Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories Growing Up Black in America [Hardcover]

Laurel Holliday (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1999

Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed of a day when black children were judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. His eloquent charge became the single greatest inspiration for the achievement of racial justice in America. In her powerful book in the Children of Conflict series, Laurel Holliday explores how far we have come as she presents thirty-eight African-Americans who share their experiences. The unforgettable people we hear from are young and old, rich and poor, from inner cities, suburbia, and rural America. In chronicles that are highly personal, funny, tragic, and triumphant, the contributors tell what it is like coming of age stigmatised by the colour of their skin, yet proud of their heritage and culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Part of the "Children of Conflict" series, this anthology presents autobiographical stories, diary excerpts, and essays by blacks who grew up after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

American-Statesman Holliday's first-person accounts, like all good stories, illuminate the universal by highlighting the personal. -- Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Atria (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067100803X
• ISBN-13: 978-0671008031
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,768,751 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hurts, wounds, hopes and triumphs of growing up Black, June 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories Growing Up Black in America (Hardcover)

Children Of The Dream A review by Gunter David Ft. Washington, PA

In the age of the status quo between black and white in American, when the races have social contact mainly at work, rarely at home, Children Of The Dream: Our Own Stories Of Growing Up Black In America makes a vital contribution. For how are we to know about each other, except by reading of inner thoughts and feelings, since most of us don't openly talk to each other?

This book is filled with memoirs of Afro-Americans struggling to come to terms with the color of their skin in a white world. But unlike other books having covered the same terrain, this volume describes the experiences of children, as told by adults looking back. The hurts, the wounds, but also the hopes and triumphs are recounted in the first person. They make for deeply personal stories, both revealing and informative.

Among the most moving is the very first in the book, "The Question" - a recollection by Arline Lorraine Piper of how her grandmother fed hungry white men during the Depression, when her own family had little to spare. "Sticks And Stones And Words And Bones" by Amitiyah Elayne Hyman, tells of relationships with white neighbors. There is sadness and a sense of loss in "My First Friend (My Blond-Haired, Blue-Eyed Linda)" by Marion Coleman Brown, on the theme of how children are taught to hate. And then there is "White Friends" by Bernestine Singley, a bitter indictment of both black and white social values.

The book is the latest in editor Laurel Holliday's "The Children Of The Conflict" series. Her introductions of each story beautifully set the scene. The pictures of the authors as children provide an illuminating touch.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "out of the mouths of babes", April 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories Growing Up Black in America (Hardcover)

Each essay spoke right to me. Some whispered and others shouted, but I knew exactly where the sound was coming from. Mind you, those hurts and slights may have happened quite awhile ago, but the memories seemed to have shaped (and are shaping) some extraordinary individuals. Will be giving this book to many people and genuinely hoarding my first edition copy.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These stories are literally our own. New voices, old truths., March 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories Growing Up Black in America (Hardcover)

Arline Lorraine Piper, author of the award-winning story, "The Question," in CHILDREN OF THE DREAM, captures the essence of the anthology in her extremely modest description of herself. "If I am at all extraordinary," she says, "it is in my willingness to expose my truth to myself, so that my truth can also be accessible to you. But this effort on my part to be ruthlessly honest with myself will only have full significance for you if it empowers you to the same honesty with yourself...." Welcome to the victors' tales, stories not merely of survival and overcoming, but of ultimately prevailing. With enormous range, across class, color, gender, age, lifestyles and experience, the stories in ruthless, honest remembering. For a nation suffering from collective amnesia where race is concerned, CHILDREN OF THE DREAM is a powerful cure. Sometimes funny, sometimes painful, sometimes subtle, sometimes in-your-face, each vignette is its own reminder of exactly how things on the race front got to be the way they are. This is a dialogue on race, voiced by people on the street, telling it the way it always has been and, regrettably, still is. CHILDREN OF THE DREAM is one more piece of evidence contradicting the popular, simplistic notion that there is one authentic Black experience. For instance, even though it happens to be my own story, not all African Americans grew up in single parent homes in the ghetto struggling to make ends meet. Dawn Bennett-Alexander's "(R)Evolution of Black and White" humorously, yet compellingly, makes just this point and Staajabu's "255 Sycamore Street" and Robert E. Penn's "War" go on to reinforce it. CHILDREN OF THE DREAM is a book for the entire family. Any young adult, for instance, can relate to the two 19-year old Bennett-Alexander sisters who share their experiences from markedly different perspectives in "The Black Experience" and "Betrayal in Black and White." When their baby sister, 9-year old Tess Alexandra, weighs in with her clear-eyed essay, "'Mixed' Emotions," even the youngest school-age child can hear and understand her voice. And as if that weren't enough, I dare you to remain unmoved after reading Antoine P. Reddick's brave but heartbreaking "All the Black Children" and then flip to Toure's "Blackmanwalkin," a young man's joyful tribute to his father. Finally, for those who think virulent racism is a thing of times past, apartheid lives well and prospers next door, on the bus, in school. Laurel Holliday has done something quite extraordinary. Once again, in this her last in the "Children of Conflict" series, she has stepped back and made it possible for readers to hear, without filters, the enormously varied voices of ordinary people speaking as the experts they are on growing up, in this instance, Black in America. CHILDREN OF THE DREAM offers readers the gift of entering the 21st century less ignorant, less divided, less mean-spirited, less smug, more generous, more hopeful, more sensitive, more empowered to face the clear and still present truth about racism's destruction. Make no mistake though. As one of the contributors to the anthology, I assure you that we do not point fingers, seek sympathy, or even threaten retribution. Rather, we have laid open pieces of our lives so you can see how we are all shaped, for good and bad, by the same forces. As with all gifts, you may take these or leave them. But for the wise ones, who desire a new, empowered, awakened way of racial being, the choice will be perfectly obvious