Last week, The Rap Sheet published my reflections on Ed Lacy’s Room to Swing as part of its regular Friday blog series, and editor J. Kingston Pierce was kind enough to schedule that essay on September 25, the anniversary of the day the Little Rock Nine finally entered Central High School in 1957, the same year the book itself was published.
While I wish I could say I had such dates on instant recall in my mind, the truth is that I don’t and I just happened to come across the anniversary when I was flipping through a new book I’d like to recommend here: This Day In Civil Rights History by Horace Randall Williams and Ben Beard. As the title promises, the book offers daily mini-essays on major historical events. Just for a quick sampling: April 16, 1963 was the day that Martin Luther King Jr. released his famous “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,” and June 21, 1964 was the day that civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner was murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Milestone dates, of course, and well known, but the book also offers less obvious choices, such as November 9, 1968, when James Brown first performed his song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” There are 366 essays in all, when you take into account leap-year, and not incidentally, February 29 was the day in 1940 when Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for her role in Gone With The Wind — as the book emphasizes, “the first African American not only win an Oscar but also to attend the ceremony as a guest instead of a servant.”
While most of the events commemorated here fall during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s — what we traditionally think of as the Civil Rights Era — the book importantly stretches outside of that narrowest of definitions. On September 20, for example, you’ll learn that Maryland passed the nation’s first miscegenation laws on that date in 1664 — and that Alabama was the last state to hang on to such laws, right up into the 21st century. And the span of that entry is important, because the book stresses that civil rights news and issues persist up to to very recent history, whether the Confederate flag controversy in 1998 (October 14) or the reopening of the Emmett Till murder case in 2004 (May 10).
As for today, September 30, it’s an important anniversary as well, with an entry looking back to 1962:
On this day in civil rights history, a deal was struck between segregationist Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to allow the enrollment at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) of its first African American student, James Meredith….
Needless to say, This Day In Civil Rights History is a rich and fascinating book — enough to keep you reading it (dare I say it?) all year round.
I’m honored that the The Rap Sheet has chosen to run my short essay on Ed Lacy’s Room To Swing as part of their ongoing Friday blog series “The Book You Have To Read.” I first wrote about Room to Swing in an article on Civil Rights Era mystery novels for Mystery Scene and I’ve been wanting to recommend the book again ever since. Today marks 52 years since nine black students were escorted by the armed soldiers into Little Rock High School — a milestone in the history of U.S. integration — and since Room to Swing, which appeared the same year, deals explicitly with integration, civil rights, and the roots of racism, today seems a fitting time to remember this time. Check out 
Two of my favorite folks will be at 
On Tuesday, September 22, Alfred A. Knopf will publish James Ellroy‘s Blood’s A Rover, the third and final installment of the Underworld USA novels that began with American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. The new book is not only a fine finish to that trilogy but also strikes me as both Ellroy’s most ambitious novel (drawing on seven different perspectives) and the most accessible entry into the trilogy. As with its predecessors, Blood’s A Rover continues to explore how private lives can impact very public and highly political events, spanning in this case from the aftermath of the King and Kennedy assassinations to the eve of the Watergate break-ins. But this new book is also, at its heart, a love story, with each of the three leading men — Wayne Tedrow Jr., employed by Howard Hughes; Dwight Holly, reporting to J. Edgar Hoover; and Don Crutchfield, a window peeper turned obsessive investigator — falling under the spell of women, including a radical liberal activist, Joan Rosen Klein, who may stand as the most complex female character in all the author’s books.
