Downtown Oakland Senior Center 200 Grand Avenue Oakland, CA 94610 – (510) 238-3284
Book Club Meeting
The only thing more enjoyable than reading a great book is discussing a great book!
1:00 p.m. on Friday, February 17, 2017 The Blacker the Berry
A Harlem Renaissance Classic by Wallace Thurman
Our Black History Month Selection
MEETING LOCATION – Upstairs in the Multi-Purpose Room
Bring a snack to share Bring a friend, and Bring a suggestion for our next book
About the Book –The Blacker the Berry One of the most widely read and controversial works of the Harlem Renaissance, The Blacker the Berry...was the first novel to openly explore prejudice within the Black community. This pioneering novel found a way beyond the bondage of Blackness in American life to a new meaning in truth and beauty.
Emma Lou Brown's dark complexion is a source of sorrow and humiliation -- not only to herself, but to her lighter-skinned family and friends and to the white community of Boise, Idaho, her home-town. As a young woman, Emma travels to New York's Harlem, hoping to find a safe haven in the Black Mecca of the 1920s. Wallace Thurman re-creates this legendary time and place in rich detail, describing Emma's visits to nightclubs and dance halls and house-rent parties, her sex life and her catastrophic love affairs, her dreams and her disillusions -- and the momentous decision she makes in order to survive.
A lost classic of Black American literature, The Blacker the Berry...is a compelling portrait of the destructive depth of racial bias in this country. A new introduction by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, author of The Sweeter the Juice, highlights the
About the Author
Wallace Henry Thurman (Pseudonym: Patrick Casey and Ethel B) Thurman was born August 16, 1902, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the son of Oscar and Beulah Thurman. Wallace Thurman settled in New York City at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of heightened black literary activity during the mid-1920s. Because of his unconventional lifestyle and penchant for parties and alcohol, he became popular in Harlem social circles, but he was only considered a minor literary figure. His fame lay with his influence on and support of younger and talented writers of the era and with his realistic--although sensationalized--portrayals of the lower classes of black American society. Thurman was lauded as a satirist and often used satire to accuse blacks of prejudice against darker-skinned member of their race.
Born and raised in the American West, Thurman attended the University of Utah for a year before transferring in 1922 to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles Thurman wrote a column, "Inklings," for a black-oriented newspaper. He then founded a magazine, Outlet, hoping to initate on the West Coast a literary renaissance like the one happening in Harlem. Outlet lasted only six months, and in 1925 Thurman went east. In New York City he took a job as a reporter and editor at The Looking Glass, then became managing editor of the Messenger , where his editorial expertise earned him notoriety. He published short works by the poet and author Langston Hughes--not because Thurman thought them good but because they were the best available--and pieces by the writer Zora Neale Hurston. He left in the autumn of 1926 to join the staff of a white-owned periodical, World Tomorrow.