Customer Reviews

Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America

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Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, A Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America is an honest, though painful look at race relations in America. C. Carr sees parallels between her quest in Our Town and that of South Africa's "truth and reconciliation" hearings. The work bears witness to the searing history of lynching in towns all across America in the first half the last century. Carr captures white hatred, fear, denial, and guilt and black anger, bitterness, fear, and pain. She quotes Chilean legal philosopher and activist Jose Zalaquett, a member of the commission that investigated atrocities under the Pinochet regime: "If you have a choice between truth and justice, choose truth. Truth doesn't bring back the dead, but it does release them from silence." That's just what Carr does in this book.

Carr was 17 when she learned her beloved grandfather was a Klansman. Not until she was in her 20s did she see the infamous photo taken in her home town on the sweltering summer night of August 7, 1930--a black and white picture of two black men hanging from a tree as smiling townsfolk looked on. Like so many of us white liberals she felt guilty about our country's racist history. But Carr also felt a special shame about her town's history and her grandfather's membership in the Klan. That shame ultimately led her to write Our Town. Her story is an effort to examine the truth as a means of healing and opening a dialogue.

Carr pursues the truth like a bloodhound. It doesn't matter that she often loses the scent while on the trail because she refuses to give up and just keeps circling Marion and the small towns surrounding it until she gets the next whiff. Early on in her research she decides to go back home and ends up living in Marion, Indiana for an entire year. During that time she interviewed those who witnessed the lynching and were still alive. She also went to Detroit several times to interview the third victim of the lynching - James Cameron - who, though spared death, was marked by the experience for the rest of his life. And to gain insight into the psychology of hatred and fear, Carr interviewed the figurative descendents of the Ku Klux Klan: the hodge podge group of Kluxers, white Supremacists, and skin heads all who still espouse racial hatred. Reading about them made me think of Hannah Arendt's now famous characterization of the Nazis and the Third Reich--"the banality of evil." Not surprisingly, many of the Kluxers and their brethren see Hitler as a man of vision.

In "An American Secret" a personal reminiscence that appeared in the New York Times Magazine before the release of Our Town, Carr relates that the inspiration for her work was in part a conversation with a friend Robbie McCauley, an African-American theatre artist whose performances often emphasize the importance of black-white dialogue. Carr confessed her guilty truth to her friend and was surprised by Robbie's relief. She recalls Robbie told her ". . . white silence is often just a refusal to acknowledge what black people have been through." So she told Robbie about searching the lynching photo for her grandfather's face, and recalled her friend telling her "those are stories we need to hear."

So Carr set herself the mission of telling these stories, of uncovering the truth. She removes the veil of white guilt and liberal superiority so that she can listen to today's Kluxers. She captures them in all their complexity with the same skill that helped her to understand the performance artists whose work she had followed while writing reviews for the Village Voice.

Carr is a gifted writer. Interspersed throughout this 400+ page book are poetic moments of personal insight. While living in Marion, Carr and her sister visit their grandparents' graves. Later she reflects: "[r]eally we were visiting the mysteries, as if the graves could tell us something." The night she leaves Marion, she can't resist one last visit to her grandmother's house. Looking at the house from her car, Carr observes: [I was] almost too numb with exhaustion to feel anything but a sort of inchoate yearning. So much had eluded me here, or else seemed to crumble in my hand." The truth lay in the grave with many of the Marion residents who had witnessed the lynching in August 1930. The truth was still choked back on tongues both black and white that felt safer with silence. Carr concludes "we couldn't make up for what the ancestors had done, we could only acknowledge the pain it had caused." Carr's story takes us into the dark wood with eyes wide open and we are the better for having taken the journey with her.

I am from small town Indiana and black. Raised in southeastern Indiana during the 1960's and 70's, I was not aware of this lynching until I first saw the photograph in my early 20's. I thought it took place in the south and found out only later it was Marion.

Carr's book is an important one and this country should appreciate her hard work researching this incident. The book itself was hard to follow. Much of the time I was going in circles. The book is probably to long, especially the parts with the recent klan members. I had little to fear from the klan growing up, possibly because they were so pitiful. I can't understand why she made them so important in the book. The real story was the early klan in Indiana.

When she wrote about the Sheriff, Archey, I did enjoy that since it seemed he had solid facts and dates on his rise and triumph. Overall an important subject, but could be streamlined and organized better.

I grew up 1/2 block from the Marion city limits. I spent 21 years there and wanted to leave from the time I was an adolescent. Although I have been gone over 30 years, I visit several times a year as I still have family there.

The lynching was not something I knew about until I was in high school. (I am white and went to all white county schools. My parents moved to Marion in the fifties.)

I also have to address the review by the man from TN. He objects to the characterization of the viewers in the lynching photo as gleeful. It is the single most harrowing aspect of the photo. Just look on the back of the dust jacket and decide for yourself.

His apologia is that the viewers may have been on a voyage of discovery and not have known how to react because who could enjoy looking at such a sight. How does the reviewer then explain the photo becoming a local bestseller?

The reviewer also suggests that the survivor of the lynch mob (James Cameron) may have fabricated his presence there. Cameron's surviving the lynch mob is not in question. There are numerous witnesses. The reviewer further tries to cast doubt by saying he doesn't recall what felony Cameron went to jail for. Cameron was imprisoned for his part in the killing of Deeter - the crime that led to the lynching - and was later pardoned by the Governor of Indiana. The teenaged Cameron had initially agreed to participate in the robbery but ran away when he recognized Deeter as a man who had been kind to him.

