Osumane K. Power-Greene discusses The Confessions of Matthew Strong!
About The Confessions of Matthew Strong:
A wildly original, incendiary story about race, redemption, the dangerous imbalances that continue to destabilize society, and speaking out for what’s right.
One could argue the story begins the night Allegra Douglass is awarded Distinguished Chair in Philosophy at her top-tier university in New York—the same night her grandmother dies—or before that: the day Allie left Birmingham and never looked back. Or even before that: the day her mother disappeared. But for our purposes Allie’s story begins at the end, when she is finally ready to tell her version of what happened with a white supremacist named Matthew Strong.
From the beginning, Allie had the clues: in a spate of possibly connected disappearances of other young Black women; in a series of recently restored plantation homes; in letters outlining an uprising; in maps of slave trade routes and old estates; in hidden caves and buried tunnels; and finally, in a confessional that should never have existed. They just have to make a case strong enough for the FBI and police to listen. This is when Allie herself disappears.
Allie is a survivor. She survived the newly post-Jim Crow south, she survived cancer, and she will survive being stalked and kidnapped by Matthew Strong, who seeks to ignite a revolution. The surprise in this doesn’t lie in the question of will she be taken; it lies in how she and her community outsmart a tactical madman.
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Ousmane K. Power-Greene is the Program Director of Africana Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Clark University. Over his career, his scholarship has been supported by various fellowships, most notably the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities’ sponsored scholar-in-residency program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Power-Greene is the author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement, and his writing appears in The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters.
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Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. This event will be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!