Literature and Poetry

Jo Freeman Reviews Vice President Kamala Harris: Her Path to the White House

Vice President Kamala Harris: Her Path to the White House

by Malaika Adero

New York: Sterling, 2021, 186 pages with 120 photos, $29.95 hardcover

If you like photos, you’ll love this book. It is packed with some of the most striking photos of KH and her life that I have seen.

While it’s mostly photos, there is some text. It has many of her own speeches, including her 2011 inaugural address as California Attorney General, her 2020 speech accepting the Democratic nomination, and several commencement addresses.

The author provides some fascinating tidbits of information. Where else can you read that Harris’ sorority sisters donated checks written for $19.08 to the Biden-Harris campaign, commemorating the founding of Alpha Kappa Alpha in 1908? The author says that the Biden Victory Fund received more than 11,000 such checks, from an AKA membership of 300,000.

There are also some holes. The author is not familiar with Berkeley in the Sixties, even though it was very important to Harris’ parents, who were Cal graduate students at that time. One striking photo shows her mother and a friend at what the caption says is a civil rights protest in Berkeley but without a specific date or place. Since I was a Cal undergraduate during those years, and very active in the civil rights movement, I recognized the scene. It was a small plaza at the southern entrance to the campus, where we put up our tables and passed out literature. The photo does not depict a civil rights protest, though the signs on the tables clearly indicate that it was late Spring of 1963 during or after the Birmingham demonstrations.

The book raises lots of questions. KH’s mother was a high caste Hindu but sent her daughters to a Christian church in nearby Oakland. Why? Both parents were active in the civil rights movement in Berkeley but KH chose electoral politics rather than radical politics. I well remember the split in California during KH’s formative years, with radicals often denouncing those who pursued elective office as sell-outs. Nor is there anything about her political mentors or her base. Electoral politics requires money, contacts and name recognition. Where did KH find these?

Given her international origins, one might expect her to study international affairs rather than go to a local law school and from there become a criminal prosecutor. “Her path to the White House” must have been very curvey.

KH’s parents separated when she was eight. She was raised by her mother. Nonetheless, one gets the impression that KH saw herself as fundamentally a Black woman. Although she visited her relatives in both India and Jamaica, this book paints those identities as more background than foreground. Having participated in electoral politics in Brooklyn, where we have people from everywhere, I know that African-Americans and West Indians don’t like each other. Yet KH chose Black as her primary identity.

This is a gorgeous book, well suited to be a graduation present for a young woman of any color. Buy it for the photos, not for the text.

Tags: african-americans, alpha kappa alpha, civil rights movement, electoral politics, inaugural address as california attorney general, west indians

Baseball's Peerless Semipros: The Brooklyn Bushwicks of Dexter Park, Journal of Sport History and My Experience at That Park

From the Editor: Last night I watched — on television — the San Francisco Giants play their rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, winners of the 2020 National League Championship title. They played in Arizona, where the Giants hold their spring training and the game ended in a tie. But it was another location I thought about in Brooklyn, and a game that featured guest Hank Greenburg, a well-known player that my father admired. At that time, Greenberg was retired, I believe, but the fans at the Dexter Park, crowded the stands to see him. Last year, I wrote a brief article, A Baseball Story You Might Not Have Heard About an American Catcher and Spy for the OSS, and thought this year I might follow it up with an lengthy excerpt from a story about the Brooklyn Bushwicks. "Even as minor league and semipro baseball declined in the 1940s, the Bushwicks still outdrew the big league Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Braves in 1945." more »

Jo Freeman Reviews Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells

Jo Freeman writes: "Ida B. Wells was an important writer and activist. She was born in 1862 in Mississippi and died in 1931 in Chicago. She lost her parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Wanting to keep her siblings together, Ida got a job as a teacher at age 16 to earn the money to support them. She later took some of them to Memphis where she shifted from being a teacher to a writer. She is primarily known for her tracts against lynching, which led to her being run out of town in 1892... There are some gaps. Very little is said about her frequent work for woman suffrage beyond a few swipes at white suffragists and sixties feminists. There is nothing about her extensive work for the Republican Party, such as being the official Hoover campaign Organizer of Negro Women for Illinois in 1928. more »

The Scout Report: Penn and Slavery Project, Robots Reading Vogue, Open Book Publishers, Black History in Two Minutes & Maps of Home

Founded in 2017, the Penn and Slavery Project researches the University of Pennsylvania's ties to slavery and scientific racism. Robots Reading Vogue explores the digital humanities (DH) possibilities presented using data from Vogue magazine. Vogue creates a DH bonanza, as it has been "continuously published for over a century," and is "completely digitized," resulting in some six terabytes of data and thousands of covers and images. What makes the [Open Book Publishers] literary hub unique is that it not only publishes books in traditional print and ebook formats, but it also publishes "free online editions of every title in PDF, HTML and XML formats that can be read via our website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere." Black History in Two Minutes (or so) podcast is a wonderful resource to learn the full scope of U.S. history. The award-winning show explores important people and events from the past and present. more »

Jo Freeman Reviews Kamala’s Way, an Overview of Harris’ Life in California Politics

Jo Freeman writes: This is a political biography. Published only a week before Kamala Harris was inaugurated as this country’s first female Vice President, this book is an overview of Harris’ life in California politics. The author was able to write it so quickly because he has reported on California politics, policy and justice for two newspapers in that state for four decades; Harris has been politically active for about three. more »