Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman's Journey Home

The strong women and men of her youth taught Gloria Wade-Gayles invaluable lessons about race, faith, and dignity. In these richly spiritual and moving essays, she recalls their powerful legacy as she traces her steps from a southern housing project to a college professorship. With grace and humor she evokes the caring black community of her childhood in racially segregated Memphis. She writes of the close and sustaining bonds among the women of her family and of her painful and loving relationship with an uncle devastated by racism. She takes us from her spiritual grooming in the black church to her activism and imprisonments during the civil rights movement. Throughout the book, Wade-Gayles writes courageously about complex issues: her friendship with a white woman, her reasons for being pro-choice, and mourning her mother's death. She transforms even the universally traumatic experience of a bad haircut into an exploration of the politics of hairstyles and the meaning of gratitude. Passionate, lyrical, often playful, these memories remind us all how we can infuse the struggle for justice with warmth and love.