Watching Our Crops Come In [Hardcover]

Clifton L. Taulbert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1997

Clifton L. Taulbert's third memoir, Watching Our Crops Come In, begins in 1967, when Taulbert, now a young airman, faces the prospect of Vietnam while recognizing a new war blazing in the delta of his youth, a war that tugs at his heart, but his uniform keeps him from the fight for liberty back home. From the Freedom Riders and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Taulbert's own work as a campaign volunteer for Robert F. Kennedy, Watching Our Crops Come In vividly evokes the mood and personalities of the emerging civil rights era. In his hometown, young idealists and old dreamers - from "saints" to "sinners" - register the colored vote. It is the warm, loving wisdom and enduring dreams learned on the front porches of his childhood that carry him through these turbulent times in the fervent belief that tomorrow is the brightest day. Deeply moving and life-affirming, Watching Our Crops Come In captures the ambience of the emerging civil rights era and the spirit of the ordinary people who changed the South.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Continuing the autobiographical coming-of-age saga begun in When We Were Colored and The Last Train North, Taulbert opens this modest, gracefully written memoir in 1967 when, as an African American in the U.S. Air Force, he feared being sent to Vietnam but was assigned instead to a Washington, D.C., smoldering with racial unrest. On leave, he returns to his hometown in the Mississippi delta and discovers a South being gradually transformed by the civil rights movement; black and white volunteers are working together for social change. His sister's arrest in 1968 during a demonstration on the University of Mississippi campus makes him realize that the struggle for freedom will exact a price. Taulbert's enthusiastic idealism as a campaign volunteer assisting Robert Kennedy's presidential bid turns to anger and despair with RFK's assassination that same year. Later he marches on Washington with the Poor People's Campaign. Although he seems more of an observer than a participant in the struggles he describes, his eloquent memoir offers a stirring picture of the birth of the new South. Photos. Author tour. (Feb.) Richard Roundtree and Al Freeman Jr.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Recalling his steps as a bright black kid from the Mississippi Delta to U.S. Air Force service in Maine and then to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., Taulbert offers the next stage in his cultural chronicle of black life in the 1950s and 1960s, begun in Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored (LJ l/89) and The Last Train North (LJ 7/92). He develops the changes he witnessed from leaving the Delta in the spring of 1963 to the summer of 1968 as more than a personal journey; he writes of an epic moment for a nation and its peoples, a shift from when our world was colored and the South was ugly and profane. But there was more: Vietnam and poverty and domestic unrest. Taulbert's story is not merely a coming-of-age memoir but the reminiscence of social change reflected in an individual life. Highly recommended for collections on blacks, the South, and modern U.S. history?Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (February 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670859524
• ISBN-13: 978-0670859528
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,164,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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