Volume 48, Number 4 · March 8, 2001
Separate and Unequal
By Larry McMurtry
One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race
by Scott L. Malcomson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 584 pp., $30.00
When he was eleven years old Scott Malcomson placed third in a citywide spelling bee in Oakland, California, home, as he reminds us, of both the Black Panthers and the Gray Panthers. At the awards ceremony after the spelling bee Marcus Foster, the black superintendent of Oakland's schools, made what Mr. Malcomson remembers as a warm and moving speech. About a year later—in November 1973—Marcus Foster was murdered by the Symbionese Liberation Army, kidnappers of Patty Hearst and surely one of the more improbable of the various quasi-revolutionary groups operating in those fevered times.
Review, 2797 words
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