A Long Dark Night

May 2, 2016
Lawyer and historian Martinez (Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present) tackles the subject of race through the decades following Reconstruction. Beginning with an account of the federal government's role in legitimizing discrimination under law, Martinez then moves onto the violent repression of African-American rights, the Southern Populist movements and their white architects, and a once-over survey of the Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois dichotomy. The Great Migration follows, and the book slides into a cultural perspective with diminished attention to the role of law as it attends to popular racist images of African-Americans in cartoons, advertisements, and film. (For example, by focusing on D.W. Griffith's fictionalization of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation, Martinez elides the Klan's real-life deeds.) Martinez hits historical landmarks (e.g., Marcus Garvey, the Tuskegee Airmen) and is particularly informative when delving into juridical processes (e.g., Plessy v. Ferguson, the failed attempt to achieve anti-lynching legislation). Nevertheless, there remains a hit-or-miss quality to this ambitious undertaking, which seeks to merge legal, political, social, and cultural history into an instructive and well-meaning corrective to a lacuna in popular history.