Colored People:  A Memoir
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
$22.00
 

ISBN 0679421793
Alfred A. Knopf

African-American Studies/ Non-Fiction/ Memoir

"In this rich memoir of his early life, the celebrated scholar and writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us an indelible portrait of a vanished America.  Born in 1950, he grew up in Piedmont (population 2,565), a West Virginia town perched on the side of a hill in the Allegheny Mountains.  He was raised in a small, intimate, middle-class "colored" community where secrets and haircuts were prime commodities and the major social event was the annual mill picnic. 

It was a time when the United States was just crossing the threshold into desegregation (the Piedmont schools were integrated the year before Gates entered first grade); when racial boundaries were constantly shifting and progress was measured primarily by the number of black faces that appeared on television.  But Gates's story is not only a story about race.  It is the story of a family, of a village, and of a special time and place in American history."