Our family walks
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Our Family Walks is a coming-of-age narrative that explores what it means to be an African American/multiracial boy growing into manhood during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in a city that is the seat of America's political power, Washington D.C. In the tradition of Tobias Woolf's This Boy's Life and Ta-Nahisi Coates's Between the World and Me, the memoir examines familial and institutional relationships as well as the relationship between the individual and society at moments of great sociocultural and political shifts. Two-thirds through, at Chapter 7, the narrative morphs from being about a boy surviving his hardscrabble childhood and life at the orphanage, to a story of victim turned victimizer, and an author considering what this turn meant then, and what it means today. The story comes full circle by concluding in Obama's America amidst a 21st century resurgence of the Civil Rights Movement.
Degree
Ph. D.
Thesis Department
Rights
Access to files is limited to the University of Missouri--Columbia.