( ☐ Black ☐ White ) House

U.S. paperback cover on the left; U.K. paperback cover
on the right.

"Barack Obama's candidacy has got me thinking of Irving Wallace's 1964 novel The Man, which imagines an America led by a black president. But Wallace's hero, Douglas Dillman, isn't elected; he's a Midwestern senator who inherits the White House after the president and the speaker of the House are killed in a freak accident. The vice president has recently died, and since the novel was published before the adoption of the 25th amendment the office remains vacant. As president pro tempore of the Senate (a ceremonial post he was chosen for to appease the party's liberal wing), Dillman is therefore next in line.

     Unlike with Truman and LBJ, the country doesn't rally around the new president: sixty-one percent disapprove of him. Dillman can't fault them; he holds a low opinion of himself too. Racial insecurity bedevils him. 'I am a black man,' he says, 'not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President.'"
— Ariel Gonzalez, Huffington Post (May 19, 2008)
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"No justice, no peace. In the most devastating and detrimental blow to Americans, the electoral process and our Constitutional right to vote, the Supreme Court has struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 4, which maps the areas that must have pre-clearance from the federal government before making any changes to their voting laws, was ruled 'unconstitutional' in a 5-4 decision today, and the ball was thrown into Congress' court. Eliminating Section 4 is just a slick, polished way of eliminating pre-clearance all together — the very basis of the Voting Rights Act. This outrageous ruling puts African Americans, other minorities, the poor and all oppressed groups now at the mercy of state governments, yet again. It's as if we're in pre-1965 America….
     Almost immediately following the Court's reprehensible ruling, we see voter suppression tactics at play. According to the latest news reports, Texas' Attorney General Greg Abbott announced: 'With today's decision, the State's voter ID law will take effect immediately. Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.' In other words, those that are impacted the most by carefully concocted methods of disenfranchisement, will now be at the mercy of the states creating those schemes."
— Rev. Al Sharpton, Huffington Post (June 25, 2013)
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Buy all of Irving Wallace's books here...