Interesting Times: The Life and Times of a Civil Rights Child

I was fortunate to live during interesting times. I grew up in a small but interesting town in New Jersey. I was lucky enough to be born into a loving family with lots of older siblings (eight older and one younger brother). As an African American born at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, I had a bird’s eye view of America as it ascended the post-World War II mountain to the top of the world. As a child of the Civil Rights movement, I am old enough to remember and wise enough not to forget the struggles of that era and the sacrifices made. Each day, the number of people that can remember that era diminishes, and I feel that time is passing by my generation. We have already elected a president that was born too young to remember the March on Washington and the movement itself has reached a state of social amnesia and political atrophy. From the inception of this nation, race has been woven into the American fabric. Therefore, it is all the more important that we have a serious dialogue about race. Quite often we call for such dialogue but never truly get around to talking about it. We are somehow caught up in the vicious cycle of talking about talking about it. My life story attests to the hidden ghost of racism that haunts the house we call America and I dream of a day when the specter of racism no longer looms.Although this book chronicles my life’s journey, it is also about the burgeoning of America, and the vicissitudes that made my American journey interesting times. I wrote this book not as a tribute to myself but as an inheritance to my children and their children’s children. We must be forever mindful that what was given can easily be taken away and those that forget history will soon repeat it. Read more