Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

So in exchange for choosing Crowns: Black Women in Church Hats  for our April book discussion. The members of Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series were given passes for the play Crowns: the Musical.  According to NPR, "even before the book was finished, Marberry approached the artistic director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ about adapting if for the stage. From the more than 50 women in the book, playwright and director Regina Taylor created six composite characters. The things that I thought were lacking in the book: a story, a person who was not in church culture, a male,  allusions to modern life, were all in the play. Even though Ms. Taylor stayed true to the real women in the book, using some of their lines verbatim, having a young person from a big city descend on the set which takes place in Darlington, SC, adds another dimension to these women's stories. Because of Yolanda, the teen from Chicago, the women themselves eventually open up...

The Urban Life Experience Book discussion Series has been immersed in the outrage against racial injustice, mass incarceration and the killings of unarmed citizens by the police. Imagine how we responded when asked by the New Haven Free Public Library and the Long Wharf Theatre to read the book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. The book features black and white photos taken by Michael Cunningham. Journalist Craig Marberry provides the mini-bios of the women pictured. The group met on Saturday April 14 th and actually had one of the best discussions ever. The oral history provided in the women’s stories, although not so much concerned with criminal justice or race relations, was yet meaningful, providing another facet of African American culture. The forward was written by Maya Angelou, who asserted that “Truly the Civil rights Movement was begun In the Black Church.   She made the connection between African head coverings and African A...