The dawn at my back : a memoir of a Black Texas upbringing / Carroll Parrott Blue.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blue, Carroll Parrott.

Series:

Constructs series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Blue, Carroll Parrott.

Photographers--United States--Biography.

Photographers.

African American photographers.

United States.

African American photographers--Biography.

Motion picture producers and directors--United States--Biography.

Motion picture producers and directors.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

303 pages : illustrations, maps ; 27 cm.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, [2003]

Summary:

Individual lives, viewed through the right lens, can reveal the essence of a time and place with startling clarity. In this innovative memoir, filmmaker Carroll Parrott Blue turns her lens on her mother's and her own lives as African American women in the segregated South before and during the Civil Rights era. This mother-daughter story foregrounds two strong women who fought institutionalized racism -- one through community activism, the other through artistic creativity -- even as the effects of racism and their differing responses to it frayed the very fabric of their relationship.

In telling this story, Blue underscores how strongly popular culture images of Blacks affected the lives of individual African Americans. She remembers movies such as Imitation of Life that she and her mother viewed together and fought about, ads that portrayed Negroes as unclean, TV shows like Amos 'n' Andy that perpetuated stereotypes -- and shows how the unending barrage of demeaning images set her mother on a lifelong quest for self-improvement and middle-class respectability. Blue also describes how the same images, coupled with her mother's relentless efforts to impose essentially white standards of behavior and appearance on her daughter, created in Blue the desire to be a shaper of images rather than just a consumer, which eventually led to her becoming a photographer and filmmaker. Sweeping across the whole twentieth century, this mother-daughter story ultimately becomes a seething American history, the story of a growing African American awareness.

Contents:

Part I Prologue: Hell 9

Part II Life

Chapter II. All about My Mother 33

Chapter III. Houston 51

Interlude #1 A Memory 89

Chapter IV. Detroit 93

Chapter V. Niagara Falls 110

Interlude #2 Soap and Cereal 121

Chapter VI. My Harry 133

Chapter VII. That Forty-Year-or-So Argument 145

Chapter VIII. When Louisiana Married Texas 165

Part III My Life

Chapter IX. September 23, 1960 177

Interlude #3 May 1975 201

Chapter X. Peace beyond Understanding 225

Chapter XI. Mrs. Mollie Carroll Parrott 249

Chapter XII. blue@thegetty.january21.1998 261

Chapter XIII. Legacies 275

Part IV Epilogue: Dawn 289.

ISBN:

0292709137

OCLC:

51549207