Although published nearly ninety years ago, William Thomas Smith’s 1937 serial novel The Black Stockings feels ripped from today’s headlines: a white supremacist presidential candidate and his masked terrorist group, the Black Stockings, vow to kick all immigrants and minorities out of the country, and a Black guerrilla network armed with advanced weapons battles against them. In a similar vein, H.L. Faggett’s Tales of Black Robin (1945–1952) detail the adventures of a former football player turned undercover avenger who rights racist wrongs in the Jim Crow South, one punch in the jaw at a time.
