GIRLCHILD: GROWING UP BETWEEN THE PINES AND PALMS IN JIM CROW GEORGIA AND FLORIDA : A Memoir

This memoir is a legacy project as well as a history lesson. No, there are no lectures or footnotes. It is a first-person retelling of pivotal years of her youth, during a seemingly fixed, yet slowly transforming period in our nation. The author was a Black child born into the post-World War II world of Jim Crow segregation. She grew up in two adjoining states of the old Confederacy—South Georgia and South Florida. Being the first Black child born on the all-White Air Force base in Lowndes County (Valdosta), Georgia, was seen as a privilege bestowed on her mother by the fact of her father’s military service during the war, yet her mother was curtained off in the hallway with her newborn, away from the white mothers.. The sudden move to Miami, a supposedly liberal, but still very segregated city, offered new opportunities and challenges, including better schooling, but more restrictive economic circumstances of life with a now single mother. Read more