A lyrical recollection of a segregated Memphis childhood, rich in love and wisdom, that, unfortunately, peters out in typical Sixties-generation preoccupations. Wade-Gayles (English and Women's Studies/Spelman College) grew up in a housing project in Memphis during the late 40's and early 50's at a time when a housing project ``was a stopping-off place. A decent, but temporary home you lived in until you were able to buy a real home.'' Her parents were divorced, and her father, though a railroad porter living in Chicago, was a vital presence in her life—as were her mother and grandmother, figures of outstanding courage and determination, and relatives like the tragically doomed Uncle Prince. It was Wade-Gayles's grandmother who responded, when the author complained of whites ``always pushing us back,'' that ``They don't know it, but they're pushing you back to us, where you can get strong''—a response that held the family together, set high standards of behavior and accomplishment, and gave Wade-Gayles the confidence to go to college and graduate school, to become an activist in the civil- rights movement, and, later, to teach college. Though segregation was a harsh presence in Memphis, the author poignantly contrasts life in the projects, in schools segregated but ``challenging and uncompromising in their insistence on excellent academic performance and exemplary character,'' and in the supportive black churches with the bleak killing-fields the inner-city has become today. Now married with two adult children, Wade-Gayles relates her somewhat undifferentiated opinions of whites; her belief in ultimate integration preceded by a period of racial separation; her ideas on gender; and a spiritual quest after her beloved mother's death that led to an encounter with an Ndepp priestess from Senegal. An evocative recollection of a community cruelly defined by race but sustained by loving strength and deep faith.
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-8070-0922-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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