What Mama taught me about the Claudine Gays

Betraying the generation told to be "twice as good"

In the introduction to my book Zionism & the Black Church, I write extensively about my mother and father and how they shared stories of their upbringing in Little Rock, Arkansas. One of the things my mother loved to talk about most was her alma mater, Scipio Africanus Jones High School, the only high school for Black children in all of then-racially segregated Arkansas. I believe Mama graduated in 1953. Mama’s love for and recounting of S. A. Jones is how I was first made aware of the angst over desegregation within the Black community during the fight for civil rights.