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Overview
In the sequel to his universally loved Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, Clifton L. Taulbert takes the reader on a journey out of the segregated South of his childhood and into the explosive era of the 1960s. This is the story of what happened when, at age 17, Taulbert boarded the Illinois Central train on one of its last runs out of Greenville, Mississippi, to St. Louis, the city of his dreams. The reality he found was not what he expected, but it held its own warmth and promise. It was the world of the Lively Stone Church of God and the people who gathered there to sing, worship, and encourage each other as they had down south. It was the world of Brazier's Confectionery, the little black-owned corner grocery store, of the people who lived above the store and worked hard to make their northern dreams come true. Here Taulbert encountered the frustration of second- and third- generation northern blacks who were still barred by color from meaningful jobs and full participation in society. The Last Train North is the story of one naive and hopeful "colored boy" struggling to become the strong, successful black man his southern community had sent him north to be.Picking up where his memoir, When We Were Colored, left off, Taulbert recounts his 1963 migration from the small segregated Mississippi town of his birth to the big integrated city of St. Louis, where opportunity was everywhere. The realities of the North sometimes fall short of his fantasies, but he never loses sight of his dreams.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Taulbert reflects on his childhood in the segregated but amiable town of Glen Allan, Miss., during the 1950s and his move in 1963 to St. Louis, where he eventually founded his own marketing company. (May)Library Journal
Rendering his rites of passage as a rural, Southern, black man-child caught in social upheaval, Taulbert continues the autobiography begun in Once upon a Time When We Were Colored ( LJ 7/89). In the same bittersweet tone, his cultural chronicle takes a 17-year-old from the Mississippi Delta in 1963 to St. Louis, where he dreams of a fully integrated environment and future. JFK's assassination, an escalating war in Vietnam, and unrest on America's campuses and streets fill Taulbert's changing world. But his writing focuses on self-identity and affirmation rooted in a network of family and friends in countryside and city; his memories flow with the steady strength and resilience of black kinship in an ageless community of alvalues and vision. Recommended as a complement to Dick Gregory's Nigger (1964) and Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land ( LJ 2/15/91).-- Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y.Book Details
Published
October 1, 1998
Publisher
Tulsa, Okla. : Council Oak Books, c1992.
Pages
220
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780933031623