedford Forrest’s legacy shows up in contemporary life, Down Along With That Devil’s Bones points to the oppression these monuments seek to preserve. This book is a well-researched history and a call for reformation in America.
A personal examination of one of the great divides in our country today ... In his first book, the author widens his inquiry into race and violence with an urgent and eye-opening look at Confederate monuments in the South ... O’Neill brings us right into the historically significant action ... Essential reading for how we got from 'Appomattox to Charlottesville—and where we might go next.'
White Lies podcast producer O’Neill debuts with an eloquent and provocative examination of the links between protests over Confederate monuments in the South and the resurgence of white supremacy ... [O'Neill] movingly documents recent acts of racist violence, including the 2015 Charleston church shooting and the 2017 killing of a woman protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. O’Neill writes with grace and genuine curiosity, allowing people on all sides of the issue to speak for themselves. This inquiry into the legacy of American slavery is equally distressing and illuminating.
