The Flaming Sword
AuthorsThomas Dixon, Jr.
IllustratorEdward Shenton
LanguageEnglish
PublisherMonarch Publishing
Publication date
1939

The Flaming Sword was a 1939 novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. It was his twenty-eighth and last novel.[1] It has been described as "a racist jeremiad centered on the specter of black sexuality."[2]

Background

The novel is the last installment of a trilogy which included The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation.[3] It is partly based on The Red Dawn, a play written by Dixon in 1919.[3]

Dixon worked sixteen hours a day on this novel.[4] The book came with thirty pages of illustrations done by Edward Shenton.[3] It was published by Monarch Publishing, owned by Edward Young Clarke, a Ku Klux Klan member.[3]

The title is taken from a quotation by African-American leader W.E.B. Du Bois: "Across this path stands the South with flaming sword."[2][4][5]

Plot summary

Shortly after Angela Cameron gets married, an African-American man breaks into her house, kills her husband and son, and rapes her sister.[3] As a result, she decides to move to New York City and learn more about the situation of African-Americans.[3] Meanwhile, African-Americans and Communists try to overthrow the government, and they succeed: the country becomes known as the 'Soviet Republic of the United States' and the only newspaper available in New York City is the Soviet Herald.[6][7] However, she meets her childhood sweetheart and decides everything is not lost.[3] Eventually, she donates US$10 million to found the Marcus Garvey Colonization Society, whose aim is to repatriate African Americans to the African continent.[2][5]

Critical reception

The book was reprinted four times in the first two months of publication.[3] In 2005, it was reprinted by the University Press of Kentucky.[1]

According to biographer Anthony Slide, the novel "is generally seen as a critical failure."[3] Indeed, The New York Times called it "a nightmare melodrama" and "the expression of a panic fear."[3] Alluding to World War II, the New York Herald Tribune suggested, "it is not as wildly incredible today as it might have seemed a few short weeks ago."[3]

The novel was praised by Marcus Garvey.[5]

References

  1. 1 2 Project Muse
  2. 1 2 3 Alusine Jalloh, Toyin Falola, The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2008 p. 86
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon, Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2004, pp. 186-189
  4. 1 2 Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2011, pp. 31-32
  5. 1 2 3 Ibrahim Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914–1940, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004, p. 313
  6. ↑ Glen David Gold, Excerpt: 'Thomas Dixon: Jael-baiter', NPR, June 4, 2007
  7. ↑ Thomas Dixon, 1864-1946 , Documenting the American South
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