In 1919 West Helena, Arkansas a group of black sharecroppers met to discuss unionising. This provocation ended with a riot – really, a massacre – that led 4 whites and 100 blacks dead. And how did authorities respond? 300 blacks were jailed, 12 of whom were executed in trials lasting one hour or more.
Robert Whitaker’s [...]

Long before Zadie Smith’s White Teeth defined a second generation of British emigrants came Samuel Selvon. Born in Trinidad Selvon’s novels, beginning with 1956’s Lonely Londoner, brought to life the ‘cities within a city’ – divided by class and race.
“Because Sam has written so authentically, he has made it easier for the rest of us [...]

You wonder about the world we live in, and then you learn that friendly fascist Walt Disney is the most translated author of all time. Suddenly it all makes sense.
Read more HERE

Source: New Yorker
Top 9 Racist Disney moments HERE

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 gets another look with Michael Dobbs’s ‘One Minute to Midnight’ which tells how the world came one or two miscommunications away from nuclear annihilation; and close enough to Jamaica for Soviet warships to be visible off the coast.
And as the book reviewer suggests, just imagine what would’ve happened were [...]

Richard Wright, the pioneering black American author of Native Son is having several of his works republished.
The omnibus Black Power contains two of the three travel books he wrote in the mid-1950s, together with his White Man, Listen! lectures.
There’s also a novel he began in the final weeks of his life but never finished, A [...]