Customer Reviews

Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dr. Smead's coverage of this heinous crime took me right back to my childhood, right back to the time and place where it all happened. I lived through this frightening event as a child, two blocks from the jail where Mack Charles Parker was abducted. It was a time of lawlessness when the "spirit" of the Klan was everywhere in the deep South and it permeated every aspect of life, even to the governor's office. You may not see it on a daily basis or be consciously aware of it all the time but you dared not forget it was alive and well. The complete breakdown of order and untimate lawlessness reminds us that when any man's right to a fair trial and to life itself is ignored then no man's rights are safe. And though I, as a white kid, felt disgust and anger toward the sorry bunch that carried out this lynching -- as many whites did -- and at the same time felt fear for my own safety, I could only imagine what terror black families must have lived in.

Now Blood Justice tells all the details of this crime, leaving no stone unturned. Smead tells the story of the initial crime Parker was accused of, the abduction and ultimate murder to prevent him from coming to trial, the investigations by various law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the political ramifications that went all the way to Washington, and the attempts to bring the lynch mob to justice. The perpetrators are identified though all, I believe, are now dead. It was a fascinating read, one I couldn't put down.

An intelligent study of how the beastly activity of a lynching is planned, carried out and covered up. Reading Blood Justice in 2011 felt like opening a 50 year-old time capsule and having the stench of good-ole-boy southern justice slap you across the nose.

Author Howard Smead did an excellent job of showing just how a lynching involves everyone from the town fool to the mayor. But then the author doesn't stop at the town limits, he goes on to show how the politics of the times made this case a priority for the Mississippi governor and legislators. Then because the crime may have involved the crossing of state lines the Lindbergh Law was invoked bringing in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI agents. Ingredients: A white woman raped, a black man arrested then dragged from his jail cell and murdered, a southern town rejoiceful then fearful of being found out. Even President Eisenhower makes his presence felt in this book.

Its a history lesson on civil rights and southern white supremacy. Without the occurrence of this tragic lynching the civil rights bill of 1964 might never have been signed. And though Mack Parker's lynching spurred new pleas for a Federal Lynching Bill,( U.S. House Representative L. Dyer's 1922 anti-lynching bill blocked by white southern democratic block), there is still no such law protecting citizens.

On June 13, 2005, in a resolution sponsored by senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and George Allen of Virginia, together with 78 others, the US Senate formally apologized for its failure to enact this and other anti-lynching bills "when action was most needed."[3] From 1882-1968, "...nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and three passed the House. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass a federal law."[3] None was approved by the Senate because of the powerful opposition of the Southern Democratic voting block.[3]


1959
Radio Moscow broadcast: "It is perfectly clear that none of the criminals concerned will be punished, for in the United States those who murder Negroes are not punished. The Ku Klux Klan lynchers who are intensifying racialist terror in the U.S. enjoy the advantage afforded them by complicity of the authorities."

NAACP head Roy Wilkins called the lynching "the natural consequences of an organized campaign of law defiance by governors of states, members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and state and local politicians."

This book is well researched and well written. It does an excellent job of chronicling the series of events that took place with vivid detail. Although the book does not read fast, it is still well worth taking the time to read.

Thanks to the diligent work of Howard Smead,Blood Justice will become a cornerstone in every civil rights library.

This book accomplishes everything it sets out to do.

I read this for a History class and I found it interesting. Nuff said.

This book captures you in the first chapter with a description of the actual crime. It does, however, get slow throughout the middle of the book when Smead goes into great detail of the facts. I think what really made me like this book is hearing Professor Smead talk about it during our history class. He's an amazing lecturer and leads a captivating discussion about the book, not to mention everything he lectures about. If anyone reading this attends the University of Maryland, Smead's history class is a STAPLE in the schools course offerings.

This probably was this professor's dissertation for his Phd. because it reads like one. It starts out VERY good but then it draggggggggggggggggs on and on. And the rapist was never "lynched", he was shot and thrown in a river. He wasn't hung from a tree. Good read if you like liberal nonsense.

An exhaustively detailed account of one of the last lynchings to take place in the United States, Smead's work is also simply exhausting. Compared with earlier, grislier, more sensational color-based killings, there's very little to the murder of Mack Charles Parker, and the book does little to compensate for this. Despite a wealth of research, and the violent act at the heart of the tale, BLOOD JUSTICE lacks any real sense of drama, or emotion. The participants in the killing, and in the investigation that followed, are ciphers, and fail to engage the reader one way or another, whether to detest or admire. The highly-publicized search for Parker's killers is stripped down to a catalogue of who, what, and where, making the heart of the book the dullest portion to read. This isn't helped at all by the numbing similarity of so much that was said and done during the manhunt, a fact that might cause a reader to think that an identical section of pages had been printed several times over, as the same people repeat the same things again and again.

While the lynching of Mack Charles Parker is a significant part of the American civil rights conflict of the '50s and '60s, and deserves attention, Smead's work does little more than prove that not every historical event deserves treatment in book form. What happens in BLOOD JUSTICE could easily have been distilled to half the length, or less, and been placed inside a larger work without robbing the story of its power.

I took Dr. Smead's class, and he is much better as a lecturer than a writer. His class is dynamic and interesting, full of little tid-bits of fun facts about the time period. However, the book doesn't do his lecture style justice. Where he is interesting in lecture, in writing he just bores me to tears. I skimmed most of the book because I couldn't stand the slow pace and attention to too much detail.

So, if you go to the University of Maryland: take his class, don't read his book. For everyone else, well, I guess just don't read his book.