It's Good to be Black by Ruby Berkley Goodwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Goodwin's memoir gave me the same feeling as watching one of Frank Capra's better films, like "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946). I'm guessing that has something to do with the fact that it was first published in 1953.

Goodwin's book is set in the small southern Illinois town of Du Quoin, the same town where I was born, published when I was seven years old but covering the years when my grandfathers were coming of age. Like her father, my grandfathers were coal miners. Unlike her, my family is white, but some of the experiences are certainly the same. In one of the chapters, she tells the story of the Davis' mine explosion. One of my grandfathers worked at that mine.

In another chapter she tells the story of the Black families following the Jack Johnson/Jim Jeffries heavyweight championship fight. No one had a radio at the time, and so everyone gathered outside the newspaper's offices to hear the news of the fight. She tells of the pride the Black people felt when they learned that Johnson won. This chapter reminded me of a similar piece that Maya Angelou wrote about when Joe Louis became heavyweight champion. I wondered if Angelou had read Goodwin's piece, which was published several years before.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the memoir is Goodwin's insistence on the quality of the term "black" at a time when no one I knew of wanted to be called that. I remember being drawn into an argument between two of my Black friends in the late fifties about whether one of them was in fact Black. It was clear to me that neither of them wanted to be qualified in that manner. It would be at least another ten years before the "Black is beautiful" movement when begin to gain momentum.

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