Danny Duncan Collum

This book was fantastic, just like everything I have read by Danny Duncan Collum.

This book was the first fiction of his that I have read.

Tommy Jackson is just a normal working class white boy from rural Mississippi. Like any 1950s teenager he likes driving around with his friends and getting drunk when mom isn't looking. One day a black boy in town is disrespectful to a white girl, and later that night Tommy inadvertently witnesses his murder.

For the rest of his life he tries to pretend he didn't.

When in college in Jackson, Mississippi in the 60s the freedom riders come to town, and he thinks he has found a way to make up for what he didn't do in high school.

Being the only white southern boy involved in the movement ends up making him a target for all the locals, and the sit ins don't go as expected.

It's really a fantastic tale of race, love, family, friendship, religion, God and the long arm of the law.

The end was a bit rushed but that was the only downside I had.… (més)

This book was fantastic and I could not put it down. Regardless of your religious, political, or racial perspective I think there is something to be learned from Black And Catholic in the Jim Crow South. They rendition of how Catholics were treated in the south regardless of color reminds me of the story of the south that ended with "Well your husband's Jewish..." "No, he's Catholic" "I knew it was something weird"

The book has some historical references form the author, but its mostly full of short stories from folks from a town in Mississippi. Not the stories you here at the Knights of Columbus, but the ones from your Grandpa, that you can't wait to hear next time you see him, and you miss when he's gone.

The author groups the stories together in chapters to make the readable by subject, but it really appears to be the folks own words, some who where there when the Church refused to fall to pressure to keep blacks out, to integrating their schools far before the government counterparts. But not all is rosy for Christ's Church, as we have our bigots too.

When Holy Family ( a primary black catholic church in Natchez) becomes the head of the NAACP, and one of its priests the chairperson, it can only be by the grace of God that it is not bombed. I didn't realize how much blacks, and whites who happen to have been associated with them, really had to fear for their life from extremists, particularly once the protection of government was removed and the market saw that separate but equal was simply not profitable. Crazy people don't like the market.

Please do yourself and your family a favor and read this book.… (més)