While I was looking at “Black Reconstruction”, I was reminded of a novel about Reconstruction written by Howard Fast called “Freedom Road”.

Full disclosure: I’ve never read FR.  But the gloss I received about it years ago was that it dramatized the attempts of a multi-racial commune to set up in post-Civil-War South Carolina.

Howard Fast was a bit of a Leftie, and served 3 months in jail during the McCarthy era for not “naming names”.  In jail he began his best-known work, Spartacus, the movie of which, with Kirk Douglas,  was a fixture of my youth.

I finally did purchase a copy recently, and it’s sitting on the list of things to be read.  But the couple of dips I took into the book (I almost always look at the end of the book, for reasons I’m not going to go into now; I also looked at the beginning and another place) looked like well-written, good story, page-turner.

Googling the book this morning, I realized that it was made into a TV mini-series in the ’70’s, starring, of all people, Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson.  Seems like that mini-series might be worth a gander for the TV-oriented.