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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 185 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Colored People
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Viking £16
This book is a very personal and nostalgic account of growing up during the 1950s and 1960s, tracing the development from segregation to integration, the linguistic change from ‘coloured’ or ‘negro’ to ‘black’, and the dawning of the Civil Rights Movement as experienced by the black community in the small town of Piedmont, West Virginia.
Gates writes not from the perspective of an author with the social and political understanding of living in 1994, but chooses to ‘get rid of the baggage that’s been added to my life since then’ and recounts his story through the innocence of childhood from the point of view of the boy he was. This is a powerful device that forces his audience to absorb and confront the narrative, experience by experience.
However, because of this the book does not locate the wider sense of the period outside of Piedmont, where during this era over 70 percent of blacks in America were living in urban industrialised cities. In fact, as Gates describes, it was through television that the Civil Rights Movement first came to Piedmont.
Gates wanted to write something accessible, ‘a book people can read from like a novel or poem’. He certainly achieves this with Colored People. His verbal style is rich and vibrant, giving a real validity and gritty flavour to the memories he resurrects. Rather than following a rigid chronology, each chapter is a story in itself, containing anecdote and hard honest emotion.
He describes life under segregation in great depth, how the community faced prejudice and harsh living conditions. In one among many beautiful descriptions of his determined mother, he writes, ‘She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, she knew the way in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh.’
Gates captures the humour of a child struggling to interpret his surroundings. He expresses his revelations when he first comes into contact with the writings of Baldwin, Du Bois and Malcolm X. He says, ‘I got goose bumps just thinking about being black, being proud of being black.’
The underlying concern of the author is to ‘recollect a lost era’. Yet he feels that cultural identity for African-Americans has become confused and he argues not for assimilation into white American culture but for a separate cultural identity.
As an insight into the evolution of the black community in Piedmont and Gates’ personal development Colored People succeeds and is entertaining, shocking and engaging from beginning to end. Yet it leaves me stranded in terms of how it fits with the struggle today. Although the ideas of civil rights have progressed, living standards for urban working class blacks are now worse than they’ve been for decades, and racism is still endemic to American society.
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