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Reviewed by Alice DiNizo for Readers' Favorite
Erin Mitchell has created a masterpiece in her book "Born Colored: Life Before Bloody Sunday", for it clearly tells of segregation in the American South in those years just before the Civil Rights Movement. What Mitchell conveys quite clearly is that African-Americans, faced with segregation, survived by living as a community, watching over their children and anyone needing assistance. Neighbors shared with neighbors and everyone knew of the successes or needs of the neighborhood's children to succeed better. Mitchell, herself a retired Chicago school teacher, tells of the unfairness of those times, of her parents' work as a teacher (her mother) and a principal (her father) and how their salaries were so much less than those of the white educators. But she also writes of true and loving family connections which they experienced when she and her brother spent summers with their maternal grandparents in Selma, Alabama. Erin, her brother Stanley and younger sister Alice Rose grew up and went to school in Fitzgerald, Georgia, but they cherished those summers in Selma, again with a neighborhood that watched over their own.
"Born Colored" is an extremely well-written book that is bittersweet. It conveys the acceptance by the southern blacks of the unfairness of segregation, how Mitchell's mother accepted clothing donations from white families and turned them into masterpieces for her own children. Mitchell tells of travelling as a little girl with her father, only to face being unable to board a bus for their destination as they were black and the bus was filled. She does recount visiting the South years later when discrimination was illegal and tells of being amazed at being seated at what was a white's only establishment in her childhood years. The reader will feel her joy at being able to walk about and shop without the sting of being shunned for the color of her skin. "Born Colored" is a poignant book that should be read by everyone everywhere. We've come a long way, Baby!
