It would seem to most that the obsession with young killers, alleged or otherwise, began with the 2000 Nathaniel Brazil case. Yet, as Elaine Brown demonstrates in her explosive and formidable book that dissects the 1997 trial of Michael Lewis, known as Little B, such an obsession – like patriotism during war and politicians’ increased visibility around election campaign time-is nothing new under the sun.

Lewis, who grew up in the urban community of Bluff in Georgia in cramped apartments where fat rats and roaches feasted, and cocaine and heroine deals were conducted in dimly-lit street corners. Only 13 when he was accused of murder, and just 14 when sentenced to life in prison – the young boy had a nearly nonexistent family life with an absentee father and a crack-addict-prostitute mother declared unfit by the state. Then in a warm afternoon in Georgia, his life took an even more devastating turn, when the area’s most notorious drug dealers, serving as key witnesses of the murder of 24-year-old black male Darrel Woods, pointed out Lewis as the killer.

While white teens accused of mass murders around the same time were recommended for counseling and for enrollment in mental health programs, Little B was denounced in the media as being a predator with no respect for human life. One who deserved whatever punishment the state deemed necessary.

Moreover, despite the fact that the questionable witnesses’ stories were not in harmony, and in spite of the fact that it was later revealed that several members on the prosecuting team’s witnesses had cut deals with the district attorney to receive less severe sentences for their own crimes in exchange for implicating Little B in the murder, the young boy was jailed.

The trials and tribulations of Little B interests Brown greatly. But early on, she makes it clear that while her book is a sort of manifesto calling for an appeal for the incarcerated teen, it is also an outlet in which she is conveying her outrage over subtle racism and what she terms “New Age” bigotry in the Millennium.

Flipping back the pages of history, Brown traces the origins of “New Age/New Era Racism,” settling first on 1780s United States, indexing the wrongs of politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln. The latter she blasts as being one of the most irredeemable racists of his era and the former has, in the past, been wrongfully attributed with wanting to do away with black slavery, when in actuality merely using it as a threat to weaken the slavery-dependent Confederacy. The attacks proceed on to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the last four presidents of the United States, particularly Clinton, and surprisingly so, since the latter has maintained an image of solidarity with Black America.

Not even blacks are exempt from the verbal whippings administered by Brown. Marking prominent sociologist William Julius Wilson and journalist Leonard Pitts and even such entertainment tycoons as Russell Simmons and Sean “P Diddy” Combs along with political leaders as W.E.B. Dubois, Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell as modern day house slaves. Brown condemns them as being just as instrumental to the detriment of the state of Black America as any other racist. Brown asserts that living “in the big house” and embodying the traits of the slave-era House Slave, and thus receiving mass acceptance by the mainstream world, led them to distance themselves away from the black struggle and turn instead into oppressors of other blacks. This state of mind, Brown believes, is exemplified by the renowned black historian Henry Louis Gates who once declared: “Home for me is Harvard Square…Our community of black professors has more in common with our white colleagues than with our brothers and sisters still in the ghetto.”

Throughout the book, Brown is unceasingly repetitive, as if her redundancy is purposefully done to stress and remind one of her conviction of Little B’s innocence and of the ugliness of her self-branded theory of post-Twenty-First Century Racism. However, her persuasiveness is so passionate, her rhetoric so powerful, one wonders if matters would have turned as they did for Little B, had she, and not the newly-graduated defense lawyers, represented the young Lewis. And one doubts if her book would have any purpose at all, if her own vision of American solidarity and equality were an actuality.

Brown, whose only previously-published work has been “Taste of Power,” a memoir about her days as a political leader of the Black Panthers, has written a book that encourages reflection on social events that seem to not only be a staple of the past, but threatens to be a continuous reality in the future, if not given proper handling.