Présentation de l'éditeur
In this elegant family history, journalist Thai Jones traces the past century of American radical politics through the extraordinary exploits of his own family. Born in the late 1970s to fugitive leaders of the Weather Underground and grandson of Communists, spiritual pacifists, and civil rights agitators, Jones grew up an heir to an American tradition of resistance. Yet rather than partake of it, he took it upon himself to document it. The result is a book of extraordinary reporting and narrative.
The dramatic saga of
A Radical Line begins in 1913, when Jones's maternal grandmother was born, and ends in 1981, when a score of heavily armed government agents from the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force stormed into four-year-old Thai's home and took his parents away in handcuffs. In between, Jones takes us on a journey from the turn-of-the-century western frontier to the tenements of melting-pot Brooklyn, through the Great Depression, the era of McCarthyism, and the Age of Aquarius.
Jones's paternal grandfather, Albert Jones, committed himself to pacifism during the 1930s and refused to fight in World War II. The author's maternal grandfather, Arthur Stein, was a member of the Communist Party during the 1950s and refused to collaborate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. His maternal grandmother, Annie Stein, worked closely with civil rights legends Mary Church Terrell and Ella Baker to desegregate institutions in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
His father, Jeff Jones, joined the violent Weathermen and led hundreds of screaming hippies through the streets of Chicago to clash with police during the Days of Rage in 1969. Then Jeff Jones disappeared and spent the next eleven years eluding the FBI's massive manhunt. Thai Jones spent the first years of his life on the run with his parents.
Beyond the politics, this is the story of a family whose lives were filled with love honored and betrayed, tragic deaths, painful blunders, narrow escapes, and hope-filled births. There is the drama of a pacifist father who must reconcile with a bomb-throwing son and a Communist mother whose daughter refuses to accept the lessons she has learned in a life as an organizer. There are parents and children who can never meet or, when they do, must use the ruses and subterfuge of criminals to steal a hug and a hello.
Beautifully written and sweeping in its scope,
A Radical Line is nothing less than a history of the twentieth century and of one American family who lived to shake it up.
Extrait
Chapter 1: Cobblestones
Two young women climbed the stairs to an elevated rail platform in Brooklyn during the summer of 1929. One of them walked with a cane, and the other's legs were hampered by a long black coat that was anything but stylish. Their school day had just ended, and they stood a few paces apart waiting for the train to Coney Island. On the street below, nothing stirred unless it had to. Glass, steel, stone, concrete: everything in the borough absorbed the sun and was too hot to touch. Carefully shaded groceries were rank and rotten by midmorning, while fat flies swarmed around the steaming trash piled on the sidewalk.
Evelyn Wiener, known to her Yiddish-speaking friends as Chavy, was taking summer classes because she had flunked geometry. Only fifteen years old, a childhood case of polio forced her to walk with the aid of a wooden cane. Her father had been a charter member of the American Communist Party, and Chavy remembered well the night when the czar had been overthrown. She had been only three in 1917 and had toddled out in wonder to watch her parents and all their friends drinking vodka in celebration. She had grown up in the Party. As a girl she had been a Young Pioneer and recently, though she was not yet sixteen and had lied about her age, she had joined the Young Communist League.
Chavy and her radical friends had their own language and style. The men wore leather jackets, and the wome
