CHILD OF THE DREAM

“Sharon, I cannot promise you that the passage of any law will eliminate hate. But the laws will give Negroes full citizenship and bring us closer to equality.”

Legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson—most famously known for breaking baseball’s racial barrier when he played with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947—gave this nuanced benediction to his only daughter, 13-year-old Sharon, as the family heard the disheartening news of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. What the memoirist also beautifully and accessibly conveys is how her parents succeeded—and, by their admission, sometimes failed—in rooting her and her two brothers, 10-year-old David and 16-year-old Jackie Jr., in the realities of pater Robinson’s renown, Connecticut’s 1960s-style racial microaggressions, and the seismic social and political shifts augured by the emerging civil rights movement. Thanks to the author’s deft and down-to-earth style, readers understand how the personal and political converge: When her brother runs away from home in order to get away from his father’s shadow, she muses on the social pressures of a school dance in the midst of midcentury U.S. racism; it is at a jazz fundraiser her parents coordinate for the Southern Christian Leadership conference that she finally meets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

A lovingly honest memoir of a racial—and social activist—past that really hasn’t passed.