barryqwalsh
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- Sep 30, 2014
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Book of the Week, Negroland Episode 1 of 5
Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 to a successful black, middle-class couple in Chicago. Her memoir looks back on her childhood and the black bourgeois upbringing that 'made and maimed me'.
She explains the title of her book, "Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty."
But the material comforts provided by a father who was a paediatrician and a mother who was formerly a social worker were circumscribed by all the painful and baffling assumptions of racial prejudice. To be a child in Negroland you had to learn the rules. But who was making those rules? And what exactly were they?
Margo Jefferson went on to become an arts and theatre critic on the New York Times and Newsweek. She won a Pulitzer for her journalism and now teaches at Columbia University.
Written and read by Margo Jefferson
Abridged and produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4
AUDIO
Episode 1, Negroland, Book of the Week - BBC Radio 4
