SocProf reviewed Invisible by Stephen L. Carter
Review of 'Invisible' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I, for one, did not know that Lucky Luciano was taken down by an African American woman prosecutor in the 30s. Amazingly enough, this is only a tiny part of the story of Eunice Hunton Carter (the grandmother of the author), a remarkable woman, who should have had a more brilliant career than she did, being constantly passed over for higher positions because of her sex and race. The life of EHC is fully embedded in the activism of her parents (her mother toured the segregated and lynching South, on her own, to organize African Americans, her father was an officer in the WMCA), the Harlem Renaissance, luminaries such as W.E.B. Dubois, Thurgood Marshall, and the rest of the African American cultural elite. EHC both resented and had to submit to the demands of institutional racism and sexism, but also the demands the Harlem's Great Social Pyramid ruled by the …
I, for one, did not know that Lucky Luciano was taken down by an African American woman prosecutor in the 30s. Amazingly enough, this is only a tiny part of the story of Eunice Hunton Carter (the grandmother of the author), a remarkable woman, who should have had a more brilliant career than she did, being constantly passed over for higher positions because of her sex and race. The life of EHC is fully embedded in the activism of her parents (her mother toured the segregated and lynching South, on her own, to organize African Americans, her father was an officer in the WMCA), the Harlem Renaissance, luminaries such as W.E.B. Dubois, Thurgood Marshall, and the rest of the African American cultural elite. EHC both resented and had to submit to the demands of institutional racism and sexism, but also the demands the Harlem's Great Social Pyramid ruled by the Czarinas.
The book starts with the Atlanta riots of 1906 (her family lived there at the time) all the way to the McCarthy era (her brother was a communist who ended up leaving the US and joining Dubois in Ghana, and then settling in Zambia). EHC had judicial and political ambitions tied to Thomas Dewey and the GOP, squashed on both counts (and also because the FBI, under Hoover, had listed her brother as one to arrest in case of national emergency and had a 700-page file on), later reinventing herself as an internationalist after the creation of the UN (she did not like FDR but stroke a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt). As successful as she was, there is no question that systemic and personal elements outside of her control (racism, sexism, red scare) thwarted what should have been an even more major career than she had.