Born into the Storm

Abstract

I grew up in Detroit, but because my father was in the Air Force I was born on an Air Force base in Chicopee, Massachusetts. It was 1954, the same year that the US Supreme Court ruled against “Separate but Equal,” the purported theory underpinning legalized segregation in the south in the case of Brown v Board of Education. This major legal victory was the culmination of almost 100 years of struggle against Jim Crow, the wicked child of slavery. Within a few months of my birth, the political landscape of the United States erupted into a battlefield as the impact of that Supreme Court decision provided the contemporary context for the African American national community to accelerate and intensify confrontation with the racist legacy of slavery. I was raised in the storm that would follow. My development as a child was influenced by the social changes that were occurring throughout the country and especially in the developing political consciousness of black people.