The Brick Slayer Quotes

“Anyone studying the Nixon case (apart, I suppose, from neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and members of the Ku Klux Klan) is bound to feel their blood boil by the sickening racism displayed by the police, the public, and the press at the time. Still, it is an undeniable fact that Robert Nixon’s departure from Los Angeles in the spring of 1937 coincided with the end of the West Coast serial “brick slayings.” And with his arrest the following year, the brick slayings finally stopped for good.”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer

“As Elizabeth Dale makes clear in her powerful book, Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871–1971, there can be little doubt that Nixon was subjected to precisely this sort of brutal mistreatment at the hands of the Chicago police.”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer

“The jury found Nixon guilty on the first ballot, broke for dinner, then voted to impose the death penalty. From start to finish, the process took only seventy minutes—“one of the speediest death verdicts on record in Cook County,” as the Chicago Tribune reported.[54] Nixon’s electrocution was set for the third week in October 1938.”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer

“He is very black—almost pure Negro. His physical characteristics suggest an earlier link in the species.”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer

“In speech and manner, he lacks the charm of the average, harmless, genial, grinning southern darky so beloved by the American people.[37]”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer

“The result of that pledge was his 1940 masterpiece Native Son.”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer

“Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of stories depicting the savage oppression of African Americans in the Jim Crow South.”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer

“His real name was Robert Nixon.[”
― Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer