Albert Murray’s The Spyglass Tree and the 1923 Armed Defense of Tuskegee Institute

In Albert Murray’s novel The Spyglass Tree (1991), which is set in a town similar to Tuskegee, Alabama and at a college similar to Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s, the protagonist hears a tale in a barbershop of how the campus community defended itself from the Ku Klux Klan in the previous decade. The protagonist uses this story, which is an approximately accurate re-telling of the historical defense of Tuskegee Institute from the Klan in 1923, as a model for heroic action. Murray thus revisits a theme from his first novel, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), in which the same protagonist learns to appreciate and be guided by African American vernacular traditions and published forms of discourse in equal measure.