It seemed to me to take forever for me to read The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon. Although the persons dealt with in each chapter weren't well known, the events covered were not quite so obscure.
For example, I knew Senator Charles Sumner was beaten by someone with a cane. Yet I had never heard of Congressman Preston Brooks who was the perpetrator of the beating. I knew Brooks wasn't censured for attacking a Senator in the Senate chamber, but I didn't know that he was re-elected a month later. So the man who attacked Sumner suffered no political penalty for his action.
Although I've seen the film Mary Poppins I don't recall the song "Sister Suffragette" at all. I just listened to it and it wasn't familiar, but then I saw Mary Poppins more than sixty years ago.
I found out that the Kansas referendum on slavery was totally corrupt. Most Kansas residents were too poor to own slaves. Pro-slavery people from Missouri voted in the Kansas election illegally, and abolitionists from outside Kansas also voted in that election. Four dozen people were killed for political reasons. Homes and businesses were destroyed.
I was amused to learn that in September 1973 the Ojibwe Adam Fortunate Eagle went to Italy dressed in Ojibwe regalia, and claimed to have discovered Italy, just as Columbus was supposed to have discovered North America. Fortunate Eagle was invited to meet Pope Paul VI, but refused to kiss the Pope's ring.
It interested me that Japanese Americans living in Hawaii weren't incarcerated during WWII. I suspect that the authorities weren't able to distinguish between Japanese Americans and Native Hawaiians. I find this amusing.
Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated have tended to want to be extremely patriotic after WWII. It seems to me that they weren't sent to camps because they weren't patriotic. This happened because the United States was at war with Japan. If the U.S. is ever at war with Japan again, Japanese Americans would be rounded up and confined just as they were in WWII. Their personal patriotism would be irrelevant.
There was some discussion of prominent Japanese American Norman Mineta's personal experience with being discriminated against in housing after he returned from combat in World War II. I looked up his political career on Wikipedia and discovered that Mineta was the first Asian American Mayor of a major city (San Jose) and a U. S. Congressman. He also served in the cabinets of both Clinton and George W. Bush. So Presidents from both parties appointed him to cabinet positions.
On September 11, 2021, Norman Mineta was in a bunker with Vice President Dick Cheney. They saw the hijacked plane that was headed to the Pentagon explode. Mineta phoned the head of of the Federal Aviation Administration and told him to ground every plane immediately. 4,546 civilian planes were grounded. Some were diverted to Canada. Many pilots were only told that there had been a "security incident". Canada grounded all flights except flights bound for the U.S. to allow them to land safely.
Given what happened on 9/11, it seemed likely that U.S. airlines would discriminate against Muslim or Middle Eastern passengers. Mineta sent a letter to all American civilian carriers telling them not to profile Muslim or Middle Eastern passengers or subject them to additional inspection.
In a chapter about Septima Clark, ( I had read about her in Spell Freedom, the last book I reviewed on this blog) I discovered that Clark learned to speak Gullah and Geechee.
I learned from The Gullah Society that Gullah and Geechee are two different cultures. Many of the Gullah came from Gambia, Senegal and Sierra Leone. They live on the South Carolina Sea Islands and the coast of Georgia. The article doesn't specify what countries in Africa the Geechee came from, but they don't live on the Sea Islands like the Gullah. They live on the Georgia coast and Northeastern Florida. The name Geechee may have come from the Ogeechee River in Georgia. The Geechee may have predominately lived on the coast of that river.
The Gullah language is influenced by the Krio, Wolof and Bambara languages of West Africa. We are told by the Gullah Society article that Geechee language is influenced by different African tongues than the Gullah language, but we are given no specifics.
The Gullah and Geechee do have specific dishes associated with each cultural group. The Gullah dishes are Gullah red rice, shrimp and grits and okra soup. The Geechee dishes are frog legs , crab bisque and peanut soup. The first two Geechee dishes are associated with French cuisine. The peanut soup is also called Tuskegee soup and is made with peanut butter rather than milk. It is called Tuskegee soup because George Washington Carver, who did experiments with peanuts, worked at the Tuskegee Institute.
A black woman in Alabama named Recy Taylor was gang raped by six white men. Taylor's house was firebombed because she reported the gang rape. Two all white grand juries refused to charge the six rapists. So the NAACP sent Rosa Parks to investigate. I wasn't aware that Rosa Parks investigated crimes. I'd only heard of her in the context of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
For the first time I read about what happened in the aftermath of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Snipers fired at integrated buses. Four churches and the homes of their ministers were firebombed. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, whose church had been firebombed, said to his parishioners that they should pray "for those who'd desecrate the House of God." Two Klu Klux Klan members were indicted for these bombings. They confessed but an all white jury found them not guilty.
In 2019 all the records of the Highlander Folk School were destroyed. This was where Tennessee voters learned how to pass literacy tests. My last review on this blog was of a book dealing with the Highlander Folk School which can be found here.
I am happy to say that a statue of Rosa Parks was also erected in 2019.
I would like to end this review with the following quote from The Small and the Mighty:
"Education is liberation. And an educated population is difficult to oppress."
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