Word: blackly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...major faults of American belles-lettres has been the failure of most fiction-writers to confront realistically the problem of black and white in America. Too often both blacks and whites have pandered to the stercotypes of the public (and to the dollar sign). or else have written as it a sense of grievance and the element of anger intrinsically produce good fiction. Fortunately. John A. Williams is one American novelist who has avoided these dead-ends...
...suffer. Its fundamental message is that when a society, no matter what its political structure or philosophy, so oppresses a people as to choke off their life-force, those people have no choice but to resort to violence. The author contends that given the unwillingness of America to let black men be men blacks have no alternative to using violence-restricted violence, hopefully, with a definite purpose: but if that fails then large-scale guerilla warfare, and the consequences be damned...
John A Williams is a man who is black and who writes from a black perspective. His perspective is also that of an oppressed individual who knows what oppression can do to its victims regardless of their nationality, religion, or race...
This conclusion is the result of some forty-odd year of being black in a white society: but its immediate cause is the killing of an unarmed black teenager by an Irish-American policeman. The policeman, cited on two separate occasions for bravery, says the youth attacked him with a penknife. He pumped five bullets into the teenager's chest. No knife is ever found. Browning (and black America) recognizes the killing for what it is: cold-blooded murder. His faith in the country completely shattered, he arranges through the Mafia a contract for the policeman's death...
Browning believes this process of selective assassination will produce two results. It will alert black America that the word now is to be cool and kill an eve for an eye thus letting white America know that it can no longer wantonly murder blacks without retribution. He hopes that it will also head off massive unorganized ghetto revolts in which only blacks suffer. But Browning's hopes crumple like a dynamited bridge, as the policeman's death touches off an uncontrollable swirl of events...