People Wasn`t Made to Burn (Hardcover)

"What I appreciate about Joe Allen`s work is that he demonstrates as a historian . . . the power of information, meticulous, distilled, coherent, principled."—John Pilger

In 1947, James Hickman shot and killed the landlord he believed was responsible for a tragic fire which took the lives of four of his children on Chicago`s west side. Prosecutors sought a death sentence for Hickman, but a vibrant defense campaign—which included the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead and acclaimed artist Ben Shahn—exposed how working poverty and racism led to his crime and helped to win Hickman`s freedom.

In the best tradition of true crime drama and narrative nonfiction, Joe Allen unearths the compelling story of a campaign that was willing to stand up to Jim Crow well before the modern civil rights movement had even begun.

As deteriorating housing conditions and an accelerating foreclosure crisis combine to form a hauntingly similar set of factors as those which led to the tragic fire that claimed the lives of James Hickman`s children, Allen`s book restores to prominence a previously unknown individual whose story has profound relevance to today.

Joe Allen is a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review and a long-standing social justice fighter involved in the ongoing struggles for labor, abolition of the death penalty, and against the Iraq war. He is the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost.