Daniel Kleven > Recent Status Updates

Baldwin is a King *scholar.* This book is a superb bit of historical work by one who has gone as deep into the primary sources (The King Papers) as you can, all focused on the subject of prayer. Baldwin has written two other books on King, and so far all I can say is this is top notch. I've surveyed as much as I can on the topic of "Black Prayer" and Baldwin cites every source I've found and then some. Great start.

"King's conception and practice of prayer are meaningful for persons of faith in contemporary society and the world. His experiences with prayer, theoretically and practically, are informative, instructive, and inspirational, and they invite readers in all ages to a journey of self-exploration, self-analysis, self-surrendering, and self-discovery" (5).

THIS BOOK

"As the plow cut through the earth, uprooting the plants to lie withering in the summer sun, Moe slowly followed his father out across the fields. Midway down the first plowed row he stopped and picked up one of the uprooted plants. For some time he stood unmoving, staring down at it. Then he bent his head to it; his shoulders shook and he cried."

😭

I used to think Jim Crow and segregation was about which water fountain you could drink out of or which seat on the bus. Du Bois helped me understand more thoroughly the crushing systemic injustice of it -- economic, law enforcement, political, lynchings, robbery, the sharecropping system, let alone the social and religious aspects of it.

Du Bois helped me understand it. Taylor makes me *feel* it.

transformative

religion? race? reconstruction? education? the 1870s? Baptist Barnas Sears?

These are a few of my favorite things...

Sharecropping -- wow. Reading Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk gave me a framework for understanding the economic and mathematical details of sharecropping; Taylor fills it in with gripping narrative and characters.