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Magic City

Magic City

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

1997African American menFictionHistoryRace relationsRiots
4.0
Open Library
Open Library

First lines

Joe Samuels had decided to quit dreaming.

About this book

Based on true events, Magic City is the powerful story of two people who unwittingly lit the match that burned the community of Greenwood to the ground and erased it from the history books. Jewell Parker Rhodes imagines this tragedy through the eyes of Joe Samuels and Mary Keane, two people fundamentally divided by race but forever joined by fate. When Joe, a young man entranced by Houdini, is falsely accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty lynch mob. Haunted by the mystery of his brother's death and the dark truth behind his father's success, Joe soon learns that he has been running all his life and that this may actually be the moment to turn and fight. Mary, the motherless daughter of a poor farmer who tries to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, is barely able to imagine what life could be like outside the prison of her own home. Now, however, she must unlock the courage to help exonerate the man she has accused with her panicked cry. Magic City, a mythic tale of violent revenge, is a portrait of an era, climaxing in the heroic but doomed stand that ultimately pitted the National Guard against a small band of black men determined to defend the town they had built into the "Negro Wall Street." Depicted against a backdrop of jail escapes, ghosts, family betrayal, and lost loves, it is a tale at once harrowing and redemptive.

Themes & subjects

African American menFictionHistoryRace relationsRiotsFiction, general
First published 1997

Setting

OklahomaTulsaTulsa (Okla.)

About the author

Jewell Parker Rhodes
Jewell Parker Rhodes

1954

Author

Jewell Parker Rhodes

First published

1997

Pages

288

Read time

≈ 7h

Editions

10

Language

English

Publisher

HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN

9780062085306

Where to buy

TR
Amazon Bookshop

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The same story in other forms.

Magic City

the film

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the series

Magic City

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