At the Elbows of My Elders: One Family's Journey toward Civil Rights

The Grant family is emblematic of many black middle-class and blue-collar people who, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, went to school, paid their dues, and forced America to face its prejudices. Grant details how her family built a prosperous life through the operation of a funeral home, the practice of chiropody (podiatry), and work on the railroad and on pleasure boats that plied the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. During the 1950s the Grant family home provided a refuge for African American entertainers and political leaders refused accommodations by major hotels. The black community chafed under Jim Crow laws but also built its own institutions. The tension between what they could and could not do for themselves energizes this memoir.