Benji Cole of CBS Radio interviews the author of “An American Daughter of Brown”, Bari S. Robinson

Bari S. Robinson, the magnificent author of “An American Daughter of Brown”, is interviewed by CBS Radio’s Benji Cole. They talk about the book’s message as well as the author’s purpose for writing it.

Bari S. Robinson is a lawyer who works in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from the University of Kansas with a B.S. in French education. She also has a Master of Arts in French from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a Juris Doctorate from Berkeley Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Ms. Robinson also wrote Cuba’s Guarded Promise. and the nonfiction work, A Country on the Verge of Massive Change. She now lives in Oakland, California.

In the interview, they talked about the author’s work, entitled “An American Daughter of Brown”. Her book is a historical novel set in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in 1955 in the geographic center of the United States. It is the coming-of-age story of Lauren Sullivan, an eight-year-old African American girl from the lower middle class, who learns that she is no longer able to attend the elementary school that she loves and in which she thrived academically due to a new law that requires the integration of the public schools.

When the story begins, Lauren’s mother, an elementary school teacher; grandmother, a piano teacher; and grandfather, a railway mail clerk, with whom she and her younger brother Danny live, are attempting to conceal their concern about the newly integrated experience Lauren and her younger brother are about to embark on. The reader learns about her enlightened black family’s concerns about possible violence as well as the level of education the children would receive.

Readers of An American Daughter of Brown will experience the intricacies of overt and subtle racism through the perspective of a child who grows into a young woman in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead of witnessing violent racism as seen in news reports at the time, or the stark contrast between very poor, illiterate Blacks and affluent whites, the reader will embark on a journey with a young girl from an educated, enlightened family who must navigate the effects of slightly more subtle but equally debilitating racism. The reader will also learn that to achieve this, black women, no matter how educated or brilliant, must skillfully manage sexism. All of this allows the present reader to assess if and how far the United States has progressed in its pursuit of civil rights.

Listen to the full interview below: