Method without method
A memoir of truth, transformation, and a new American story
Rafael G. Warnock
288pp. Penguins press. $ 28.
A renowned African-American church minister, novice politicians will launch a US Senate campaign in 2020 to challenge wealthy right-wing incumbents. Faced with his long probabilities, he is in a breathtakingly close competition based on his promise to find a way to bring his state and country closer to the ideal “loved community” of the civil rights movement. Won. This upset victory allows Democrats to dominate the Senate with a single vote, raising the prospect of progressive reform.
It’s certainly unlikely, but this is exactly what happened to Warnock. The Chief Pastor of the Evenizer Baptist Church in Atlanta (formerly Dr. King’s Church) follows in the footsteps of his friend and parishioner John Lewis, facilitating the transition from a spiritual counselor to a politician. I did. In 1965, the year of the March from Selma to Montgomery and the Voting Rights Act, Gandhi’s great intellectual, Bayard Rustin, is famous for encouraging civil rights leaders to switch from protest to politics. Unfortunately, the list of leaders advised by Rustin is relatively small, and at least in the national context, Lewis and Jesse Jackson are the most prominent civil rights figures seeking and retaining their position in Washington. ..
Democrats were ecstatic about Warnock’s election. This is half of the “Georgian miracle” elected by two Democratic senators (Warnock and John Osov) in the Deep South. But many didn’t know what to expect. The lack of political records behind him raised questions not only about Warnock’s legislative priorities, but also about his views on abstract issues such as the proper relationship between religion and politics.
Answers to these and many other questions can be found on the sparkling page of his memoir “A Way Out of No Way.” In nine fascinating chapters, Warnock offers an extraordinary life story, from the poor beginnings of the savanna to the arrival at Capitol Hill. In the process, he speaks faith, truth, and reflects with considerable frankness and insight into the meaning and importance of political and social redemption.
Alabama V. King
Criminal Trial Launches Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King Jr.
Dan Abrams and Fred D. Gray, David Fisher
384pp. Hanover Square. $ 28.99.
Gray is a lawyer and still practicing at the age of 91, but he continues to be the dark hero of the modern civil rights struggle. His name rarely appears on the list of the movement’s most influential and respected activists. They fought outdoors, often on the streets, for freedom and social equality.
In contrast, the relationship between the Gray Movement’s high drama and its most prominent practitioners (A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Fanny Luhammer, John Lewis, etc.) is largely indirect. It was hidden by the target. His contribution to racial justice was made in Alabama courts, not in mass gatherings. Unlike the movement’s most famous lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, he never made a name for himself in Washington and performed legal magic only once in a discussion at the US Supreme Court. Instead, he stayed close to his home in communities like Montgomery and Selma, laying the foundation for equal justice under the law.
Gray’s career as Alabama’s most effective advocate at the heart of African-American legal rights, as revealed in Alabama vs. King, is the attraction of grit, determination, and court insight. It will be a typical story. Gray associated parts of this story with earlier books such as “Bass Ride to Justice,” but now with the help of Abrams and Fisher, back in 1956 and the early months of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Explains the details. Look at the trial in which Gray made an ingenious defense of the right to protest. This was King’s first experience as a criminal defendant.
The story of the prosecution’s attempt to break the boycott by imprisoning one of its leaders and Gray’s lively counterattack against Jim Crow’s “justice” is compelling and revelatory. Indeed, a 25-year-old lawyer, just two years inexperienced after graduating from law school, was impressed that “American Gandhi” played a vital role in the emergence of King because it is a timeless story. It’s a story.
From hood to horror
Separate worlds, shared dreams, and battle stories for the future of America
Charles Booker
336pp. Crown. $ 28.
The author of this memoir / manifest combination is the “other” booker, not Cory Booker, Newark’s second-term US Senator. But like Senator Charles Booker is a “food” African-American, in his case a poor region at the western end of Louisville. After 10 years of practicing the law, he was elected to the Kentucky State Representative in 2018, and two years later, he ran for the Democratic Senate and eventually with Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. I lost the close competition. Senator Mitch McConnell in the 2020 general election. Booker is not in a hurry to defeat and is now seeking a nomination to face another incumbent Republican senator in Kentucky, Rand Paul, in November 2022.
Booker’s life story, and the political philosophy that emerged from it, begins in the urban areas of Louisville, but eventually extends primarily to the spread of rural states. “From the Hood to the Holler” is the title of his book as well as the name of the community outreach organization founded in 2020. We decided to bridge the cultural, economic and racial gaps between urban and rural communities. The subtitle of the book-he seeks a “new politics” that recognizes and encourages the “shared dreams” of all Americans. He focuses on what unites us, not what divides us, and refuses to abandon the dream of a unified nation under the banner of democratic inclusion.
Self-proclaimed progressive, Booker will support Bernie Sanders in 2020, with left-handed leaders such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, as well as a thorough overhaul of the Green New Deal, universal insurance and the criminal justice system. Obviously, Booker chose a difficult line to hit the hoe in the bright red, but as someone who had previously beaten the odds, he wages a cultural war between cities and rural areas that could tear our country apart. Reject the traditional wisdom of being able to do almost nothing to get over.
