Msconcerned's Manifesto

"For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects . . . . We have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it." Dorothy Sayers

Arthur Browne, in  “One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York”  (Beacon Press), seamlessly weaves together three compelling and timely narratives: the untold story of the city’s forgotten first black police officer, Samuel J. Battle; the poet Langston Hughes’s struggle to complete Mr. Battle’s biography (the book draws heavily on Hughes’s own revealing unpublished manuscript); and an inspirational portrayal of how one man influenced history. (Mr. Browne and his book were the subject of a  recent Metropolitan article .)