Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

  Thirteen of us met on Saturday February 8 th  to discuss  Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America  by Joy-Ann Reid. This non-fiction book, published in February 2024, chronicles the courtship and marriage of Medgar and Myrlie Evers. At the time of their meeting, he was a WWII veteran who was returning to college after his time in the military. She was a 17-year-old college freshman who was majoring in Education. Myrlie’s aunt and grandmother, who raised her, discouraged her from dating an “older man” who just back from Europe, and was ready to be treated like a man by white Mississippians. Barb L. started us out, saying, "It was the early chapters of their lives and of their romance, it was beautiful but then for me it just got harder and harder, the granular details of what it was like in Mississippi and all of the terrible things that happened." Robin added, "I think the book was really beautifully done and easy to read. I c...

  Notes from Book Discussion Mar. 4, 2023   Angela Davis, an Autobiography ©1974, 1988, 2021   Fourteen of us met on Saturday March 4 th to discuss Angela Davis: An Autobiography . This is the newest edition of her autobiography and the prefaces to the first, second, and now third editions are included at the beginning.   I admitted to the group that I had a little trouble reading this book . I’m sure that I read the autobiography when I was younger and remember harboring some ingrained prejudice against communism , due to indoctrination, not at all by my own logic or reasoning.   I think when I was very young and I read this I was like “ Communists , Oh my God ! ” I was a lso a little put off by the structure. I started our discussion by having the group turn to the Table of Contents and review each section.   Part One is “ Nets, ” Nets begins when she was underground in New York as a result of what had happened when she was in California . The ...