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Book Review - Road Through Midnight: a Civil Rights Memorial

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Book Review - Road Through Midnight: a Civil Rights Memorial Georgia Library Quarterly Volume 57 Issue 3 Summer 2020 Article 17 7-1-2020 Book Review - Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial Susan Clay University of Georgia, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/glq Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Clay, S. (2020). Book Review - Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial. Georgia Library Quarterly, 57(3). Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/glq/vol57/iss3/17 This Review is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Georgia Library Quarterly by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Clay: Book Review - Road Through Midnight Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights but are nearly identical to many others in that Memorial by Jessica Ingram (University of North historical arc. Carolina Press, 2020: ISBN 9781469654232, $35.00) Each account begins with Ingram’s photograph of a place followed by a shiny black page, which Jessica Ingram’s Road Through Midnight has the allows readers to gather their thoughts and heft and feel of an art book and the pleasing emotions before continuing; the page is almost matte finish of an exhibition catalog, or a shiny enough to see yourself reflected on it. catalog raisonné, until you realize it’s not Next comes a brief account of what is known exactly that kind of book. Although this book about what happened at that place—in some includes Ingram’s award- cases, we will never know, winning photography, it is exactly. Each account is much more than her written in white text on a photographic art. The cover black background, with the features a dark photograph of victim’s name in bold white a vaguely familiar dirt road almost as a reminder of which is almost White-on-Black violence. This indistinguishable from its work has the feel of dark blue background. Road something holy. Through Midnight is a journey through a landscape of Some of the victims of these violence and resistance violent acts are well known: during the Jim Crow era in Medgar Evers; Chaney, Mississippi, Louisiana, Goodman, and Schwerner; Georgia, and Alabama. and Emmett Till. Others are Ingram’s book answers not as well known: Clinton questions many of us ask: Melton, Mattie Green, and What happened on this piece Reverend George W. Lee. of land? What does it look Incidentally, Reverend Lee’s like now? What happened to the victims? What widow insisted on an open casket several happened to the perpetrators? months before Mamie Till did the same for her son, Emmett. For each victim, the facts of their The incidents detailed in Road Through murder are stated, with details supplemented Midnight are frozen in time, and yet they are from newspaper accounts, other narratives, and also part of the continuation of a racist ephemera. Interviews with surviving relatives American history that began with the arrival of and reporters—people with firsthand the first enslaved Africans on these shores. This information—appear with Ingram’s racist history continued through a robust slave photographs. If a case was reopened, and if the trade, Emancipation, Reconstruction, convict perpetrators were brought to justice, the leasing and Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, reader also discovers that. Some victims are and mass incarceration. Most of the events in memorialized with roadside markers or Road Through Midnight took place in the 1960s monuments; for others, it seems, the memorial Published by DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University, 2020 1 Georgia Library Quarterly, Vol. 57, Iss. 3 [2020], Art. 17 is the retelling of their stories that connects Through Midnight is not an easy read, nor is it their lives to the present. meant to be, but it is a powerful means for learning part of our shared history. Jessica Road Through Midnight contains a few brief Ingram spent more than a decade creating what texts that serve more as teaching tools than as she describes as “an interpretive and suggestive retellings of violence. These texts touch on work rather than a scholarly one,” but one topics like the origins of the Ku Klux Klan; the that—through her photographs, detailed second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan and the research, and many personal interviews—will Stone Mountain carving; and Koinonia Farm, an help readers connect the past to the present interracial community near Americus, Georgia, and with what still remains to be done. Highly that exists today. recommended. In the book’s afterword, the author says, “we Susan Clay is Map Librarian at must do the work of remembering.” Road University of Georgia https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/glq/vol57/iss3/17 2.
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