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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 ALLEN | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
When Carrie Allen McCray was a child, she was afraid to ask about the framed photograph of a white man on her mother's dresser. Years later she learned that he was her grandfather, a Confederate general, and that her grandmother was a former slave. In her late seventies, Carrie McCray went searching for her history and found the remarkable story of her mother, Mary, the illegitimate daughter of General J. R. Jones, of Lynchburg, Virginia. Jones would later be cast out of Lynchburg society for publicly recognizing his daughter. FREEDOM'S CHILD is a loving remembrance of how Mary spent her life beating down the kind of thinking that ostracized her father. She was a leader in the founding of the NAACP and hosted the likes of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois as they plotted the war against discrimination at her kitchen table. Carrie McCray's memories reward us with an extraordinarily vivid and intimate portrait of a remarkable woman. "Highly recommended for all readers."--Library Journal, hot pick; "I defy anyone to finish FREEDOM'S CHILD without a tear in their eye, a sense of meeting a great spirit, and an inspiration to act with generosity and justice."--Gloria Steinem; A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB and QUALITY PAPERBACK BOOK CLUB SELECTION.
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
McCray's loving tribute to her mother chronicles one woman's battle for racial equality from Reconstruction to the Depression. That Mary Allen was born in 1877 of a white Confederate general and a black housekeeper was not so remarkable in the Old South; that her white father claimed his black offspring was. General John Jones took his light-skinned daughter out for ice cream (treatment denied his darker-skinned son) and paid for her college education. This devotion likely cost him a place in the Confederate pantheon. Ironically, the general (and the ex-slave uncle who raised Mary after her mother's death) instilled the redoubtable confidence and fortitude that fueled Mary's lifelong battle for ""full freedom"" for blacks. She succeeded her late first husband, Gregory Hayes, as president of Virginia Seminary and later founded NAACP chapters in Virginia and Montclair, NJ, where she moved with her second husband. McCray remembers her childhood home abuzz with early NAACP leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, Harlem Renaissance writers like Sterling Brown and Countee Cullen, and ""Thursday people,"" blacks who visited on their traditional day off from jobs as domestics in white households. Drawing on family memories, stories told by the poet and longtime family friend Anne Spencer, and from the Library of Congress's NAACP archives, McCray fashions an episodic, novelistic portrait of her mother. Some of the invented conversations that bridge gaps in the reported record are stilted and preachy, but McCray largely succeeds in creating a forceful testament to her mother's strength in the fight against discrimination. Though she regularly locked horns with theater managers, school principals, and even US presidents, no incident illustrates Mary's strength of character more than her persistence in speaking daily to a white neighbor, who eventually accepted Mary as her best friend. Such attention to small, everyday details makes this intimate familial memoir more affecting than third-person history. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Mary Rice Hayes Allen was born in 1876, the offspring of a former Confederate general and his black domestic servant. That in and of itself was hardly an exceptional occurrence. Yet, as McCray's wonderful narrative reveals, both the father and his daughter didn't fit the molds reserved for them. The father, J. R. Jones, publicly acknowledged his paternity, paid for his daughter's upkeep and education, and suffered social ostracism as a result. His daughter became a teacher, bore 10 children, and was a pioneer in the civil rights movement, displaying the same courage and dogged tenacity that her father showed on the battlefield. McCray, trained as a teacher and social worker, turned to writing at the age of 73, and her biography of her mother is clearly a labor of love. It is a sweeping story that deftly interweaves the personal saga of a woman with her tumultuous times--a worthy tribute to an extraordinary human being. --Jay Freeman