GROWING UP BLACK, edited by Jay...

GROWING UP BLACK, edited by Jay David (Avon: $9). The excerpts from 25 African-American autobiographies in this volume cover two centuries of black experience, beginning with Isaac Jefferson’s account of life at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson--a slave owner who opposed slavery in principle. While many of the authors document the arbitrary and often murderous violence that blacks faced during the century after the Civil War, the common thread that runs through these disparate memoirs is the bitter discovery of how restricted opportunities were for African-Americans in the self-proclaimed land of freedom. Maya Angelou recalls the anger and resentment she felt when a white graduation speaker assumed that black children might aspire to be athletes, but nothing more; Elizabeth Eckford describes her encounter with a furious mob in 1957, when she tried to enter officially desegregated Little Rock High School. In a powerful excerpt from “Dispatches From a Dying Generation,” Nathan McCall observes the pernicious effects of those limits on young African-Americans today. Reflecting on his own troubled youth--which included a prison sentence for armed robbery--McCall warns, “I see a younger, meaner generation out there now--more lost and alienated than we were, and placing even less value on life. We were at least touched by role models; this new bunch is totally estranged from the black mainstream.”