All Is Never Said: The Story of Odette Harper Hines - Softcover

Rollins, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566393086 ISBN 13: 9781566393089

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1995

Synopsis

With intelligence, insight, and humor, Odette Harper Hines describes her life—a life that reversed the pattern of the Great Migration by beginning in prosperity in the urban North and moving into the small-town South. Recorded by Judith Rollins over eight years, this intimate narrative is an unusual collaboration between two African American women who represent two generations of civil rights activists.

Born in New York into a comfortable family, Hines' activism began I the Abyssinian Baptist Church in her teens and continued throughout her life as she witnessed the Great Depression in Harlem, worked on the WPA Writers Project, became publicity director of the NAACP, and volunteered for the Red Cross in Europe during WWII. When she moved to Louisiana in 1946, she continued to challenge racial injustice and risked her life to house civil rights workers in the early 1960s (Rollins, among them). She later started and directed the Headstart Program in her parish.

Throughout this narrative, Hines describes her relationships with such figures as Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell, Walter White, Thurgood Marshall, Ella Baker, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, and many others. Yet Hines' memoir is not only about her public life. She courageously reveals her personal life and private pain. Twenty-eight photographs— mostly from Hines' family album—accentuate this oral history that is, as Rollins states in her Introduction, "a complex and textured portrait of an extraordinary twentieth century American woman."

About this title

Review:

In the 1960s, Judith Rollins was working for CORE in Louisiana, where she was housed by a remarkable woman--Odette Harper Hines, whose lifelong activism benefited the NAACP, the WPA Writers Project, and the Red Cross along with countless people on whose behalf she worked for racial justice. Recorded by Rollins over eight years, this is a spirited oral history of an extraordinary woman whose public life intersected with such figures as Walter White, Thurgood Marshall, Ralph Ellison, and many others.

From the Publisher:

The spirited oral history of a remarkable African American woman

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1566393086
• ISBN 13: 9781566393089
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 445