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3 opere 8 membri 1 recensione

Opere di Edward H. Peeples

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Data di nascita
1935/04/20
Sesso
male
Nazionalità
USA
Luogo di residenza
Richmond, Virginia, USA

Utenti

Recensioni

First, in the interest of full disclosure: I know the author.
Scalawag is a very personal account of a white Southerner worked against injustice and for equality from the very early days of the civil rights movement. There have been other accounts by white activists, including one of my personal favorites, Freedom Song by Mary King, but this story by Ed Peeples is different. It is different because Ed was from a poor white, largely dysfunctional, family. He struggled to get an education, keep a job, and raise a family all while engaging in activism. Ed did not go south to Mississippi or Georgia. His activism took place in large part where he was going to school, in the Navy, and in Virginia where he worked and lived. I knew some of the story he recounts about growing up mainly through my mother who worked with Ed and the others who figure in his story but to be honest, I didn’t pay a lot of attention. Like most people who know him, I just liked him. The fact that his childhood and adolescence did not make him bitter but made him more empathetic is a wonderful thing.

Like many autobiographical works, Scalawag sometimes seems disjointed and even though I knew first hand of many of the events from the 1970s and 1980s, I sometimes had to go back a few paragraphs to make certain that I had the date right. But this does not detract from the warmth and humor that comes through consistently. I could often “hear” Ed telling the story to me or to a group of his friends. He is a great storyteller.

I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think there are any other books about the efforts to desegregate Virginia written by a white man. Certainly others have written about Prince Edward County, but I’m not sure that anyone else has written about segregation in the Richmond City Welfare Department or at what is now the famous basketball school, Virginia Commonwealth University, (Ed, by the way, played basketball for VCU’s predecessor, Richmond Professional Institute) or at the Medical College of Virginia hospitals and school. Ed was involved in desegregating all of those institutions.

If you are interested in Virginia or Southern history, this is an important book for you to read.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
Maya47Bob46 | Apr 5, 2014 |

Statistiche

Opere
3
Utenti
8
Popolarità
#1,038,911
Voto
4.0
Recensioni
1
ISBN
3