The Strivers' Row Spy

June 15, 2016
During the days of the Harlem Renaissance, the nascent FBI's first African-American agent gets a daunting and dangerous assignment.At Middlebury College's 1919 graduation ceremony, the imposing James Gladforth recruits Sidney Temple into the recently formed Bureau of Investigation even before the young man has received his diploma. J. Edgar Hoover himself interviews Sidney in the Capitol building. His first assignment is a provocative one: to monitor the activities of firebrand orator Marcus Garvey and his opposition to W.E.B. DuBois and his organization, the NAACP. Sidney has the additional tricky task of convincing his wife, Loretta, to move from West Philadelphia to Washington while keeping his new assignment a secret. There's another surprise when the case takes them to the heart of Harlem. Neophyte Sidney is the ideal first-person guide for the reader, introducing many significant figures from the era, like poet James Weldon Johnson, Adam Clayton Powell, and Max Eastman, who edits the Liberator, a provocative magazine. The complex conflict between DuBois and Garvey turns in no small part on Garvey's view as a Jamaican that the Negro will never be a full participant in American society. Sidney catches a lucky break when he earns Garvey's trust by pursuing a would-be assailant. At the same time, he suspects that someone powerful and covert is controlling these events. Overstreet's debut novel could use a little more pace and a little less embellishment, but he successfully immerses the reader in a fascinating and little understood era in the nation's history.

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Starred review from November 1, 2016

Overstreet's debut introduces Sidney Temple, the FBI's first African American agent, as he keeps an eye on rival leaders Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois in 1920s Harlem. Solid local color and involving historical details. (African American Fiction and More, 5/18/16)

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2016
Debuting novelist Overstreet dares to mix pulse-racing spy fiction and seminal historical figures of 1920s Harlem, bringing the popular separatist Marcus Garvey and his trained African Legionnaires and UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), along with famed integrationist historian W. E. B. DuBois and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), vividly to life as flesh-and-blood men passionate in their conflicting views on how to foster better circumstances for colored Americans. We meet lead character Sidney Temple at his college graduation in Vermont in 1919, when he is secretly recruited to join the Bureau of Investigation headed by J. Edgar Hoover. The bureau hopes that Temple and other agents of color can better infiltrate UNIA and the NAACP and bring down both leaders in accord with Hoover's wrong-headed belief that social equality of the races, however achieved, could only be a communist plot to overthrow the U.S. government. Temple ably navigates the double (arguably triple) life of a spy with family, friends, and racist colleagues. So convincing is Overstreet that readers will forget that these events never actually happened.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)