You will meet many like the reviewer from TN in Carr's book. A theme of the book is the continuing denial of the lynching and the racism in Marion by the white community. Marion has been crumbling and shrinking as long as I have known it. Now I know why. The town was diseased long before I was born.

But you do not need to be from Grant County or Indiana to relate to this story of a town gone wrong. It is a brave person who knocks on doors to talk about race as Ms. Carr has done. That courage comes through and is what makes this book an intriguing read for those who have never stood on the courthouse square or had a picnic in Matter Park.

In Our Town, Carr takes us on her 10-year search for the real story behind the August 1930 lynching that Marion, Indiana has never really dealt with. Carr's personal family history is intrinsically entwined with the story. Her grandfather, who lived in Marion, was a Klan member. The concept for the book was sparked when she broke her silence about her grandfather's Klan membership to a black friend. "Those are the stories we need to hear, that white people aren't telling," her friend had replied.

The book lays bare the long-term ramifications of secretiveness, and silence, about the past. Carr discovered a "code of silence" around closely held secrets woven through the fabric of Marion - not only about the lynching, but about the area's underground railroad history, and the fate of the local Miami Indian tribe, who used silence as a means to erase its own culture for the purpose of blending into the dominant white culture. Her grandmother, it turns out, claimed to have Miami Indian heritage. Her grandfather had used silence to erase his own past - in particular his illegitimate birth. And his klan membership wasn't known to most of his family until after his death.

Carr interviews scores of people in her 10-year odyssey. A seasoned investigative journalist, she sheds new light on some old mysteries. She also explores the kinds of human questions that most of us, as readers, would ask ourselves. Millions of us, after all, have the skeletons of Klan members in our own family closets. Carr's story would be left undone if she didn't search for her own truth, and she draws thoughtful and eye-opening conclusions. There are many gems to be found in this book. Our Town will hopefully act as a springboard for white-black dialogue about the past, and serve as both a tonic and a constructive tool in our collective struggle for improved race relations.

Outstanding! The only word to describe this 10 year in the making heart felt project. Cynthia took her time and did painstaking research. The fruits of which got her on the top best books for 2007 in the Chicago Tribune.

Back in Febuary 2007 I was waiting on a train in Chicago. I happen to be reading the Tribune. I recognized this book from the listings. Partly because myself and my wife are mentioned in it.

I bought and read the book last summer. I have over 50 books on hate groups. This book stands out above the rest. Thank You Miss Carr.

Brad Thompson
afoundryrat2@yahoo.com

If you want to read truth that in many ways is a metaphor for what was happening across America over the last four decades, read this amazingly accurate account of Marion, Indiana, and its KKK, and the residue that still exists today there as well as in many other geographical locations in the minds and hearts of some Americans.
The reason why I know that her book is amazingly accurate is that I lived there and worked with many of these people Carr reports about. I not only taught at the two school systems and worked as a reporter at the Marion-Chronicle (a player in this drama)at the time, I was there standing outside my classroom the day the cafeteria erupted into a civil rights melee!
Although this book offers many threads of story, Carr's real contribution is the accurate documentation of a slice of history that shows the danger of "willful neglect" of us all as we watch innocent citizens abused and killed in the name of God.
---Charlene Lutes, Ph.D.

I've been following C. Carr's work for years in the Village Voice and elsewhere. She's a writer's writer. I've always been a fan of her writing about performance: She is so measured and meticulous even when she is writing about people going crazy on stage. Now she's directed this same sensibility -- her eerily calm voice, her relentless reporter's narative forward motion, her talent for disturbing, her extraordinary precision -- to telling this story about race and crazyness in Indiana. And what a story it is. It's both horrendous and yet somehow a relief, to hear the truth. I can't get it out of my mind.

tedious, repetative and annoying. the book was really a search for who were members of the Klu Klux Klan in Marion Indiana in the 1930's and who are enrolled today. the whole book goes on and on endlessly in minute detail with a speculated history of the KKK in the midwest. it is not the story of the lynching and the people involved. within the first 30 pages, Carr sets up the a framework for the mystery "who was my grandmother?" which tempted me to slug through this endlessly detailed book - a question that is never addressed. while i did find the facts about the KKK in the midwest interesting and truly surprising, the actual information contained would be better suited to a 3 page magazine article.

One of the principles in the Cynthia Carr's Our Town book is the woman Mary Ball. She was the woman who says she was raped while her boyfried was killed which set off the chain of events which ended up with the now infamous Marion Indiana lynching. Without realizing this fact I married into Mary Ball's family in 1967. For the next nearly 20 years I was Mary Ball's daughter-in-law. In all those years what happened to her as detailed in Cynthia Carr's Our Town book was a carefully guarded secret. I had no clue. Years after Mary Ball's death Cynthia wrote the Our Town book which by the way was the tip off to me of what happened to Mary all those years before. Our Town is an excellent book with details that could only be explained by Cynthia's meticulous research. My hat is off to her & her excellent writing of this book. I hope she was awarded some kind of honor for her excellent. Madelene Palm Springs - Calif

The last public lynching in the North took place in 1930 in Marion, Indiana, hometown of the author's father. Carr moved to Marion for a year to research the lynching and to see if her beloved grandfather could have taken part. What she discovers is the truth about race relations in Marion and the U.S. today, the history of blacks in the county, the state of the current Klan, and the history of her own family. A long but rewarding book.