Description
From its original sin of slavery, we hoped America would have changed its ways with the Emancipation and the Reconstruction period. However, its journey through darkness was to continue with the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. They ushered in one of the ugliest, most diabolical periods in American history known as the Jim Crow era. Behind the scenes for over a century the Klan terrorized the emancipated people. They lynched them, burned them, murdered them, shot them and so doing killed thousands of these freed people in the name of white supremacy. Their use of the noose to strike fear in the heart of minority is still ongoing. This is a story of three men, one who defied the Klan another who took Klan ideology to new heights and another who tried to heal.
This story examines, explores and exposes racism in that nation. It exposes the thinking and privileges of the white mass and the suffering of the underprivileged black minority. The battles that are fought to retain the status quo and those to gain equality. It is a fiction that is based on the reality of this nation and its racist past, with the hope of a better future for all as that nation evolve.
Oswald Mould is a retired Registered Nurse and has worked in the mental health field as a Psychiatric Nurse in the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation for three years. Before this, he worked for 11 years for the State University of New York at the Downstate Medical Centre, including six years as an Emergency Room Nurse in the Resuscitation Unit and for five years as a Radiology Nurse. He also worked for five years as a Trauma One Emergency Nurse at Harlem Hospital of the New York Health and Hospital Corporation; at the Interfaith Jewish Medical Centre as a Medical and Surgical Nurse; and as a Visiting Nurse.
Before working as a nurse, Oswald worked in the computer industry, in the corporate world of Wall Street and as a civil servant. He witnessed the September 11 attack on the original twin towers of the World Trade Centre, which he describes as “a horrendous incident that pushed me into nursing, because I had already qualified as a nurse.” After the crisis, his company moved the IBM facility in upstate New York, where Oswald had to commute approximately 100 miles daily.
The author says he was influenced by the many racial incidents of young black men being killed by the police in New York and other parts of the USA. He felt the need to do something about it and decided to write his first book. He states that “enduring the pain of racism is common among black men, for we have to live with it daily in some form or another.” He channelled his feelings into his fictitious characters and wrote this, his debut novel, as a gripping, emotional and relevant demonstration of the racial problems inhibiting America’s growth and development in its embrace of diversity.
His comprehensive research, included the history of the lynching and hanging of African Americans, the dark, disturbing history of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and how for decades its members terrorized African Americans in the South through harassment, shootings, hangings and burning the homes of innocent people while they slept. The author carefully researched the United States Air Force Academy and the Vietnam War, which is based around three main characters whose lives are strongly emotional and relevant in today’s world.
The author says that “after reading this story…readers will see the United States of America in a way you may have never seen it before.”
