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A review by dragonbitebooks
A Time To Protest: Leadership Lessons from My Father Who Survived the Segregated South for 99 Years by Angela D. Massey
Review originally published on my blog, Dragon Bite Books.
This memoir and history by Penny Edwards Blue was the work of two days’ reading for me. Blue, a native of Franklin County, Virginia—specifically Union Hall—reaches back along her family tree to recount how she, her siblings, her parents, and her ancestors further back stood up against bigoted ideas and indignities inflicted upon Black people in America from the time that Africans first arrived on the American coast up to now. Her father’s grandparents, whom he knew well and about whom he could share personal stories, were freed at end of the Civil War. His great-grandfather was also his grandfather’s enslaver. Blue’s father, born in 1912, was able to shake the hand of Barack Obama and see him elected as president before passing from the world. Through short, personal stories about his actions, his interactions with family and with those who would try to oppress him, his character, and his reputation, the reader gets to know Charles Edwards. Charles lived through legal and enforced segregation as well as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s and desegregation, and instilled in his family and acted with admirable pride and dignity, actively working through action and withholding of patronage to ensure that he and his family were not cowed by those who wanted to make them feel lesser. These short stories about Charles Edwards and his ancestors were fit between a more general timeline of Edwards’ life and of Black history in America. I still feel like I got to know Edwards personally, but the tone of the book was not as intimate as I had expected it to be.
Chapters and passages about the broader history of Black and white people in America in this and earlier centuries are well researched, though most of the annotations are in the back of the book rather than on the same page as I would have preferred them to be.
If you’re looking for an easy and quick read about the segregated South and the history and the institutional racism that has led to today’s racial divide in the US, and especially if you have an interest in the history of Southwest or rural Virginia, this may be a good book to pick up. The stories help to make more personal these broad concepts and centuries of practices, which could easily be the work of a whole college degree’s worth of classes, but which here are included more as an overview and a means of giving context to the stories shared.
It might be worth noting that Charles Edwards and Penny Edwards Blue are both products of Appalachia too.
***
This memoir and history by Penny Edwards Blue was the work of two days’ reading for me. Blue, a native of Franklin County, Virginia—specifically Union Hall—reaches back along her family tree to recount how she, her siblings, her parents, and her ancestors further back stood up against bigoted ideas and indignities inflicted upon Black people in America from the time that Africans first arrived on the American coast up to now. Her father’s grandparents, whom he knew well and about whom he could share personal stories, were freed at end of the Civil War. His great-grandfather was also his grandfather’s enslaver. Blue’s father, born in 1912, was able to shake the hand of Barack Obama and see him elected as president before passing from the world. Through short, personal stories about his actions, his interactions with family and with those who would try to oppress him, his character, and his reputation, the reader gets to know Charles Edwards. Charles lived through legal and enforced segregation as well as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s and desegregation, and instilled in his family and acted with admirable pride and dignity, actively working through action and withholding of patronage to ensure that he and his family were not cowed by those who wanted to make them feel lesser. These short stories about Charles Edwards and his ancestors were fit between a more general timeline of Edwards’ life and of Black history in America. I still feel like I got to know Edwards personally, but the tone of the book was not as intimate as I had expected it to be.
Chapters and passages about the broader history of Black and white people in America in this and earlier centuries are well researched, though most of the annotations are in the back of the book rather than on the same page as I would have preferred them to be.
If you’re looking for an easy and quick read about the segregated South and the history and the institutional racism that has led to today’s racial divide in the US, and especially if you have an interest in the history of Southwest or rural Virginia, this may be a good book to pick up. The stories help to make more personal these broad concepts and centuries of practices, which could easily be the work of a whole college degree’s worth of classes, but which here are included more as an overview and a means of giving context to the stories shared.
It might be worth noting that Charles Edwards and Penny Edwards Blue are both products of Appalachia too.
***