Race in America, in Fiction and Nonfiction

Joy-Ann Reid is an MSNBC national correspondent appearing regularly on prime-time programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. She is the former managing editor of TheGrio.com, and has written columns for the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, Salon.com, and the South Florida Times. In Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide (William Morrow), Reid shows that, despite the progress we have made, we are still a nation divided—as seen recently in headline-making tragedies such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore. With President Obama's election, Americans expected an open dialogue about race but instead discovered the irony of an African American president who seemed hamstrung when addressing racial matters, leaving many of his supporters disillusioned and his political enemies sharpening their knives. To understand why that is so, Reid examines the complicated relationship between Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, and how their varied approaches to race parallel the challenges facing the Democratic Party itself.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He is the author of the novels Freeman, and Before I Forget; the collection Forward From this Moment: Selected Columns, 1994-2009, Daily Triumphs, Tragedies, and Curiosities; and Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. Pitts’s new novel, Grant Park (Agate Bolden; $24.95), begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts between the two eras. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint hacks into his newspaper's server to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's publication. While a furious Carson tries to find him, Toussaint is abducted by two white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Barack Obama's planned rally in Chicago’s Grant Park. Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement.