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Summary of //The Other Side of the River //

Separated by the St. Joseph River, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor are two Michigan towns that are geographically close, yet in every sense worlds apart. St. Joseph is a prosperous lake shore community, 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of Eric McGinnis, a black teenage boy from Benton Harbor, is found in the river, relations between the two communities grow increasingly strained as long held misconceptions and attitudes surface. As family, friends, and the police struggle to find out how and why McGinnis died, Alex Kotlowitz uncovers layers of both evidence and opinion, and demonstrates that in many ways, the truth is shaped by which side of the river you call home.

-A Story of Two Towns, A Death and America's Dilemma

Section 1: Chapters 1-17 Section 1 of the book starts off with a body that has been found floating down the St. Joseph River. The body is of a young male that had been claimed missing after that Friday night. The young man is a teenage African American who was from Benton Harbor. The police looked into the case and found it to be an accidental drowning. Many citizens, mostly from Benton Harbor, believed that this was not an accidental drowning and that it was a murder. This case had caused a lot of arousal in the neighborhood and made a greater divide between St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. This case was then looked back into when a young detective got put on the case many years after Eric McGinnis had died. This section goes back and looks at many of the people that knew Eric and who might know information about the nights after he had gone missing. This section gives the reader good background information about Benton Harbor and St. Joseph. It also shows the reader how divided these two towns were and still are.

Section 2: Chapters 18-32

Section 2 of the book starts out with alot of conflict at Benton Harbor School. The main controversy is superintendent Sherwin Allen's fate as apart of Benton Harbor schools. Many people wanted him fired for missappropriating school funds, and in the end of this whole mess Allen was fired, but charges were never filed by the state police. What lingered long afterwards was this: if the powers that be spent as much energy, time, and money investigating Eric McGinnis's death as they did in dethroning Sherwin Allen, they would have solved Eric's death. For alot of people, the equation was that simple. The next part of this section talks briefly about the race card. Most familiarly the "Austin case." Lllyod Austin was falsely arrested, and the police used excessive force against him, he did not match the characteristics of the robber, and he thinks the police did this to him only because he is black. That is how most blacks think. They feel that we (as in white people) look at them all the same, that to us everyone looks like one another. The book then talks more about the night that Eric went missing, and all the different stories that were being told. So many different people have their own side of the story, especially whether or not you were from St. Joseph or Benton Harbor. The book goes into great detail about the racial tension between these two towns, and different accounts of violence and arguments. After many, many years the death of Eric McGinnis is still being looked at and still trying to find an answer. The cause of Eric's death is still undecided although many people believe that he had accidentally drowned in the river, and many people still have their own reasoning of why they think he died. To this day, racial tension is still a problem across the United States and this book is a great example of what this tension was like in two small towns in Michigan in 1991.

__About the Author __ -Alex Kotlwitz-

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