GATES' "COLORED PEOPLE: A MEMOIR"

I absolutely loved this book because Gates writers deftly, confidently and paints vivid pictures of what life was like in Piedmont, West Virginia from the 40's to about now. In the Preface to his book he writes a letter to his daughters, "Maggie and Liza," explaining the impetus behind his book. Gates writes, "I have written to you because a world into which I was born, a world that nurtured and sustained me, has mysteriously disappeared. My darkest fear is that Piedmont, West Virginia, will cease to exist...I am writing to you because of the day when we were driving home and you asked your mother and me just exactly what the civil rights movement had been all about..." More importantly, I loved this book because it straddles the fence between anthropology, sociology, history, and literature; there is a charm and an enjoyment that comes from reading the work of a voracious reader like Gates. And if you pay attention to his prose, you might actually learn something.

For my part, what I learned is that, desegregation, while a noble and righteous and necessary action in our society, was a hard pill to swallow not just for whites but for blacks as well. The common ideology is that desegregation was only difficult for racists/ethnocentric whites who had to now completely share their resources, institutions, and public meeting spaces with blacks; however, very little is ever written about how because of desegregation many black dominant traditions had to die out as well. Case in point: the colored Westvaco pic-a-nic in Piedmont, West Virgina. Gates writes that "The mill administration itself made the decision, it said, because the law forbade separate but equal everything, including picnics. So the last wave of the civil rights era finally came to the Potomac Valley, crashing down upon the colored world of Piedmont...Nobody wanted segregation, you understand; but nobody thought of this as segregation" (Gates, 213).

Another thing that Gates' book has taught me is that for every advancement that people of color have pushed for there has always been one person, the progenitor, the avante garde, the front line, that bear the most of the brunt. So, if your people have never had to suffer or advance a cause then it a person like Rosa Parks or Cesar Chavez will never matter to you, but the oppression they overcame and the hardships that they have had to deal with are no joke. In Gates' life the person who took most of the psychological brunt of desegregating is Gates' brother, Rocky. "One factor that eased my passage in school was the fact that Rocky was the pioneer, so he got the brunt of the problems that lay in wait." (Gates, 98).