An eloquently told story that should make an impact.
A distinguished African American attorney’s account of how growing up in the Jim Crow South impacted her later struggle to overturn desegregation laws.
Segregation was a hard fact of life for African Americans when North Carolina native Roundtree (1914-2018) was a child. Undaunted, her mother pushed her and her sisters to become “women of destiny” by pursuing their educations. The author excelled in school and was accepted to Spelman College in Atlanta. After a short stint teaching, she traveled to Washington, D.C., where she went to work for Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, who recommended her for the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Roundtree took her first stand against racism while in the military when she successfully spoke out against Army plans to segregate the WAAC. At the end of the war, she was offered a position with the Fair Employment Practices Committee in California. She had initially wanted to go to medical school, but she soon came to realize that a law degree would best serve her desire to “chang[e] the world in which I’d come of age.” Roundtree attended Howard University School of Law and then began the legal work that would lead to the eventual “shattering of Jim Crow.” In 1955, she won a major victory in the Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company case, which helped bring about the end of the separate-but-equal practices that had been at the heart of segregation laws. Her law practice thrived, but a period of ill health and “nagging restlessness” caused her to turn to her religion for solace. Later, she enrolled in the Howard University Divinity School and became one of the first ordained female ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a leading light in “yet another war, a war for [abused] children.” Thoughtful and highly inspiring, this book, co-authored by McCabe, is not only a moving memoir; it is also an important contribution to the history of civil rights in America. Tayari Jones provides the foreword.
An eloquently told story that should make an impact.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-955-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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