Watching Our Crops Come In - Softcover

Taulbert, Clifton L.

3.81

16 ratings by Goodreads

9780140244342: Watching Our Crops Come In

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140244344 ISBN 13: 9780140244342

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1998

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The third volume in the acclaimed autobiography evokes the mood of the civil rights era as the author, then a young airman, leaves segregated Mississippi in 1967 for Washington, D.C. By the author of When We Were Colored. Reprint. Tour.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A tepid recollection of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War from a man who watched both primarily from the sidelines. The third of Taulbert's memoirs (When We Were Colored, 1989; The Last Train North, 1992), this entry follows him through the 1960s, when as an enlistee in the US Air Force, he was saved by a special assignment from having to serve in Vietnam; he was equally, he claims, ``prohibited by [his] uniform from joining the fight for freedom back home.'' Taulbert left the Mississippi Delta at the age of 17 to join his father in St. Louis. He joined the Air Force in 1964 and was given a ``classified position'' in data processing at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. From that vantage point he watched ``scores of airmen shipped off to a war . . . to ensure democracy, even though,'' he notes, ``it was not fully realized here at home.'' During his years in the nation's capital, he closely observed the marches and riots that tore apart the country and noted the changes wrought by the movement on his own hometown. He was astonished to see ``blacks and whites working together for social change.'' His mother, Mary, became the director of the local Head Start project; family members and friends became activists. An admirer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Taulbert stubbornly dismisses black power leaders such as H. Rap Brown as ``northern cousins'' who ``had not marched in Selma or faced the dogs in Montgomery.'' Well, neither did he, and his lack of involvement waters down his occasional perceptive observations. Disillusioned by the assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy, Taulbert regarded the 1968 Poor People's Campaign as a grave disappointment. His lack of real engagement, his repeated references to ``coloreds,'' and his attribution of Brer Rabbit dialect to residents of his hometown (``ther wuz angels coming . . . more than I could eber count'') will not play well with most readers. (b&w photos) (Author tour) -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Continuing the autobiographical coming-of-age saga begun in When We Were Colored and The Last Train North, Taulbert opens this modest, gracefully written memoir in 1967 when, as an African American in the U.S. Air Force, he feared being sent to Vietnam but was assigned instead to a Washington, D.C., smoldering with racial unrest. On leave, he returns to his hometown in the Mississippi delta and discovers a South being gradually transformed by the civil rights movement; black and white volunteers are working together for social change. His sister's arrest in 1968 during a demonstration on the University of Mississippi campus makes him realize that the struggle for freedom will exact a price. Taulbert's enthusiastic idealism as a campaign volunteer assisting Robert Kennedy's presidential bid turns to anger and despair with RFK's assassination that same year. Later he marches on Washington with the Poor People's Campaign. Although he seems more of an observer than a participant in the struggles he describes, his eloquent memoir offers a stirring picture of the birth of the new South. Photos. Author tour. (Feb.) Richard Roundtree and Al Freeman Jr.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.