Nicholas Lemann
Texas is a Southern state and a Western state, a populist state and a business state, an intolerant state and a diverse state. Nobody is better equipped to make sense of Texas in all its largeness and complexity than Bill Minutaglio. A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles is the best guide we have to the history of politics and race in Texas.
Cary Clack
A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles may be the best book written about the intersection of race and politics throughout Texas history, an intersection in which racism put ambitious white politicians on the road to wealth and power while relegating Black and Mexican American Texans to second-class citizenship—or death. Bill Minutaglio knows where all the bodies are buried in Texas, the Black and Brown bodies victimized by the violence of lynching or by the Texas Rangers. He also knows Texas’s buried history, that history of racial exploitation, exclusion and, yes, execution that isn’t mythologized and burnished into legend.
Stephen Harrigan
Bill Minutaglio is the ultimate spirit guide through the chaotic, raw, eternally grasping but occasionally semi-uplifting struggle for dominance in Texas. He has lived through and reported on many of the wild events and personalities that he has so elegantly depicted in this book. In the years to come A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles will be the go-to volume for readers who dare to peek under the hood of Texas politics to have a closer look at the driving pistons of money, power, and race that keep this infernal engine running.
Joe Holley
Ever hear of Jovita Idar, the young South Texas newspaper publisher who faced down a contingent of Texas Rangers? How about Norris Wright Cuney, the astute African American political activist from Galveston? Or the women’s rights activist Ellen Lawson Dabbs? Or Robert L. Smith of Waco, the last African American state legislator until Barbara Jordan was elected to the state senate nearly three-quarters of a century later? In this deeply researched, immensely readable history of race and politics in Texas, Bill Minutaglio resurrects these and other memorable Texans who deserve a more prominent place in the annals of the state. Minutaglio has always been an engaging writer, whether exploring the birth of the blues in Texas or re-creating for his readers the horrific 1947 dockside explosion in Texas City. In A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles, his masterpiece, he shifts history’s kaleidoscope, bringing to vivid life a revisionist view of the Lone Star State, a Texas most of us never knew.
