Negroland: A Memoir

By Margo Jefferson

Book Overview

An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson

National Bestseller
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A New York Times Notable Book

Jefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: "I call it Negroland," she writes, "because I still find 'Negro' a word of wonders, glorious and terrible."

Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, while her mother was a socialite. Negroland's pedigree dates back generations, having originated with antebellum free blacks who made their fortunes among the plantations of the South.

It evolved into a world of exclusive sororities, fraternities, networks, and clubs--a world in which skin color and hair texture were relentlessly evaluated alongside scholarly and professional achievements, where the Talented Tenth positioned themselves as a third race between whites and "the masses of Negros," and where the motto was "Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment."

Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions, while reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments--the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the falsehood of post-racial America.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307473430
• ISBN13: 9780307473431
• Release Date: August 2016
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"