Tomlinson Hill

May 19, 2014
On December 15, 2001, as Chris Tomlinson sat in the sun with Afghan warlords, LaDainian Tomlinson and the San Diego Chargers were losing to the Oakland Raiders. In this fast-paced and spellbinding tale, Chris, who is white, narrates with great verve the tale of a Texas plantation owned over the years by both white families and black families—including LaDainian’s—that share the same name. Drawing deeply on family letters, scrapbooks, and historical archives, Chris traces the history of Tomlinson Hill from the mid–19th century to 2007, when the oldest Tomlinson to live on the plantation dies. In 1865, just before his death, the then-owner of the plantation, Jim, informed his slaves of their status as free men and at least two of the former slave families on the land adopted the Tomlinson name. By 1945, Albert, who was white, had divided Tomlinson Hill into lots and sold them to black families who had spent generations on the land; a descendant of one of those families, O.T., raised his family, including his son, LaDainian, there. Tomlinson not only offers an engaging and poignant look into his own past but also a riveting glimpse of the history of race relations in Texas.

June 15, 2014
A foreign correspondent examines the intertwining histories of two Tomlinson families-one white, the other black-who shared a common past spent on a Texas slave plantation.After spending more than a decade covering wars in Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan, Texas native Tomlinson returned to the United States with his consciousness of man's inhumanity to man permanently raised. Determined to expose the way his family past was implicated in the problematic history of racial relations in America, Tomlinson began by probing an alleged connection to former NFL running back LaDainian Tomlinson. The author learned that both he and LaDainian had descended from families that had lived on a plantation called Tomlinson Hill. Scouring family papers, archival documents, area history books and the Internet, Tomlinson pieced together the stories of the two families. Starting in the years preceding the Civil War, his ancestors established Tomlinson Hill and began keeping slaves who would eventually take the family name. Later mythologies about the South would transform all slave owners, including the Tomlinsons, into symbols of graciousness and gentility. At the same time, they erased one essential truth: that violence and injustice toward blacks was a fact of life on all plantations. This attitude persisted into the 20th century, becoming embedded in the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan, which claimed to celebrate the "heroic" values of the Old South and managed to draw members of Tomlinson's own family into the Klan's ranks during the 1920s. Even after the civil rights movement, the supposedly enlightened teachers in the Dallas county schools Tomlinson attended "walked a careful line in teaching about race, holding no one responsible for the sins of the past." The author offers not only a detailed history of two families brought together by circumstances greater than themselves; he also opens an honest conversation necessary to begin healing the centuries-old racial rifts that have marred American history.Cleareyed and courageously revealing.

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February 1, 2014

Supervisory correspondent for the Associated Press in Austin, TX, Tomlinson spent 14 years as a foreign correspondent, then returned home to report on a far more personal story: the two families, one black and one white, who trace their ancestry to the Central Texas slave plantation owned by his family. Especially interesting is the discussion of Tomlinson's relationship with LaDainian Tomlinson, one of the top running backs in NFL history. The author's recent documentary on this subject won the Silver Heart Award at the Dallas International Film Festival in 2013, and several PBS stations will be airing the film.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2014
An award-winning foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, Tomlinson turns his journalist's acute eye on his own family background to present an unflinching look at the racial history of one small Texas community, from the days leading up to the Civil War, through the civil rights movement, to the present day. In telling his own story, however, Tomlinson must also tell that of the black families who, by accident of ownership, not birth, share his name. His was a family of slaveholders, and the descendant of one of those slaves is his contemporary, NFL legend LaDainian Tomlinson. Both men grew up mired in the mythology of their families' legacy, one that correspondent Tomlinson portrays as a racist, misogynistic hotbed, and one that athlete Tomlinson works hard to leave behind. Through his meticulous research into not only his ancestors' but also America's past, Tomlinson sets his and LaDainian's very personal narratives within the larger scope of national events, from Reconstruction to life in the Jim Crow South to today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)