A Protest History of the United States.
Gloria Browne-Marshall.
Boston: Beacon Press, 360 pp., $31.95.

New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.
Juan Williams.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $28.99.

These books have never been more timely than today since they will probably be blocked from being adopted in school libraries and taught at universities across several states. Marshall, a modern-day, award-winning hyphenate in a way the late #MayaAngelou would be impressed with, and Williams, often known as a liberal (contrarian), both give context to the evening news’ #PresidentTrump executive orders. Both explain how the war is never-ending and that protest is constant and normal when you are up against oppression, whether historically naked or cloaked in the latest fashions. Williams attempts to B.C. and A.D. two different and consecutive #CivilRightsMovements, with #BarackObama on the cross. The first is the traditional, analog, PBS one (and Williams is an expert, having written the original #EyesonthePrize companion book) and the second is the one we have now–digital, fast and furious, with #BlackLivesMatter demanding the right to grow and make mistakes in public. (As we know and as Williams writes, the organized white-nationalist, right-wing response is equally digital but more deadly.) Marshall dissects protest to illustrate that it is, among other things, “primal” and an “investment,” the carbon dioxide exhaled within the racist/sexist/capitalist carbon-monoxide-filled American experiment; it is a visceral and always-correct response to the Dollar Eagle’s generations of Nos and Thou Shalt Nots. If #LeroneBennett and #HowardZinn adopted a child and raised her, it would be Marshall. And if Newark Mayor #RasBaraka #MayorRasBaraka #NewarkMayorRasBaraka is right in that perhaps the only legitimate thing about America is the struggles within it for democracy, then these Boomerooks 🙂 should only be read outside on campuses, in between demands for #Palestinian grad students–the new, respectable #politicalprisoners!–to return to a 2025 America the authors know all too well from the historic shadows and breaking-news currents they present and represent.