Negroland: A Memoir

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic 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.