Margo Jefferson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, spoke about her childhood in upper-crust black Chicago — her father was head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite, as well as her life among “the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society.” Jefferson discussed the way in which these inhabitants of Negroland, have stood apart since the 19th century, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”
Hilton Als has called Negroland a “masterpiece—a phenomenal study-cum-memoir about the black bourgeoisie… Jefferson has lived and worked like the great reporter she is, traversing a little-known or -understood landscape peopled by blacks and whites, dreamers and naysayers, the privileged and the strivers who make up the mosaic known as America.”
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