![]() ![]() ![]() As a consequence she was socially handicapped “among Negroes who found me. The teenage Margo was hopeless when it came to acting cool, too earnest to strike aloof poses, too well spoken to pull off street slang. Cultivated and ambitious, she struggled to reconcile her grounding in respectable bourgeois values with an emerging political consciousness in an era of intense racial strife. Jefferson, a Pulitzer-winning theatre critic for the New York Times before becoming a professor of writing, relates her youthful self-doubt with candour and sincerity. But most people would like to consider us Just More Negroes." A personal memoir with profound political resonance, Negroland is an illuminating exploration of the racial politics of culture and class. "To Caucasians we were oddities, underdogs and interlopers." As her mother told her, "We're considered upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans. "Inside the race, we were self-designated aristocrats," Jefferson writes. These successful strivers and members of the liberal professions were a socioeconomic anomaly. ![]() ‘Negroland” is Margo Jefferson’s coinage to denote the milieu of affluent black Chicagoans in the 1950s and 1960s. ![]()
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