Book Review: Unlawful Orders: A Portrait of Dr. James B. Williams (Tuskegee Airman, Surgeon, and Activist)

Unlawful Orders: A Portrait of Dr. James B. Williams (Tuskegee Airman, Surgeon, and Activist). Barbara Binns, Scholastic Focus, 1 October 2022, Hardcover, Audiobook and eBook, 320 pages.

Reviewed by Josh Cohen.

In Unlawful Orders: A Portrait of Dr. James B. Williams, Barbara Binns recounts the life of a man whose bravery and determination helped change the course of American history. Her book stands apart from most middle-grade biographies because it is more than a linear birth-to-death account. Binns weaves the details of Williams’s life into the larger narrative of the fight for racial justice during the twentieth century. Informative and inspirational, this book is perfect for the curious-minded middle-grade reader.

Binns immediately grabs the reader’s attention by describing the lynching of a Black man in Cameron, Texas, in 1907. This is one of several instances where the author does not withhold violent details in order to coddle young readers. Binns wants her audience to understand the fear that much of Black America felt during this period in American history.

The fear caused by that particular lynching spurred the subject’s father to move from Cameron to El Paso, where he served as the first president of the El Paso chapter of the NAACP. This set the stage for his family’s frontline position in the battle for civil rights. Central to this battle was James Buchanan (JB) Williams. As a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, the military’s Black aviators, JB helped organize a protest of his military base’s refusal to admit Black officers into the white officers’ club. Even when faced with threats of court-martial, imprisonment, and execution, JB and his fellow officers remained peaceful and principled. Their protest, which became known as the Freeman Field Mutiny, grabbed the nation’s attention and helped facilitate the eventual desegregation of the American armed forces.

Following the war, Williams earned his undergraduate degree and his medical degree in the face of pervasive prejudice. He became the first Black surgical resident at any non-Black school in America, as well as the first Black physician (and later, first Black chief of surgery) at Chicago’s St. Bernard Hospital. In response to the discriminatory admission practices of the American Medical Association, he and other Black doctors personally met with President Kennedy to lobby for legislative action.

As Binns relays the details of Williams’s life, she provides the reader with an abundance of historical context. She gives an overview of, among other things: Black participation in (and exclusion from) the American military prior to World War II; the anti-Black riots of 1919; Jim Crow laws in the South; the “Double V” campaign during World War II; and the violence unleashed on civil rights protesters in the 1960s. While this framework is generally effective, at times the author includes snippets that don’t contribute to her narrative, e.g., lengthy biographies for incidental players and parenthetical factoids that resemble trivia more so than valuable information.

Throughout the book, Binns makes a clear effort to keep her young readers engaged. She asks them to imagine themselves enlisting in the army and offering to fight for their country, just to be told they are fit only for kitchen or latrine duty. And to imagine being informed, as children, that they aren’t permitted to attend the same schools as their white peers. This endeavor to connect with her audience is largely successful. However, readers may be surprised by the author’s inconsistent tone. Binns trusts her readers’ maturity by using challenging vocabulary and detailing disturbing violence, but she also speaks down to her readers with occasional platitudes.

Barbara Binns has written an impressively researched book about one of the many unheralded Black heroes of the twentieth century. Though some aspects of her book could be tightened, Binns does accomplish what she sets out to. She introduces young readers to segments of American history that standard textbooks omit and, in the process, inspires them to follow their dreams, no matter the obstacles they face.