No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey through the American South - Softcover

Gary Younge

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578064880 ISBN 13: 9781578064885

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2002

Synopsis

In 1997 Gary Younge explored the American South by retracing the route of the original Freedom Riders of the 1960s. His road trip was a remarkable socio-cultural adventure for an outsider. He was British, journalistically curious, and black. As he traveled by Greyhound bus through the former Confederate states, he experienced an awakening. He felt culturally tied to this strange yet familiar place. Though a Briton by birth and the child of emigrants from Barbados, he felt culturally alien in his native land. In Dixie, however, he met African Americans whose racial distinctiveness was similar to his own. To local blacks he looked like a brother, while sounding intriguingly foreign. As he assessed their political rise in the South, he noted too how African American tradition seemed static and unchanged. It was a refreshing whiff of ""home."" Awakened to his own identity as a black in a predominantly white society and absorbed by a sense of southern myth and racial history, he produced this account, a blend of travel writing, historical research, wit, and social commentary. His probing examination of the Southland gives fresh perspective on race relations in America. Originally published in England, No Place Like Home is ""more than a piece of travel writing,"" praised the London Evening Standard, ""[but] a compelling exploration of racial identity and the problems of growing up clever, black, and angry in small-town Stevenage. . . . Younge is a fine journalist--thoroughgoing, clear-minded, and meticulous, and he writes in a measured, lucid prose. . . . Next, please take a trip around the UK, Gary Younge, and write about it. Your country needs you."" Gary Younge is a columnist and feature writer for the London Guardian. In this post he has written extensively from the United States, South Africa, and Europe. In 1996 he worked at the Washington Post as recipient of a Laurence Stern Fellowship.

About this title

Review:

Shortly before his trip to the American South, Guardian reporter Gary Younge asked an American journalist what kind of reaction he could expect as a black Briton. "Well, when they hear your accent, white Americans will usually add twenty points to your IQ," said the journalist, "But when they see your face, they most definitely won't."

That advice might convince some to stay at home, but Younge, the son of a strong- willed nurse from Barbados, took a different approach. He travelled to the heartland of American racial tensions-- along the route taken by the Freedom Riders in 1961 as they challenged the practice of racial segregation.

The Freedom Riders were a racially mixed group of civil rights workers who travelled by bus from Washington DC to New Orleans, visiting travel facilities like wash rooms and lunch counters where racial segregation, though illegal, was still practised. Some facilities prepared for their arrival by removing signs of segregation; in other places, like Rock Hill, South Carolina, they experienced violence.

Younge speaks with civil rights activists, visits schools, universities and military establishments, and tracks down long-lost cousins. As a Briton visiting America he is warmly greeted by nearly everyone (Greyhound bus employees are the exception)-- though racial tensions are still evident. In Richmond, Virginia, there is a street full of monuments to southern civil war leaders who supported slavery. Members of a rural white Baptist church are shocked to see Younge in their congregation.

Younge finds himself grappling with his own identity. Is he black, or British, or both? English people, he writes, don't like to talk about race. "Mention racial slights you have encountered, and they will accuse you of being chippy." Americans, on the other hand, "are as upfront about race as they are about their salaries or visits to their therapists." In No Place Like Home Younge adopts an American frankness as he counterpoints his journey through the American South with his childhood and experiences of racism in Britain in this lucid and engaging travel memoir. --Tamsin Todd

About the Author:

Gary Younge is a columnist and feature writer for the London Guardian. In this post he has written extensively from the United States, South Africa, and Europe. In 1996 he worked at the Washington Post as recipient of a Laurence Stern Fellowship.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1578064880
• ISBN 13: 9781578064885
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277