Publisher's Synopsis
To fully understand the gifts of the present and the promises of the future, it's necessary to look back at the realities of the past. For a Black family, courage, hope, and despair in just the right measure can lead to the unthinkable.
It was 1943, and it's likely our parents had never thought seriously about leaving home until they had children of their own. It's likely, until they saw the future through the eyes of their children, they had made peace with substandard housing, education, and lack of opportunity. But when they had children of their own, they gathered their courage and hope, set aside despair, and made the move. Theirs was the first generation, as part of the Great Migration, to settle in mass outside of the South. They had hoped Berkeley, California would be different, but they were welcomed only in South Berkeley, in an all-Colored, working-class neighborhood where they faced many problems they had left behind.
Fast forward to 1970. We were the Affirmative Action generation. We graduated from high school in record numbers. Many the first in our family to attend college. Many of us were the first to flourish in jobs on a career-track. We walked the fine line of assimilation, all while reveling in and celebrating our Blackness. But others, who were not Black or did not celebrate Blackness continued to sing the anti-Black, hate-filled songs embedded in the soundtrack of America.
And so it went, until the summer of 2021 as we tried to make sense of 2020, the years that led to it, and assessed our culpability. Tacitly we accept that it's time to relinquish the reins to the next generations. While we are held captive by years of experience, they are unencumbered by probabilities and see only possibilities. While we are looking back, their eyes are squarely set on the future. With untested skills and abilities, they execute on ideas that are beyond our imagination.
We recognize that with untested skills and abilities they conjure up and execute on ideas that are beyond our imagination. Like us and those who came before, they are accustomed to firsts