When I received a copy of Three or More is a Riot by Jelani Cobb, it was an advance reader copy that was approved by Random House the publisher. I needed to download it from NetGalley. This means it wasn't published yet. I was reading a novel at the time. So I needed to finish that book. Then it took me three weeks to read and mull over this essay anthology. In that time period, a great deal has happened--including the publication of Three or More is a Riot. So I'm late by the publisher's standards.
The title of this book is the definition of "riot" in the criminal code. It's not a riot unless three or more people are involved in "concerted unlawful actions".
Unlike many essay anthologies, this one is written by a single writer. Jelani Cobb authored all 59 pieces included in the collection.
Cobb discusses how mixed race Barack Obama was defined as black by both the black and white communities. Yet he was brought up by his white mother to be culturally white. I imagine that being culturally white allowed Obama to be elected President of the United States.
Cobb cites a 2010 Pew poll whose results were that 55% of the total respondents viewed Obama as black while a third saw him as mixed race. Cobb believes that the history of slavery, rape and random relationships means that there really aren't any genetically pure blacks. I hadn't really thought of that. Cobb is right, of course.
Cobb points out that the election of Obama couldn't change the "complex relations between African American men and law enforcement". When I lived in a primarily African American neighborhood from the late 1980's to the early 21st century, what I saw wasn't "complex". It was a poor relationship. Police wanted to intervene during social events and celebrations.
I am now doing research for this review on more recent black population shifts since The Great Migration in which many Southern blacks moved North. Cobb mentioned that there is currently a high population of blacks in the South. I learned online that there has been a Second Great Migration of young well educated Northern blacks to Atlanta. I am very well aware of a black migration to California, but this new generation of blacks moving southward was unknown to me.
My main source for this information is a website for The Brookings Institution. The Brookings Institution is a think tank that does research on the social sciences. It was formed in 1916 and is located in Washington D.C. I had heard of The Brookings Institution, but had never previously used it as a source of research.
Cobb makes a reference to Lincoln having "preternatural political abilities". I have never been a fan of Lincoln myself ever since I learned that he abolished slavery due to political pressure. You know, he had to deal with a civil war. You'd think someone with "preternatural political abilities" could have ended it with a great deal less bloodshed. Maybe he was more of a man of his time than a man for the ages.
Author Cobb attended Howard University, one of the big four HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). So he includes discussion of HBCUs in this book. Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison are among those mentioned as graduates of HBCUs. This implies that without HBCUs, it might have been a good deal more difficult for these important black figures to become prominent. I had almost no awareness of HBCUs before reading this book. So I was thoroughly educated in the significance of these institutions by reading Three or More is a Riot.
Cobb mentions that white run universities were segregated for decades. The university where I got my B.A. had few black students while I attended it. I did notice that and imagined that the reason was financial, and that there was little availability of scholarships and financial aid for those students. I knew that this was discriminatory, but didn't think I could do anything to remedy the situation.
I decided to take African American History. The students in that class were almost entirely black. It was assumed that whites like me wouldn't be interested in African American History. Yet I was. I didn't know any African Americans, but I was a history major who was attracted to all types of history.
So here's some black history. In 1867 the main campus of Howard University was built. Howard was intended to be a university for blacks. Its founder, Oliver Howard was a white man who thought very highly of African American soldiers that fought in the Civil War. Howard was a general in the Union Army and had been appointed a Commissioner of the Freedman's Bureau. Howard and the other trustees of the future Howard University purchased 150 acres of farmland on which the university would be built. Charles Boynton, who had been the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, was selected as Howard University's first president.
The first black president of Howard wasn't appointed until 1926. His name was Mordecai Wyatt Johnson. He was so light skinned that he could be mistaken for white. A photo of Johnson can be found in his Wikipedia article.
Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African American to make the Harvard Law Review, ran Howard University's law school. Houston became future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall's mentor. The two of them were responsible for the lawsuits that integrated U.S. schools in the 1950's.
In 1934 there was a protest in which a line of Howard students wore nooses around their necks. The students were demanding that Attorney General Homer S. Cummings stop the dozens of lynchings that were occurring across the U.S. I didn't know that there were lynchings outside the former Confederate South. I found a very disquieting article about lynchings in other parts of the country here.
In 1963 Albert Manley, the president of HBCU Spelman College, fired Howard Zinn, the head of Spelman's history department, for encouraging future author Alice Walker to participate in the civil rights movement. Albert Manley was worried that Zinn's advice would upset white donors. Possibly, but I'm upset that Zinn was fired for that reason.
In 1968 the students at HBCU Tuskegee University shut down the school and made a demand for more focus on African American studies. They posted a sign on the front of the administration building which said BLACK UNIVERSITY.
Plessy v. Ferguson is a famous case, but I've never read anything about the facts involved. Now I know from this book that it dealt with segregation in Louisiana railroad cars. Homer Adolph Plessy was hoping that the case would bring about a "crusade for civil rights", but it had the opposite effect, says Cobb. I wondered how that happened. I looked it up online and decided that 1896 was just too early for the argument of equality between the races to succeed at such a high political level.
Cases related to Plessy v. Ferguson were Buchanan v. Warley (1917) which outlawed housing discrimination covenants and Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) which restored housing discrimation covenants, Smith v. Allright (1944) which prohibited the Texas laws that disallowed black and Mexican voters from participating in primary elections, Sweatt v. Pamter (1950) which prohibited the exclusion of blacks from the University of Texas law school, and Brown v. the Board of Education which ended school segregation in 1954. Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall headed the legal team that won Brown v. the Board of Education. He had more than thirty years of dealing with cases involving racial segregation.
Author Jelani Cobb is the dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. He is also the producer of the documentary The Riot Report. He won the Peabody Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and is on the board of trustees of the New York Public Library.
I gave this book an A- because although this book is excellent and very thorough, I didn't read anything in it that was unexpected.
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