Tuskegee Love Letters
by Kim Russell
702 Entertainment
Paperback, $8.00
38 pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 978-0-615591544
    
Book Review by Kam Williams

“My father was a pilot with the all-Negro Tuskegee Airmen; my mother a steno-typist… Separated by war and duty, they shared the events of their lives through letters. They wrote about their joys, their dreams and their individual struggles.
Thankfully, each preserved their letters…. This collection is a glimpse of their lives between 1942 and 1956… These letters are my parents’ legacy. They tell about a difficult but wondrous journey filled with obstacles and opportunities… [and] remind us that all young Americans begin their lives with dreams.”
-- Excerpted from the Introduction (pg. 5)

If you saw the recent World War II film Red Tails, you were treated to a riveting reenactment of the heroic exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen over the skies of Europe. But a glaring omission from the movie was any mention of the African-American pilots’ pining for their loved ones back in the States.
In fact, the only romance featured in the film revolved around an ill-fated, interracial liaison between an airman and a local girl he met while stationed in Italy. For that reason, a book like Tuskegee Love Letters couldn’t have come along at a more timely moment.

“When I looked at my small son and wondered what types of information would be important for him to learn that I could pass along to him, I knew that I had to first prepare him to become a positive and proud African-American… So out of great love for my son and a deep concern for his future, I decided to write books that tend to point out some of the more obscure and forgotten about elements of the African-American ancestors’ experiences." -- Excerpted from the book jacket.
   

“When a 19 year-old member of a Black Muslim cult assassinated Chauncey Bailey in 2007—the most shocking killing of a journalist in the U.S. in 30 years—the question was: Why? Killing the Messenger… explores one of the most blatant attacks on the 1st Amendment and free speech in American history and the… cult that carried it out…Yusuf Bey… created a radical religion of bloodshed and fear…through a business called Your Black Muslim Bakery, beating and raping dozens of women… and fathering more than 40 children… [while] the police looked the other way as his violent soldiers ruled the streets. [culminating] in a journalist’s murder.”
-- Excerpted from the inside cover of the book’s dust jacket

“The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. One is the universal symbol of Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America... Despite the obvious similarities between Jesus’ death on a cross and the death of thousands of black men and women strung up to die on a lamppost or a tree, relatively few people… have explored the symbolic connections. Yet, I believe this is a challenge we must face. What is at stake is the credibility and promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society… [Those] who want to understand the true meaning of the American experience need to remember lynching. To forget this atrocity leaves us with a fraudulent perspective of this society and of the meaning of the Christian gospel for this nation.”
-- Excerpted from the Introduction (pgs. xiii-xiv)