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That’s our dear friend Clarence, whom we adore,” Abigail Thernstrom said, proudly showing me the framed photograph of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that hangs above the fireplace in the office she shares with her husband, Harvard University historian Stephan Thernstrom. She added mischievously: “It’s there to make reporters faint.” Abigail Thernstrom, a fellow at […]

The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South, by Charles Marsh. Basic Books, 294 pages, $25.00. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama/The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter. Simon and Schuster, 701 pages, $35.00. The white resistance to the civil rights movement has […]

L et us now, at long last, praise all those Negro humorists from years gone by. Some still with us, but so many gone. Moms Mabley and Pigmeat Markham and Redd Foxx and Flip Wilson and Bert Williams and Amos ‘n’ Andy, gone. Stepin Fetchit, gone. Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor and Chris Rock and […]

Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, James T. Patterson. Oxford University Press, 285 pages, $27.50. What are we to think of Brown v. Board of Education nearly a half-century after the Supreme Court handed down the decision? On the one hand, the momentous ruling of May 17, 1954, […]

Like everyone else at San Antonio airport on the night of September 17, Ashraf Khan passed through tight security before boarding Delta Airlines flight 1469 to Dallas, the first leg of a two-day journey to Karachi, Pakistan, where he planned to attend his brother’s wedding. Khan, an 11-year U.S. resident with a green card, had […]

Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He WasBlack By Gregory Howard Williams. Plume (1996), 285 pages, $13.95 paperback The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother By James McBride. Riverhead Books (1996), 297 pages, $12.95 paperback Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a […]

S everal years ago, I was the lone African American in a small group of people spending an academic year together. It had all the makings of a great experience, except for one persistent problem: A few in the group were determined to spend at least a portion of their time exploring race relations. Unfortunately, […]

Just as you’re getting ready to crack the latest beach paperback, The New York Times comes along with another idea about what makes for good summer reading. “How Race Is Lived in America” is what the newspaper called the month-long series that ran in June. “Race relations are being defined less by political action than […]

If this article had appeared before Tuesday, March 27, the sentence you are reading now would have said: “A recent decision by a district court judge about admissions policies at the University of Michigan is heartening news for supporters of affirmative action in higher education.” Instead, that introductory sentence needs to be replaced with this […]