South End Branch African and African American Authors Hybrid Book Discussion: Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921. When Joe, a young man trying to be the next Houdini, is accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty lynch mob. And Mary, the motherless daughter of a farmer who tries to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, must find the courage to help exonerate the man she had accused with her panicked cry. Based on true events, Magic City is a portrait of an era, climaxing in the heroic but doomed stand that pitted the National Guard against a small band of Black men determined to defend the town they had built into “Negro Wall Street.”

Discussion also available via Zoom. Join the discussion here at the scheduled time.