A MOST TOLERANT LITTLE TOWN: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation, by Rachel Louise MartinIn the dozen years since I read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson’s narrative masterpiece about the Great Migration, one passage has remained embedded in my mind.
It is a description of Black men, women and children picking cotton in the 1920s.
I was put in mind of that passage as I read Rachel Louise Martin’s “A Most Tolerant Little Town,” her unsparing account of an early effort at school desegregation in the Jim Crow South.
It is another to be confronted with a meticulous, day-by-day reconstruction of relentless bigotry in action.
To read “A Most Tolerant Little Town” is to be flooded with cross burnings, mob riots, night-riding raids, bombings, street-corner ambushes and racial slurs.
Persons:
Rachel Louise Martin, ” Isabel Wilkerson’s, Wilkerson, boll, Rachel Louise Martin’s “, Jim Crow, Martin
Organizations:
School, Suns
Locations:
Little, Clinton, Tenn