I respect Howard Fast as one of the ablest and most patriotic of our novelists, and I see in … Freedom Road, a valiant effort to inform us of a period when, in the aftermath of the Civil War, blind emotionalism and black hatred defeated the very ideals for which our ablest men had been fighting….

In the writing of Freedom Road, Mr. Fast the historian has sometimes been outmaneuvered by Mr. Fast the moralist…. The moralist in Mr. Fast reminds me at times of John Bunyan. His Gideon is a paragon whose integrity and courage are spotless white; his anti-christs, the planter Stephan Holms and Jason Hugar, are blacker than hell. What redeems this book is the sure narrative skill of the novelist when at last the forces of darkness, the Klan, are closing in.

Edward Weeks, "Black Hatred," in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1944, by The Atlantic Monthly...