A day seldom passes that we're not shocked by some act of gruesome violence. The African American community in particular recognizes that it is in the grip of a culture of violence. Escalating rates of murder and imprisonment due to drugs and gang violence have caused young black males to be tagged an endangered species. The black community is asking itself several searching questions: What happened to civil rights progress made in the fifties and sixties? Who are today's black leaders and role models, and where are they leading the community?
Nathan McCall's powerful and frightening autobiography Makes Me Wanna Holler does not offer pat answers; rather, within the book's fabric, commentator Michael Marshall tells us, lie threads of truth that, if followed, could lead to a solution to the crisis.
McCall, now a Washington Post reporter, writes that somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, rage, alienation, and self-hatred changed him and his "hanging" buddies into wanton predators. It was only after winding up in prison and being exposed to the ideas of Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Kahlil Gibran, and Chaim Potok that he was able to, in his words, "pull his life out of the toilet."
Literary critic John McCluskey, Jr., discusses McCall's memoir, comparing it to its predecessors like Wright's Native Son and Black Boy, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk. He notes that the pattern of powerlessness, alienation, and rage described in each book could only be broken through self-discipline, faith in a higher power, or, as in McCall's case, awakening to life's possibilities through education.
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