The Invitation: A Memoir of Hope Amidst Lessons of Race and Place - Hardcover

Taulbert, Clifton L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1588383075 ISBN 13: 9781588383075

Publisher: NewSouth Books, 2014

Synopsis

When international lecturer Clifton Taulbert receives an unexpected invitation to supper in Allendale, South Carolina, he brings with him Little Cliff, the colored boy from the Mississippi Delta who is also Clifton Taulbert, carrying all he was taught as a child about staying "in his place" and surviving in the Jim Crow South.Transported back into a setting that looks and feels like the cotton fields and shotgun shacks of his childhood, Taulbert finds himself expected to cross racial barriers he would have been forbidden to cross before. The Invitation is the story of the man and the little boy inside him wrestling with a past they both know so well, while stepping into a future that is still being determined.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

In "The Invitation," Clifton Taulbert returns to the themes of "Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored," his award-winning book and the source of a major motion picture. This new memoir chronicles Taulbert's transformative experience of a supper invitation to a former plantation house in Allendale, South Carolina, where the successful adult confronts his childhood memories and wrestles with the legacies of slavery and segregation that demand to be acknowledged in his present circumstances.

Transported back to a setting that looks and feels like the cotton fields and shotgun shacks of his childhood, Taulbert finds himself expected to cross racial barriers that no "colored" man could have broached without dire consequences. "The Invitation" is the story of the man and the little boy inside him wrestling with a past they both know so well, and of stepping into a future that is still being determined.

About the Author:

Clifton Taulbert attended school in the Mississippi Delta during the era of legal segregation. He would have failed, he believes, if not for the community of unselfish adults around him. Their presence gave rise to his first book, Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored, which was included in the United States's gift to Nelson Mandela upon his release from prison, and also became a critically acclaimed movie of the same name. Taulbert wrote a dozen more books, including the Pulitzer-nominated The Last Train North, as well as the award-winning Eight Habits of the Heart. Taulbert is president and CEO of Roots Java Coffee and the founder and president of the Building Community Institute, and has delivered training internationally, from NATO in Brussels to political organizations in Central America to Fortune 500 Companies and academic institutions throughout the United States.

About this edition

• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1588383075
• ISBN 13: 9781588383075
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224